“Take Me Out to the Ballgame” turned 100 this year, a landmark honored from baseball’s Cooperstown shrine to Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Most recently New York City’s Songwriters Hall of Fame bestowed its annual Towering Song honor on
the song often called our “other” national anthem, surpassed only by “Happy Birthday” and “The Star Spangled Banner” as the country’s most-performed tune. Yet composer Albert von Tilzer and lyricist Jack Norworth barely knew the game before composing their ubiquitous anthem and copyrighting it in 1908. Norworth, who’d reportedly been inspired by seeing a New York Giants subway sign advertising “Baseball Today – Polo Grounds,” for decades claimed he’d never even been to a ballgame, a legend debunked by a sportswriter who once reminded him of their mutual jaunt to see the Giants that very year. And most people still don’t know the song originally had verses, about a frustrated female fan named Katie Casey (rewritten in 1927 to feature Nelly Kelly). Here’s a download of the original Edison wax roll of Edward Meeker’s 1908 version.
The tune became an instant, long-lived hit, so ubiquitous it was often sung between reel changes at silent movies, before variously becoming a comic musical foil in the Marx Brothers’ classic A Night at the Opera and the inspiration for MGM’s 1949 Gene Kelly/Frank Sinatra musical named after it. Veteran Cubs radio announcer Harry Caray is credited with making the song a fixture of the game’s seventh inning stretch, and the Chicago club has made a tradition of parading celebrities through their broadcast booth to sing it, with often disastrous―if amusing―results. Here’s a download of Ozzy’s spirited attempt during a Cubs-Dodgers game. Even Bob Dylan recently performed the song as part of the baseball edition of his Theme Time Radio Hour, a program also now archived in Cooperstown. Here are three of our favorite renditions of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” as archived by YouTube.
― Legendary St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Famer Stan “the Man” Musial captures the simple, all-American essence of the tune in this solo harmonica rendition, as beamed onto the scoreboard at Busch Stadium during a game.
― Harpo Marx has been called the most famed proponent of the harp since Nero. Here he shows why with an elegant rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” on a 1955 episode of I Love Lucy.
― Jerry Lee Lewis and Neil Sedaka may not have been at the peak of their careers, yet their closing duet of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” on this April, 1965 edition of ABC-TV’s Shindig! remains one for the ages.