Yo, Meathead!

Wow, here’s something I found in the New York Daily News—more than you ever wanted to know about our national pastime’s unofficial song. Most of this is actually pretty interesting as another baseball season gets underway!

In my next post, I’ll tell ya all about Opening Day at Safeco Field!

‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame’ turns 100

by David Hinckley
April 4, 2008

Two of baseball’s most memorable 100th anniversaries unfold this summer: the centennial anniversary of the last time the Chicago Cubs won the World Series and the 100th season since Jack Norworth wrote “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

“Ball Game” was first sung at actual ball games around 1910 and in modern times it has become the soundtrack of the seventh inning stretch, another baseball tradition. The rendition most famously perpetuated, in an amusing coincidence, by the late Harry Caray, who called games for the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field.

“Ball Game” lost a few performances in recent years when some parks started playing “God Bless America” during the seventh inning stretch, but that trend seems to have receded and the traditional “Ball Game” is increasingly coming back.

So now let’s take a brief trip back to the last ought-eight and the story of a songwriter who had never seen a baseball game, but while waiting for the subway one day did see an intriguing sign.

Jack Norworth lived for 80 years and made his reputation in about 30 minutes, which is the length of the subway ride on which he composed the lyrics for “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” a song millions of strangers join to sing hundreds of thousands of times each American baseball season.

To be more precise, those strangers sing the chorus, because not one fan in a million is likely to know either of the actual verses to “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

Those verses have receded as far into the dusk of history as Ebbets Field, and when they are exhumed, it isn’t hard to understand why they have been forgotten. They sound like something straight out of 1908, which isn’t surprising, because it was exactly 100 baseball seasons ago that Norworth took his magic subway ride.

Katie Casey was baseball mad,
Had the fever and had it bad;
Just to root for the home town crew,
Ev’ry sou Katie blew
On a Saturday, her young beau
Called to see if she’d like to go
To see a show but Miss Katie said “No,
I’ll tell you what you can do… “

Call Katie’s imminent request the shout heard ‘round the nation. It goes something like this:

Take me out to the ballgame
Take me out with the crowd
Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack
I don’t care if I never get back
Let me root root root for the home team
If they don’t win it’s a shame
For it’s one two three strikes, you’re out
At the old ballgame.

Jack Norworth, as it happens, wasn’t looking to write the definitive American sport chorus. He had no ambition higher than a quick novelty hit, and baseball was a random potential subject, holding neither more nor less interest to Norworth than, say, a bicycle built for two. Born in Philadelphia in 1879, Norworth was by 1908 an established New York song-and-dance man, successful enough to fancy himself a rival of George M. Cohan. He and his wife, Nora Bayes, one of the most successful pop singers of the early 20th century and herself a vaudeville star and composer, were appearing together in the “Ziegfeld Follies” and singing a song they’d written called “Shine on Harvest Moon.” Then one day that summer, as Norworth told the story, he was taking the subway and spotted a sign: Base Ball Today—Polo Grounds.

Norworth had never seen a “base ball” game. But he happened to have a few sheets of yellow paper with him, and he got the idea for a skit that would use base ball to showcase a pretty girl who was a bigger fan than even the boys.

Thus was born Kitty Casey, who would later become Nelly Kelly, probably because Nelly Kelly sounded, if possible, even more Irish. “Nelly” also would have felt comfortable for Albert Von Tilzer, a composer and friend whom Norworth visited in search of a melody for his new lyrics. Von Tilzer was an old friend of Nelly, too, having composed the big hit “Wait Til the Sun Shines, Nellie.” Von Tilzer also was a soulmate of Norworth when it came to base ball experience. He too had never seen a game.

But he was a master of perky, sing-along melodies, and when the collaboration was finished they took it to impresario Flo Ziegfeld, who liked it well enough to insert it into the next “Follies,” where it was performed with no shortage of melodramatic flourish by Bayes and Norworth.

Soon it had been recorded by Billy Murray, the biggest star in the fledgling phonograph record industry, and by 1910 it was being sung in baseball stadiums, a practice that continues to this day.

Like any successful popular song, “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” soon spawned enough bad copies to fill a ballpark of its own. To Norworth’s life-long delight, one of the failed imitators was Cohan, who was a great fan and had attended many base ball games, but who swung and missed with “Take Your Girl to the Ball Game,” which included the line, “In the stands it’s so grand / If you’re holding her hand / At the old ball game.”

In any case, Norworth was now a big enough star that Lew Fields stole him and Bayes from Ziegfeld, billing them as “The Happiest Married Couple in Show Business.”

Alas, that proved to be another bit of show biz overstatement. By 1913 they had divorced and Norworth had left both Fields and the country, surfacing in London with the goal of sparking a different kind of musical fad: songs built around tongue-twisters like “Sister Susie’s Sewing Shirts for Soldiers.”

Things went well for Susie, not so well for Jack. By 1921 he was back in the States and filing for bankruptcy. He drifted to California, where he stayed active in show business thanks to a cushion of royalties and sheet music sales—a songwriter’s major revenue source in those days—from “Harvest Moon” and “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

After years of trying, he persuaded Hollywood in 1944 to tell the story of “The Happiest Married Couple in Show Business,” with a film titled “Shine on Harvest Moon” that starred Dennis King as Norworth and Ann Sheridan as Bayes.

“Take Me Out to the Ballgame” was featured, of course, and by then both authors had actually seen the game that had been so berry, berry good to them. Von Tilzer attended a game in 1928, and Norworth went to Ebbets Field in 1942 to watch the Dodgers.

Von Tilzer lived until 1956 and Norworth till 1959, spending his final years running a showbiz novelty shop in Hollywood and still, on request, singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” which by the time of his death was estimated to be the third–most-performed song in the country, after the national anthem and “Happy Birthday.”