U.S. cause. After the War, author Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. compared "Maryland, My Maryland" with "John Brown's Body" as the two most popular songs from the opposing sides in the early months of the conflict. Each side, he wrote, had "a sword in its hand, each with a song in its mouth". The songs indicated as well their respective audiences, according to Holmes: "One is a hymn, with ghostly imagery and anthem-like ascription. The other is a lyric poem, appealing chiefly to local pride and passion." Lyrics Efforts to repeal, replace, or revise Maryland's state song Unsuccessful efforts to revise the lyrics to the song or to repeal or replace the song were attempted by members of the Maryland General Assembly in 1974, 1980, 1984, 2001, 2002, 2009, 2016, 2018, and 2019. In July 2015, Delegate Peter A. Hammen, chairman of the Maryland House of Delegates House Health and Government Operations Committee, asked the Maryland State Archives to form an advisory panel to review the song. The panel issued a report in December 2015 that suggested that it was time the song was retired. The panel offered several options for revising the song's lyrics or replacing it with another song altogether. The panel report stated that the Maryland state song should: celebrate Maryland and its citizens; be unique to Maryland; be historically significant; be inclusive of all Marylanders; be memorable, popular, singable and short (one, or at the most, two stanzas long) In 2016, the Maryland Senate passed a bill to revise the song to include just the third verse of Randall's lyrics and only the fourth verse of a poem of the same name, written in 1894 by John T. White. This revision had the support of Maryland Senate President Thomas V. "Mike" Miller, who resisted any changes to "Maryland, My Maryland" in the past. It was not reported out of the Health and Government Operations Committee in the House of Delegates, however. On August 28, 2017, The Mighty Sound of Maryland, the marching band of the University of Maryland, suspended playing the song until they had time to review if it was aligned with the values of the school. On March 16, 2018, the Maryland Senate passed an amended bill that would have changed the status of "Maryland! My Maryland!" from the "official State song" to the "Historical State song". The bill received an Unfavorable Report by the