by Rob Hudson, Assistant Archivist, Carnegie Hall
Program Notes © 2006 by Rob Hudson
The Star-Spangled Banner
As most any school kid could tell you, the words to The Star-Spangled Banner were penned by Francis Scott Key in 1814, while watching the British bombard Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor during the War of 1812. If the soldiers of the fort hadn’t had their hands full with the British, they may well have amused themselves in their off hours with the still-evolving game of baseball – researchers have found reference to a game of that name as early as 1791!
The Star-Spangled Banner wasn’t officially designated as our national anthem until 1931 – until then, it shared “unofficial” anthem status with My Country ‘Tis of Thee, although in 1916 President Woodrow Wilson ordered that it be played at military events. Its debut at a baseball game came during the 1918 World Series, when it was sung during the 7th inning stretch to honor American servicemen.
The National Game
The name of John Philip Sousa, the March King, is practically synonymous with American music – band music in particular – in the hearts and ears of many throughout the world, thanks to such marches as The Stars and Stripes Forever and The Washington Post. He composed well over 100 other marches, as well as 15 operettas and dozens of songs. Sousa was also a world-renowned bandleader, and the Sousa Band was immensely popular in its day, playing more than 15,000 concerts all over America and Europe between 1892 and 1932. Then, as now, touring musicians often turned to baseball for amusement in their leisure time on the road, and Sousa’s band had its own baseball team – Sousa was the pitcher – that played teams from “rival” bands.
Sousa was a true patriot – he spent 19 years with the U.S. Marine Band, both as a player and as its conductor, and he volunteered for service in the U.S. Navy at the age of 62 during World War I. Sousa’s love for America and for America’s pastime worked together in 1918, when he auctioned his conductor’s baton to raise funds for baseball equipment for the sailors at the Great Lakes naval training station outside Chicago. The baton, which he had used since it was presented to him by members of the U.S. Marine Band in 1870, sold for $120, roughly equivalent to $1500 today.
In 1925, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, major league baseball’s first commissioner, asked Sousa to compose a baseball march. Sousa responded with The National Game, which he dedicated to Landis.
Base Ball Polka
The Base Ball Polka, the earliest known piece of music specifically written about the game, dates from 1858. This was also the year of the first “all-star” game, a match between players selected from among the member clubs of the newly-formed National Association of Base-Ball Players.
Slide, Kelly, Slide
Michael J. “King” Kelly was the kind of athlete tailor-made for baseball legend. Flamboyant, fast living, hard-drinking, Kelly was the most popular ball player of his day, and possibly the most colorful and well-known baseball figure of the pre-Babe Ruth era. Kelly entered the majors in 1878, playing two seasons with the Cincinnati Reds, and by 1886 had made such an impression that the Boston Beaneaters paid the Chicago White Stockings (forerunner of the Chicago Cubs) $10,000 for Kelly’s release. Already known as the “King of the Diamond,” the deal earned him the new nickname “Ten-Thousand Dollar Beauty.” It was a smart move for the Beaneaters: in 1887, Kelly hit .394 and stole 84 bases. He once reportedly stole six bases in one game, and he was one of first to steal third and home. Such feats led to the coining of the expression “Slide, Kelly, slide!”
Kelly was the author of the first baseball autobiography, Play Ball: Stories of the Ball Field, published in 1888. He retired from playing in 1893 and opened a saloon in New York, but he apparently preferred consuming drinks to serving them, and the business didn’t last. “King” Kelly died of pneumonia at age 36 in 1894, while on his way to Boston to join the London Gaiety Girls Theatrical Company to perform small comedy parts.
The song Slide, Kelly, Slide was written in 1889 by vaudeville comedian J.W. Kelly, no relation to Mike Kelly. According to one contemporary who heard J.W. sing the song on the burlesque stage, “when Kelly sang the chorus it made one almost slide out of his seat trying to get to first base, so realistic did he make it.”
The Umpire is a Most Unhappy Man
My favorite umpire is a dead one.
