Anchors Aweigh

“Anchors Aweigh” is the fight song of the United States Naval Academy and official march song of the United States Navy. It was composed in 1906 by Charles A. Zimmermann with lyrics by Alfred Hart Miles. When he composed “Anchors Aweigh”, Zimmermann was a lieutenant and had been bandmaster of the United States Naval Academy Band since 1887. Miles was midshipman first class at the academy, in the class of 1907, and had asked Zimmermann to assist him in composing a song for that class, to be used as a football march. Another academy midshipman, Royal Lovell (class of 1926), later wrote what would be adopted into the song as its third verse.”Weigh anchor” is an old Dutch sailors’ expression; it amounts to an order that a ship’s anchors be raised. (For a time, Dutch and Flemish phrases dominated sailors’ expressions all over the world.) To “weigh anchor” is to bring all anchor(s) aboard the vessel in preparation for departure. In response to the order, the phrase “anchors aweigh” reports back that all anchors are clear of the sea bottom; therefore the ship is officially under way.”Anchors aweigh” is often misspelled as “Anchor’s away”, leading to confusing the terms, and sometimes misunderstanding the order as meaning “to drop anchor”.[citation needed] Confusion may also occur over two correct spellings typically encountered: that is, “anchor’s” with an apostrophe, and without (“anchors”). Here the phrase “anchor’s aweigh”, (denoting a single anchor plus the contraction of the verb “is”) means: this anchor is raised. The single phrase must be distinguished from the plural “anchors aweigh”, which reports that all anchors of the ship are raised. Although the original (now archaic) “aweigh” is verbal and transitive, the “aweigh” used now is adjectival/adverbial in nature and meaning. “Weigh” as a verb means to “bear” or “move”, thus giving it several shades of meaning and derivation, including “weight” or “heaviness”. U.S. Navy recruits singing the post-1997 lyrics of “Anchors Aweigh” as they walk through a tunnel at Recruit Training Command Great Lakes in Illinois The song was first played during the Army–Navy football game on December 1, 1906, at Franklin Field in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Navy won the game 10–0 before a crowd in excess of 30,000, their first win in the matchup since 1900. The song was gradually adopted as the song of the U.S. Navy; although there is a pending proposal to make it the official song, and to incorporate protocol into Navy regulations for its performance, its status remains unofficial.[timeframe?] Its lyrics were considered too specific to the Academy and not representative of the Navy at large, and so were rewritten by George D. Lottman (note the reference to “farewell to college joys”). Its melody was also slightly rewritten by Domenico Savino. The song has a joyful, brisk melody, and it has been adopted by several other navies around the world, such as the Finnish Navy. In addition to being bandmaster at the Naval Academy, Zimmerman was also the organist at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Annapolis, and the opening notes of the melody to “Anchors Aweigh” bear a marked similarity (although in a different tempo) to the opening of the ancient Marian hymn Salve Regina, with which Zimmerman would have been thoroughly familiar. During World War II, members of the Navy Women’s Reserve, known more popularly as the WAVES, wrote “WAVES of the Navy” to harmonize with “Anchors Aweigh”. Bing Crosby included the song in a medley on his album 101 Gang Songs (1961).
Many arrangements of “Anchors Aweigh” exist today, one arrangement by Paul V. Yoder often sees use by military bands, such as those of the Japan Self-Defense Forces and other nations’ militaries.