August 21, 2007
The Great Songs of Baseball: An Interview with Jerry Silverman (Part 1) Posted by Allen Barra at 12:35 PM EST Jerry Silverman—folksinger, guitarist, musicologist—has published over 200 books, including folk song collections, anthologies, and instructional books for guitar, banjo, and fiddle. He is also the author of The Immigrant Song Book and Of Thee I Sing: Lyrics and Music for America’s Most Patriotic Songs. His latest, The Baseball Songbook: Songs and Images from the Early Years of America’s Favorite Pastime (Alfred Publishing, 172 pages, $19.95), is a fascinating history of early baseball songs from 1867 to 1922, complete with music and lyrics, and a CD of Silverman’s renditions. You can check out his website at www.jerrysilverman.org. We spoke at such enjoyable length that this interview is running in two parts. A subtitle for your book might be “A Secret History of Baseball in Song.” College football fight songs have always been popular, but aside from those, I don’t think I could name a song for any other sport except baseball. What do you think it is about baseball that has inspired so much music? You mention college football fight songs. There are lots of those, but they only resonate on the individual campuses and are trotted out only (when they are sung at all) at games or at sentimental alumni gatherings. The lyrics to these songs seldom rise above the level of rah-rah, and the tunes, which are composed mainly by the alumni themselves, are, shall we say, less than inspiring. Sort of on the level of official state songs, and nobody sings those either. It is hard to imagine anyone in California, for example, getting inspired by a song extolling the glories of either the Yale Bulldogs or the state of Connecticut. Baseball, on the other hand, was hailed as our “National Game” as early as the 1860s. Something about the pastoral setting in which the games were played captured the imagination of the public. Indeed, the very first game played under modern rules took place in 1846 in New Jersey (yes, New Jersey!), in a pleasant outdoor recreation area just across the Hudson River from lower Manhattan called the Elysian Fields. You can’t get more pastoral than that. The song “Hurrah for Our National Game” (1869) pictures on the sheet music cover a bald eagle standing on a crag, majestically clutching two bats, an olive branch, and a shield emblazoned with the stars and stripes. And you can’t get more American than that. So we have the patriotic and the pastoral—a surefire nineteenth-century “doubleheader” image of our country. That’s all the songwriters needed to get going. And going they got! With a vengeance. Composers and lyricists, sensing a good thing churned out baseball-themed songs in the musical styles of the periods in which they were active: marches, ragtime, waltzes, two-steps, polkas, jazz, etc. They cranked out ballads, comic songs, sentimental ditties, songs about the heroes (real and imaginary) on the field, songs about killing the umpire, taking a girl to the game and proposing in the stands (trying to “get to first base” with your best girl). They tried to top the last hit song, hoping that the vaudeville and music hall stars of the day would popularize their latest effort and send the people rushing to music stores to buy the sheet music and, later, the records. The result: hundreds and hundreds of songs—some delightful and others best forgotten. Football is not the only team sport that didn’t inspire America’s songwriters and fans. Can you name one—just one—song about basketball or hockey? Fuggeddaboudit! Lacrosse? Gimme a break! Polo? Are you kidding? That leaves us (happily) with the 1869 lyric “Then hurrah for our National Game, hurrah,/ Here’s a cheer for its well-earned fame./ Success to it ever, hurrah, hurrah,/ Hurrah for our National Game.” I can think of one song about hockey, but it’s in French. Of course, the most famous song in your collection is “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” What is the story behind that? On the face of it, there is little to distinguish “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” from the many other jolly three-quarter-time songs of its period. Next year is the hundredth anniversary of its composition, in 1908, but why it has endured as the “anthem” of baseball is something of a mystery. In fact the 1906 song “It’s Great at a Baseball Game” anticipated not only the mood and meter of “Take Me Out,” but its “menu” as well. Instead of “peanuts and crackerjack” we are offered “hot buttered popcorn and peanuts.” It was composed by two giants of Tin Pan Alley of the day, Fred Fischer, “Peg o’ My Heart,” and Richard Whiting, “Sleepy Time Gal,” to name but two of their enduring hits. The tune of “It’s Great” is catchy and eminently singable, but seventh-inning stretches come and go, and nobody sings it today. Then in 1908 the celebrated songwriter and showman George M. Cohan (“Give My Regards to Broadway,” “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy,” “Over There”) teamed up with two other well-known tunesmiths to turn out “Take Your Girl to the Ball Game,” which scans rhythmically exactly like “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” This one offers “cool lemonade” and also offers some advice in affairs of the heart. Do you see a pattern emerging here? But another strikeout. Turning our attention now to “Take Me Out,” let’s look at its composers, Albert von Tilzer and Jack Norworth. Von Tilzer was a prolific composer (“Put Your Arms Around Me Honey, Hold Me Tight, “I’ll Be With You in Apple Blossom Time”), but the key to the success of “Take Me Out” is due in great measure to the collaboration of Jack Norworth and his wife, the immensely popular vaudeville singer Nora Bayes. Together in 1903 they had composed a song that became a “standard,” “Shine On, Harvest Moon.” [Note to younger readers of this interview who may never have heard of these songs and composers: This was big-time stuff in its day, and beyond. Everybody knew these songs. —A.B.] Anyway, if you want your song to be successful, there’s nothing like having your famous wife sing it on stage. Nora introduced the song in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1910, and it was an instantaneous hit. It quickly moved from the stage to the diamond and was soon being sung in all the big-league (and other) ballparks. All the more amazing when you realize that the recording industry was in its infancy and radio broadcasting was non-existent. A new wrinkle was added to this saga 55 years later. On August 25, 2005, in honor of Jewish Heritage Day, the Jewish Peoples’ Philharmonic Chorus sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” before a Mets Game at Shea Stadium—in Yiddish!
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