On 18 August 1969, Jimi Hendrix concluded the Woodstock Festival with a medley of Voodoo Child (Slight Return) and Purple Haze interspersed with an iconoclastic interpretation of The Star-Spangled Banner. To some, this Stratocaster assault was an excoriating critique of the Vietnam War. For others, it was an insult to the national anthem and the US flag.

A year earlier, at the Royal Albert Hall in London, Keith Emerson, keyboard player of the English prog-rock band The Nice, set fire to the Stars and Stripes at the end of a savage rendition of Leonard Bernstein’s America. The Nice were banned from the Albert Hall, although they were made very welcome in New York where, in December 1969, they recorded a spirited live album at the Fillmore East – one of Hendrix’s favourite venues – showcasing America.

To many Americans the Star-Spangled Banner – also known as Old Glory and the Stars and Stripes – is near enough a religious icon. In reaction to a post-election flag burning protest in November 2016 on the campus of Hampshire College, Massachusetts, President-elect Trump tweeted, “Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag - if they do, there must be consequences - perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!”

In 2005, Senator Hillary Clinton co-sponsored the Flag Protection Act, calling for fines of up to $250,000 (around £140,000 at the time) and two years in prison for such unpatriotic desecration. Neither Clinton nor Trump appeared aware of two earlier Supreme Court rulings upholding the First Amendment of the US Constitution guaranteeing freedom of political expression and allowing – whether fellow Americans find this unpatriotic and criminal – the burning of the Stars and Stripes.

In the early stages of the Revolutionary War against the British, regiments of George Washington’s Continental Army had raised a variety of flags including the British Union Flag. The Stars and Stripes emerged triumphant from a complex and historically uncertain American flag-scape, yet might one of the alternatives below have triumphed over Old Glory? Might Jimi Hendrix have played Don’t Tread on Me? Could Keith Emerson have torched the Betsy Ross?

1. Grand Union Flag, 1775