“I’m not on Twitter,” someone else added, “but there must be a way to tell ‘them’!!!”

Asked for the particulars of his beef with this “Banner,” DeBord offered to head to the piano in his home and provide a live tutorial, over the phone. He quickly plowed through the beginning of the song — “O say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light” — but stopped when he got to “What so proudly we hailed.”

At “proudly,” he noted, the Olympic version of the anthem goes to one of those sad, dark minor chords where majors have long been the norm. He played the standard version and then the Olympic version — standard, Olympic, over and over. Once he pointed out the difference, it was obvious. The Olympic version was conciliatory, maybe even retreating. The standard version was chest-thumping and on the offense.

“It happens again on ‘rockets’ red glare,’” he said, hands on the piano, “and then again on ‘land of the free.’”

There is no official or definitive version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and that is no accident. The 1931 bill signed into law by President Herbert Hoover that adopted the song as the nation’s anthem is a model of terseness. It is mum about both lyrics and arrangement, which, said Mark Clague, an associate professor of musicology at the University of Michigan, is one reason the anthem has continued to evolve over the years.

“When Francis Scott Key wrote it, he’d just seen a decisive victory in Baltimore in the War of 1812, which was like a second war of independence,” he said in an interview. “He writes the song in celebration, and it’s played for years with a celebratory feel, up-tempo and light. Only later does it become the song we know, slower and more majestic.”