Country Music

National anthems are tricky things. As enforced relics of a previous age, they’re a bad fit for an enlightened era that doesn’t feel the need to conform to an older generation’s invented traditions. Words offend, ideologies become outmoded, regimes change, friends morph into enemies, native lands turn into contested domains, patriotic death is seen as a waste of life, and what some out-of-touch composers and flattered rulers once considered the best tunes for rallying a reluctant nation become, in David Pate’s arresting phrase, the worst songs in the world.

There are many degrees of worseness in modern music — and national anthems are a surprisingly modern invention, starting with an impromptu “God Save the King” in 1745, picking up speed with the nationalistic movements of the nineteenth century, and becoming a definitive global phenomenon only in the twentieth century as dozens of independent states emerged from the rubble of anthem-defined, potentate-led empires...