"Millons be Free" is a Jacobin song which originally celebrated the idea of the French Revolution, whose tune became the American national anthem. Oskar Jensen sings us the melody and tells us a story involving Alexander Hamilton, the advocate of women's rights Mary Wollstonecraft, Haydn and Hummel at a drinking society, a Liverpool lawyer William Roscoe and William Pirsson, a Chelmsford bookseller who immigrated to the USA.
Oskar Jensen is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, based at Newcastle University working on a project called The Invention of Pop Music: Mainstream Song, Class, and Culture, 1520–2020. His books include Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth-Century London and he also worked on The Subversive Voice research project. You can find more from his research on BBC Sounds in episodes of the Arts & Ideas podcast called Victorian Streets, Napoleon in Fact and Fiction and Eliza Flower and non-conformist thinking.
Producer: Jayne Egerton.