A Nation Once Again was voted the world's most popular song according to a BBC World Service global poll of listeners, ahead of "Vande Mataram", the national song of India. Davis copied the melody for the chorus from the second movement of Mozart's clarinet concerto. The lyrics use a simple ABABCDCD rhyme scheme, with verses of eight lines, and alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. Davis describes how he learned of ancient fighters for freedom as a boy — the three hundred Spartans who fought at the Battle of Thermopylae. The "three men" may refer to Horatius Cocles and his two companions
Of Thee I Sing Our response was that, naturally, we'd replace it with something else if the paying audience didn't take to it. Opening night, and even weeks later, one could hear a continuous 'Of thee I sing, baby!' in the lobby at intermission time." The music was "employed throughout in what was unquestionably the most closely integrated manner of any Broadway show to that time...Almost everything ...was created with a skill that had rarely been equaled in the musical comedy theatre." "Of Thee I Sing" was the first American musical with a consistently satirical tone. Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court, the Presidency, and