DATE: Monday, March 3, 1997                 TAG: 9702200265

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B3   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: COLUMN 

SOURCE: GEORGE TUCKER

                                            LENGTH:   64 lines

WITH BOMBS BURSTING IN AIR, KEY RECALLED A FAMILIAR TUNE

Many Americans mistakenly believe ``The Star Spangled Banner'' has been our national anthem since its verses were written by Francis Scott Key after witnessing the British bombardment of Fort McHenry near Baltimore on Sept. 13-14, 1814.

The true story is this: The song we now call ``The Star Spangled Banner,'' but was first called ``The Defense of Fort McHenry,'' did not receive official status until an act of Congress made it our national anthem on March 3, 1931.

Every American knows - or should know - the story of how Key watched the attack and how his fear that the fort might have capitulated was stilled ``by the dawn's early light,'' which revealed that ``our flag was still there.'' Even so, there are other facts concerning the banner, Key's poem and the tune to which it is sung that are lesser known.

Miraculously, the flag that fluttered over Fort McHenry in 1814 is still preserved, displayed in the National Museum of American History in Washington. The historic banner was made by Mary Young Pickersgill, a Baltimore ``flag, banner and pennant maker,'' shortly before it was first unfurled over Fort McHenry. Four hundred yards of English wool bunting were used to make the flag, but when the time came to assemble it, there was not enough room in the maker's tiny shop to do so. The problem was solved by taking what had already been completed to a nearby brewery. It was there that Pickersgill's 14-year-old daughter, Carolyn, and her mother, Rebecca Young, helped her complete the enormous flag.

To return to Key - throughout the bombardment he had jotted down ideas for his poem on the back of a letter. The night after the attack he arranged these notes and wrote out the first draft. That he had the tune the poem is now sung to in mind is evident from the fact that he had earlier used the same melody for another poem of his entitled ``When the Warrior Returns From the Battle Afar.'' A few days later the poem was printed in two Baltimore newspapers - and the rest is history.

As for the melody to which ``The Star Spangled Banner'' is sung, it is generally credited to the British composer John Stafford Smith (1750-1836), who either composed it or ``arranged'' an earlier popular melody during the 1780s for a drinking song, ``To Anacreon in Heaven,'' to be sung by the Anacreontic Society of London. Smith's ditty lauded the Greek poet Anacreon, the society's patron, who wrote mostly about wine and women, as emphasized in the closing couplet of each stanza, which urged the members to ``entwine the myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine.''

In commenting on the melody to which we now sing - or try to sing - ``The Star Spangled Banner,'' the Encyclopaedia Britannica says: ``It is not generally realized that the Anacreontic tune was used many times, with a variety of words of political, patriotic, social, and sometimes ribald, nature.''

To clinch the matter, Richard S. Hill, a former head of the reference section of the Library of Congress' musical division, spent 20 years working out a theory that the original melody, which Smith either wrote himself or ``harmonized'' from an earlier tune, was of Irish origin and was probably brought to this country by Irish regiments in the British army before the Revolutionary War. Hill further reported that he had discovered more than 80 early American texts that used the same melody.

With these facts in mind, it is relatively certain that Key had the popular tune in mind when he composed the words for what has been our national anthem since 1931. ILLUSTRATION: [Francis Scott Key]

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