It is not well known, but "God Bless America" is in fact a Canadian song. It was written in 1915 by Hiram Snedley of Kapuskasing, Ontario. Snedley, who was born in Quebec City on January 12, 1874 to an English father and a Cree mother, was a carpenter and amateur scrimshaw artist who enjoyed a brief burst of notoriety when he tried to introduce wattle and daub architecture to the north woods. A fine musician and staunch Canadian patriot, he had written a number of songs that had mostly a limited local distribution, including "Brave Battling Beavers" and "We Love Our Canadian Snow." Snedley was proud of this new song, which he called "God Bless Canada," and decided to put quite a bit of his own money into publishing it; however, it met with very limited success. In 1918, a close friend of Snedley's, newspaper editor and bassoonist Elbert Whift, mentioned to him that the line, "God Bless Canada" didn't quite scan, and that this rhythmic dysfluency might possibly have something to do with the song's lackluster sales record. This news hit poor Snedley quite hard. He became despondent, took to drink, and was last seen paddling his canoe northward on the Kapuskasing River, with a case of whiskey and 700 copies of "God Bless Canada" in the bow. Whift promptly changed the name of the song to "God Bless America" and sent it to Irving Berlin, who, as it happened, had once befriended a distant cousin of Whift's when she was down on her luck in New York. The rest, as they say, is history.

Aloha,
Mark