There are popular videos on the Internet that claim that the music of the anthem “The Star-Spangled Banner” is borrowed from the Russian romance “Khas-Bulat the Daring.” We checked if this is true.

On YouTube and other video services available several videos, the authors of which invite the viewer to see the stunning similarity between the melody of the American anthem and the Russian romance. Some even claim that this is not a coincidence, but direct plagiarism. In 2016, a short story on this topic even showed in the "Sunday Time" program.

To figure out whether plagiarism is possible in principle, it is necessary to find out when both works were created. Romance “Khas-Bulat the Daring”, also known as “Elegy”, written poet and officer Alexander Ammosov. This text on the Caucasian theme, popular in the mid-19th century, was first published on November 16, 1858 in the newspaper “Russian Invalid”. The poem was later set to music by Olga Agreneva-Slavyanskaya: according to one version, she came up with a new melody, and according to another, she reworked an existing one. In any case, the romance became widely known by the end of the 19th century.

The song "The Star-Spangled Banner", although became the US national anthem only in 1931, appeared much earlier. The poem that formed its basis is wrote in September 1814, Francis Scott Key, who oversaw the siege of Fort McHenry. Already next month the song for the first time performed in public in Baltimore.

Music for a long time was considered folk, and only in the 1970s, an employee of the US Library of Congress got to the bottom of the truth: this melody was created by the British composer John Smith. Back in 1776, it was first performed as the official song of the Anacreontic Society, an amateur music club in London. The lyrics to Smith's melody were written by club head Ralph Tomlinson. No later than 1783, notes and poems were published, and soon the composition To Anacreon in Heaven became popular not only in Britain, but also on the other side of the ocean - there Francis Scott Key learned about it. At the end of the 19th century, the song, which combined a British melody and poems by an American poet, was recognized as official by the US Navy, and in 1916, President Woodrow Wilson proposed making it the anthem of all Armed Forces.

Thus, the music of the Russian romance, although very similar to the US anthem, appeared later. We have been unable to find research that confirms that Smith's tune, created several decades earlier, served as an inspiration for Agreneva-Slavyanskaya. But to say otherwise is in any case incorrect.