Some thoughts of Take Me Out To The Ball Game
Take Me Out To The Ball Game
Surely, Billy Murray was a huge baseball fan. He knew all the major-league players’ names, sat on their benches during games, and even played the occasional exhibition game with the Yankees. It does seem odd that he didn’t sing the song most suited to him! 3
While riding a subway train, he was inspired by a sign that said “Baseball Today ? Polo Grounds”. After he wrote the lyrics, it was set to music by Albert Von Tilzer, although neither of them had ever seen a baseball game before. The song was first sung by Norworth’s wife Nora Bayes, then further popularized by various vaudeville acts. 2
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Gene Kelly took this idea to Arthur Freed about an original musical which would combine two big loves of his, baseball and the dance. The story would be based on Al Schacht and Nick Altrock who played ball during the regular season as pitcher and catcher and then in the off season toured in vaudeville. 6
Color illustrated piece of sheet music. The cover is various shades of blue with an image of a baseball in the background. The bottom third of the piece is solid blue with a black silhouette of a cheering crowd of people. There is a black and white photographic image of a woman, Ida Burt Laurence, at the center right of the cover. 1
Incredibly, the author of the song, Jack Norworth, had never been to a baseball game when he wrote the song. He was riding on the subway in New York, when he saw a sign advertising “Ballgame Today - Polo Grounds”. The Polo Grounds was the name of the stadium used most notably by the New York (later San Francisco) Giants baseball team. 5
It was co-written in 1908 by Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer, neither of whom had ever been to a big-league baseball game. The song purportedly was written on a New York City mass transit train (the 9th Avenue elevated) when Norworth saw an ad for a game at the Polo Grounds, pulled out a piece of paper and wrote the lyrics. 7
Like no other American sport, baseball has been glorified and preserved in musical form by inspired songwriters and poets since its beginnings. In 1858, the year when amateur baseball teams in the northeast established the first league, the National Association of Base Ball Players, one player from the Base Ball Club of Buffalo published the first piece of baseball music - The Baseball Polka. Since then hundreds of songs have followed, some composed by the players themselves, some by their sponsors, several by well-known musicians, others by unknown fans. And, it cannot be mere coincidence that all of their baseball songs generally avoided baseball issues: integration, free agency, players’ strikes, drug use, salaries, etc., never appear in the lyrics; rather, they instinctively focus on the glory, the heroes, or the past traditions of the game. 4
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