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| Julian Felipe, composer of the Philippine National Anthem |
Every Filipino knows Julian Felipe's National Anthem by heart and its Tagalog lyrics Lupang Hinirang. Some of us might also Jose Palma's original Spanish lyrics, or the English version. Since Felipe's original composition originally doesn't have lyrics, so authors attempted to make a set of lyrics for it.
However, there are still many versions and translations set to Felipe's Anthem that are obscurely-known today, such as the Tagalog translation used by the Japanese, and the Tagalog translation by Ildefonso Santos used until 1956. These were all officially adopted as the lyrics of the anthem at some point, but even more obscure and interesting are the unofficial lyrics used during the Revolution and the early part of the American Occupation.
These early unofficial lyrics tells us a lot of history. Two of these are even earlier than Jose Palma's work! It shows that even before Jose Palma's work became widespread, Filipinos made their own lyrics to express their own patriotic fervor to the music of Julian Felipe's anthem.
Unfortunately only a small fraction of these local lyrics were recorded and written down. For this post, I've searched five of them:
