After the Grand Prix last week, many first-time tourists visited one of Baltimore’s most famous landmarks. Then, after not able to actually get into the old set of Homicide in Fells Point, they wandered out to Fort McHenry.

There, on this day in 1814, the U.S. flag steadily flew while the British Navy attacked Baltimore harbor, as they had Washington three weeks before.

For amateur poet Francis Scott Key on a British ship eight miles away, it was hard to see anything clearly—like tailgating at Ravens’ Stadium this past Sunday—but the point of the attack was clear. The British laid into Baltimore with everything they had. Powdered wigs and puffy shirts notwithstanding.

When it was all over, British commanders probably felt, as Burt Gummer said of the giant sand worm in the 1990 sci-fi classic Tremors, that at Baltimore they “broke into the wrong damned rec room.”

The failed attack inspired Key to write the lines that took until 1931 to become our national anthem, “The Star Spangled Banner.” Prior to this, at the start of baseball games they were probably wearing out such favorites as “Pop Goes the Weasel.”

About life and death along the Baltimore waterfront, it figures somebody suggested setting Key’s poem to a drinking song. Since “What Do You Do With a Drunken Sailor” was taken, they picked “To Anacreon in Heaven,” a melody apparently impervious to solo delivery by the amplified human voice.

Imagine Scott Key and his friend, Dr. William Beanes, watching from the deck of the British prison barge on that morning 197 years ago.

Beanes: “Man, that was some shelling!”

Scott Key: “What? My ears are still ringing.”

Beanes: “I say, is that a flag still out there?”

Scott Key (suddenly writing):  “Yes, yes, that’s good…”

British Sailor: “Well, so bloody much for my first Black Eyed Susan in Fells Point.”