Within that 60-year period from the 1860s to the 1920s, there are hundreds and hundreds of songs which were part of the mainstream of what composers wrote about in those days. There were the usual love songs and songs of parting and sentimental songs and funny songs, but within that, they used baseball as a metaphor for other things that were going on.
So there are songs about taking my girl to the ballgame and proposing to her in the bleachers and kill the umpire, but the people who were writing these songs were mainstream songwriters. Irving Berlin didn't write many, but he wrote that one, "Jake, Jake, the Yiddisha Ball Player." There were composers like George M. Cohan, who wrote "Give My Regards to Broadway," who tried to compete with, tried to write a sequel to "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" called "Take Your Girl to the Ball Game." It sounds almost exactly like "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," but it just somehow never made the grade.
Once I got into the archives, the problem was not what songs to pick but what songs to eliminate. It never ended.
What is it about baseball? You've mentioned that you're not going to find this treasure-trove of songs about basketball, say.
I don't know. It's really strange. Baseball from its earliest days somehow was already called our national game, our national sport. There was something about maybe the outdoorsness of it, the infectiousness of the crowds roaring, I don't know. It's hard to say why something wasn't written.
Baseball has this great literary tradition, of course, but then so does boxing, and there isn't this trove of boxing songs.
Well, no. There couldn't really be. There are songs about famous prizefights. They do date back to the John L. Sullivan era and beyond. [There are] kind of folksy ballads which exist in odd collections here and there, but there isn't a popular literature of boxing songs.
The baseball players were the heroes of their day, as many of them still are today. The composers of the day, like any pop composer or contemporary composer, look for what people are buying or people are singing and try to fill the gap.
Why don't we sing about sports anymore? Why don't popular songwriters write about sports now?
It's almost a fad. During the 1930s there was this Hawaiian ukulele fad. Everybody was singing songs about going back to the beautiful islands. Before that there was the birth of the jazz era. Baseball songs, they had their day, and they just went someplace else. Popular tastes changed. Again, it's almost impossible to say why things don't happen.
Let's talk about the king of all baseball songs. Listening to the CD and trying to hear it as though I've never heard any of these songs before -- which is true for almost all of them except that one -- it strikes me that if you don't know anything about the last 100 years and you don't know anything about baseball, I'm not sure that that song would leap out at me as the greatest of them all. Maybe it does to you, but why do you think "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" became the "Happy Birthday" of baseball?
Another tough question. Again, it's impossible to say. Why didn't "Take Your Girl to the Ball Game" achieve that status? It just clicked somehow. It also may have had something to do with who performed it originally, because by the time "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" was written in 1908, recordings were already on the scene, so popular vaudeville performers performed them, and you had to be a pop star of the day to get your wares before the public.
The composer, Jack Norworth, his wife was Nora Bayes. She was a big star, a big, big star in her day. A vaudeville and musical star. She sang it, and if Nora Bayes sang it, then it was bound to catch people's attention.
You could ask the same question today. Why does any rock song become an anthem? Why does "We Will Rock You" get sung at every ballgame and another doesn't. Public taste is a fickle thing and fads come and go. What was last year's wonderful song is never heard from again.
Of all the other songs written around 1908, which you never heard of and I'd never heard of, it must have really caught on almost immediately to have captured the imagination of the baseball world. It is, I mean, I don't know if it's the greatest song of all time, but it is easy to sing, it does have a nice melody, and it's very evocative of going out and having a good time.
[Note: In the 20 hours or so since conducting this interview and listing to Silverman's version of the song twice, the melody of the verse, not the familiar chorus, has become stuck in my head. Maybe there really was something to it. -- KK]
You said the book stops at 1922 because of copyright considerations. If not for that, what would the next book look like?
Well, there was a song that I really wanted to include which was published in 1925, and it was about Bucky Harris. He was at that time the manager of the Washington Senators. They won the World Series in 1924. He lived in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., and he had a kind of a triumphant parade welcoming him back after the World Series. The governor was there and the whole business, a banquet and fireworks and whatever. Somebody wrote a song about Bucky saying something to the effect of "Do for us in '25 what you did in '24." I thought that would have been a very nice song to include.
And then of course I could have gone on and on. To overcome the lack of songs of the Negro Leagues, I would have certainly liked to include a Jackie Robinson song. But obviously it didn't happen, so you just have to stop there. There were a couple of others. There were songs about Connie Mack and the Athletics from the late '20s and early '30s. There were a lot of good songs. They didn't just stop in 1922.
You start to get into movie songs like "O'Brian to Ryan to Goldberg" [from a movie called "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," of course].
And there's certainly "Joltin' Joe DiMaggio," which I would have loved to put in, and other ones like that. But it couldn't be done.
Why is it that there were no Negro Leagues songs?
That's another impossible question. When I called the guy at the Negro Leagues Hall of Fame, he was mystified. He'd never thought of it --
Oh, you just mean you weren't able to find any.
Well, you would think that if there were any he would know about it. In view of the tremendous repertoire of songs of the black American experience in every facet of life, you would have certainly thought that the heroes of the Negro Leagues would have songs written about them. And maybe they did but they were never published, and if they were never published, we don't have records of them. It's too bad.
I mean, the only song that has this pseudo-black thing is "Brother Noah Gave Out Checks for Rain," but that was written by a white man, and it's written in this horrible dialect, and the cover is a disgrace. The only reason I put it in there is because it's typical of the era, so with baited breath and apologies in the introduction, I included it.
And that was the only song that the guy at the Negro Leagues Hall of Fame had heard of that had "something to do" -- in quotes, because it didn't -- with the black experience.
Now, paradoxically, "McGuffin's Home Run," that was written by a black composer, Gussie Lord Davis, who wrote this pseudo-Irish song. Why didn't he write something else? He was a Tin Pan Alley songwriter and he had to make a living like everybody else. He wrote "McGuffin's Home Run" because everybody was writing funny Irish songs in those days.
To hear Jerry Silverman singing the first verse and chorus of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," as well as the chorus in Yiddish, click here.
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About the writer
King Kaufman is a senior writer for Salon. Visit his column archive. You can e-mail him at king at salon dot com or visit his MySpace page.
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