– Hall of Fame Second Baseman Johnny Evers
An angry player can’t argue with the back of an umpire who is walking away.
– Hall of Fame Umpire Bill Klem. Klem began his career in 1905, the year The Umpire is a Most Unhappy Man was written. The flamboyant Klem is credited with introducing the inside chest protector, and was among the first to use arm signals with his calls. Along with Tom Connolly, Klem was the first umpire inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1953.
The Umpire is a Most Unhappy Man comes from a 1905 musical called The Umpire, with music by Joseph E. Howard and book and lyrics by Will M. Hough and Frank R. Adams. Composer Joe Howard lived an amazingly varied and colorful life, and had he not ended up as a songwriter you could easily imagine him on the ball field alongside a King Kelly or a Bill Klem.
Howard was born in 1867, in the back room of his father’s saloon on Mulberry Street in New York City – in the notorious “Five Points” district brought to life in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. Orphaned at age 7, he sold newspapers, rode the rails, toured the minstrel circuit as a boxer and wrestler, and got married and divorced in the same day – all by age 17! He began writing songs and musical comedies, opened his own theatre, and started producing his own shows. In 1899, Howard penned his first big hit, Hello, Ma Baby, the earliest well-known song to mention the telephone. He went on to write 28 musical comedies and more than 500 songs.
Howard died at age 94 in 1961, in the one place he’d probably hoped he’d die: on stage, in Chicago, the scene of most of his musical theatre successes. After leading the audience in a sing-along of Let Me Call You Sweetheart at a benefit performance at the Civic Opera House, he collapsed of a heart attack as the curtain closed.
Well, it would have been a fair ball yesterday and it will be fair tomorrow and for all years to come. But right now, unfortunately, it's foul because that's the way I called it.
– Hall of Fame Umpire Billy Evans. Evans became the youngest major league umpire when he began his career at age 22 in 1906.
Casey at the Bat
On June 3, 1888, a poem entitled “Casey at the Bat: A Ballad of the Republic, sung in the year 1888” appeared in the San Francisco Examiner, its author identified only as “Phin.” That was the nickname of 24-year old Ernest L. Thayer, who no doubt didn’t realize he’d just penned an American classic. “Casey at the Bat” perfectly captures the myth and the mania that surrounded the game already more than a century ago. Although many ballplayers named Casey came forward claiming to be the inspiration for the poem, Thayer finally admitted in 1935 that he’d based his fallen hero on a high school classmate named Daniel Casey. Really, his archetypal slugger could have been modeled on any number of Irish athletes that dominated the game in the 1880s, such as Boston’s flamboyant Mike “King” Kelly, or Philadelphia’s “Big Ed” Delahanty (one of five major league brothers!), both members of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Heavy Hitters Medley
Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?
Nobody who isn’t old enough to remember it can probably imagine the impact – both on the game of baseball and on American life in general – of Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey’s decision to sign Jack Roosevelt Robinson to his team in 1947. Rickey knew that bringing a black ballplayer to the major leagues would be extremely controversial, but he also knew Robinson’s skills justified the decision, and, moreover, that Robinson could withstand the immense pressure that breaking this color barrier would entail. Rickey told him he would simply have to silently endure whatever mistreatment came his way. And it came – as Mickey Mantle later noted, Robinson “without a doubt suffered more abuse and more taunts and more hatred than any player in the history of the game.” Probably only those closest to Robinson realized how hard it was for this deeply proud man to turn the other cheek. To the teenage Hank Aaron, “Jackie Robinson was such a hero…that I couldn't do anything but gawk at him.” Buddy Johnson’s 1949 song Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball? pulses with the sheer joyful pride that Aaron and millions of others felt when they watched Robinson play.
Always (from Pride of the Yankees)
He was a symbol of indestructibility – a Gibraltar in cleats.
– Sports columnist Jim Murray on Lou Gehrig
Lou Gehrig never thirsted for the limelight. He showed up to work faithfully every day and did his job, and was happy to do so. That some of his teammates, first Babe Ruth – no shrinking violet – and later Joe DiMaggio, commanded greater attention didn’t bother Gehrig. He said Ruth’s big shadow “gave me lots of room to spread myself.”
