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“C” is for “Carolina”

“C” is for “Carolina.” State song. South Carolina’s oldest official state song is “Carolina,” with words by Henry Timrod set to music by Anne Curtis Burgess. The General Assembly adopted it as the official state anthem on February 11, 1911. Timrod was a Charlestonian who became one of South Carolina’s most beloved poets. “Carolina” was one of his most patriotic Civil War poems, in which the poet called on the people to rise up and defend their state against the Northern invaders. Anne Curtis Burgess earned a degree in music from Converse College and taught music at Winthrop College. Burgess’s setting of Timrod's "Carolina” received its first pubic performance in 1905. In 1911, the South Carolina Daughters of the American Revolution presented a memorial to the General Assembly asking that ‘Carolina” be adopted as the official state song.

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Dr. Walter Edgar has two programs on South Carolina Public Radio: Walter Edgar's Journal, and South Carolina from A to Z. Dr. Edgar received his B.A. degree from Davidson College in 1965 and his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina in 1969. After two years in the army (including a tour of duty in Vietnam), he returned to USC as a post-doctoral fellow of the National Archives, assigned to the Papers of Henry Laurens.