National anthem gives local singers a workout

Published 10:44 pm Saturday, July 3, 2010

Here’s a safe bet: I’ll never be asked to get up in front of thousands of people and sing the national anthem.

Sure I learned “The Star-Spangled Banner” in school. I still sing it — quietly — in crowds. As anyone who has ever been near me in church knows, my voice isn’t worthy of being singled out.

I only know what it’s like to be in that spotlight because I asked singers who were brave enough to hit those notes in front of big crowds.

“I get nervous every time,” said Mark Williams, 47, who has sung the anthem at Everett AquaSox games a number of times over the past five years. He’s scheduled to do it again Sept. 1.

“You set your mind on two things. One, I have sung solos before successfully. The second is, what’s the worst that could happen?” the Lynnwood man said. “They’re not there to watch me, they are there to watch a baseball game.”

Williams landed the gigs by trying out several times at “AquaSox Idol,” an event held in years past at Everett Mall. Several judges put candidates to the test, critiquing the singers’ a cappella versions of the Francis Scott Key poem written in 1814.

Here’s some July Fourth trivia: The tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” written by John Stafford Smith, came from an old drinking song, “To Anacreon in Heaven.”

Our country’s anthem has a reputation of being tough to sing. Williams said “God Bless America,” which he once sang during an AquaSox seventh-inning stretch, is even harder, with a greater range.

“The U.S. anthem is difficult,” he said. “You have to start low, but if you start too low you can’t hit the bottom note clearly,” said Williams, whose voice is in the bass-baritone range. Easiest for Williams is the Canadian anthem. He has sung “O Canada” when the AquaSox have played the Vancouver Canadians.

Eighteen-year-old Tayla Hodges sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” for Everett Community College’s graduation June 11 at Comcast Arena.

With her own alternative rock band, called Dayfield, Hodges isn’t prone to stage fright. Her band played last year at the Gorge Amphitheatre for the Creation Festival. At Granite Falls High School, where she graduated this year and was salutatorian, Hodges sang the anthem for football and basketball games. A Running Start student, she also earned an associate degree from EvCC this spring.

“That high note, it gets really stratospheric at the end of the song,” Hodges said of the anthem.

She makes sure to focus on the words, because everyone else knows them. “You’re singing it by yourself, with no accompaniment,” Hodges said. “If you mess up your own song, you can always throw in some la-la-las.”

Both Hodges and Williams said they sing a simple, straightforward version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” without personally jazzing it up the way some celebrity singers do.

Williams said the AquaSox organization prefers that “you sing it straight.”

“They want people to sing along,” he said.

“I sing it pretty traditionally,” Hodges said. “People love it when you sing it simply, to hear the crispness of your voice. There’s already so much going on in that song — vocal gymnastics. Simple can be great.”

At Silvertips hockey games, fans of the Everett club shout the word “fight” when the singer reaches the lyrics “through the perilous fight.” That tradition has a history. It started when Everett hockey fans traveled to British Columbia to watch the Silvertips take on the Kelowna Rockets.

At the “rockets’ red glare” point in the American anthem, Kelowna fans shouted “Rockets,” according to Rob Ramsburgh, the Everett Silvertips’ director of game operations. “Silvertips fans brought that back, they put the ‘fight’ in there,” he said.

Ramsburgh said the hockey club picks anthem singers from applicants who have sung for other sporting events. Some send in CDs. There are crowd favorites, including longtime fan Michael Sicoly.

For hockey fans, it’s a long wait until September. It’s summer, AquaSox season. Williams is busy singing with church choirs, and warming up to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

“I love the song,” he said.

Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460, muhlstein@heraldnet.com.