Founded in 2004 by a group of music professionals with a nearly uncontainable love and passion for both baseball and music, The Baseball Music Project is dedicated to fostering greater awareness of the cultural lineage and historical significance of music written about baseball, through concerts, recordings, and related outreach events and projects.
Baseball and music have been indelibly intertwined since the sport's inception. Nearly one hundred songs were written about baseball between 1858 and 1900 alone, and the major collections of baseball music in the USA (the Library of Congress, the Newberry Library, the Levy Collection at Johns Hopkins and the Steele Collection at the National Baseball Hall of Fame) contain nearly one thousand works written about the sport, commencing with the first known piece of baseball music, J.R. Blodgett's "The Baseball Polka", composed in 1858.
The public's awareness of music's historical relationship to baseball, however, is generally limited to Albert von Tilzer's famous "Take Me Out to the Ballgame", or to more recent tunes like "Joltin Joe DiMaggio" and "Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?" Yet few people are aware that the March King, John Philip Sousa, composed "The National Game", dedicating it to Baseball Commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, or that Lou Gehrig's wife, Eleanor Gehrig penned the tune "I Cant Get to First Base Without You". Few are aware of such turn-of-the century musical gems such as "Slide, Kelly, Slide", "The Baseball Polka", or "Hurrah For Our National Game".
Beginning in 2006, and in cooperation with major symphony orchestras and concert halls throughout the USA, The Baseball Music Project will present concerts celebrating the National Baseball Hall of Fame through the great lineage of baseball music. The concerts will feature the greatest music ever written about the greatest sport, combined with images, narration and video about America's favorite pastime. Members of the Hall of Fame and/or baseball celebrities will serve as narrators and hosts for the concerts. Each concert will conclude with a tribute to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, featuring images of all 259 Hall of Fame members.
Highlights of the concert will include orchestral versions of"The Baseball Polka" written in 1858, John Philip Sousa's "The National Game", "The Umpire is a Most Unhappy Man", Ruth Gehrig's "I Cant Get to First Base without You", "Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball", "Let's Keep The Dodgers in Brooklyn", "Damn Yankees", and many others, including music from such great baseball films as "Field of Dreams" and "The Natural".