Gehrig began spreading himself soon after he was signed to Yankees organization in 1923. When he was called up from the Hartford farm team that September, he hit .423 in 26 at-bats. In 1925, his first full season as a Yankee, he batted .295, but for the next 12 seasons he hit .300 or better, scored more than 100 runs, and knocked in over 100 RBIs, every single year. In fact, he averaged 147 RBIs a year, a standard unsurpassed for 40 years, and his American League season record of 181 RBIs set in 1931 remains unbroken. A two-time American League MVP, Gehrig won the Triple Crown in 1934 when he led the league with his .363 average and 165 RBIs. He holds the record for the most career grand slams, with 23.
Gehrig was nicknamed “Iron Horse,” and it’s not hard to see why. He played through back pain, broken bones in his toes and fingers – in fact, his doctors later found evidence of 17 different hand fractures that Gehrig never bothered to mention. His streak of 2,130 consecutive games set a work standard not equaled until Cal Ripken, Jr. passed that mark in 1995. A Gibraltar in cleats indeed.
Yet, like the lyrics penned by Ira Gershwin in 1938, “in time the Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble,” that same year, Gehrig, who fell below .300 for the first time since his rookie season 13 years earlier, seemed to falter. His hitting lacked its usual power, and his teammates noticed shuffling feet and uncharacteristic clumsiness on the field. It was clear to Gehrig that something was very wrong, yet even by the time he took himself out of the lineup in May 1939, the disease eating away at his nervous system – amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS -- remained undiagnosed. His simple, yet heartbreakingly eloquent farewell speech that July will forever be one of the most powerful moments in baseball history. That same summer, he was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, and became the first athlete ever to have his jersey – Number 4 – retired. Gehrig died less than two years later on June 2, 1941, just two weeks short of his 38th birthday.
Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio
1941 was an emotional year on and off the baseball diamond. The war in Europe grew ever worse, threatening to draw the United States into the conflict. On the field, the highs and lows were dramatically illustrated by the lives of two men who had stood next to each other in the New York Yankees’ batting lineup, one already a legend and the other on his way. Just as Joe DiMaggio’s unstoppable bat began threatening old records and inching fans towards the edges of their seats, on June 2, Lou Gehrig, The Iron Horse, succumbed to the debilitating disease that today bears his name. A few weeks later, the records started crumbling as DiMaggio’s hitting streak continued, surpassing George Sisler’s 41-game feat of 1922 by the end of June. On July 3, his streak hit 45 games, beating the all-time major league record of 44 set in 1897 by Willie Keeler. The Yankee Clipper just kept right on going, seemingly against all the odds, connecting game after game. Finally, his whirlwind ride was brought to an end on July 17 after 56 games, but not before he had wracked up one of the most astonishing feats in all of baseball history.
Les Brown and His Orchestra immortalized the whole amazing escapade with their hit song, Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio, written by Alan Courtney and the aptly-named Ben Homer.
Take Me Out To The Ball Game
Everyone knows Take Me Out To The Ball Game. Or do we? As both National Baseball Hall of Fame President Dale Petroskey and arranger Maury Laws enjoy pointing out, most people have never even heard the first part of the song, which sets the stage for the portion we all sing at the ballpark. It tells the story of Katie Casey, who spends every last penny to cheer for her favorite baseball team at each game. When her boyfriend asks if she wants to see a show, she replies “No, [but] I’ll tell you what you can do…[cue the organist!]: Take me out to the ball game, take me out with the crowd…” If you didn’t know that part of the song, you’ll learn it tonight!
Of course, one of the best parts of the Take Me Out story is the now-familiar legend of lyricist Jack Norworth’s flash of inspiration for a new song as he chugged past New York’s old Polo Grounds on the elevated subway back in 1908. The fact that neither Norworth, nor the song’s composer Albert von Tilzer, had ever been to see a baseball game (they both attended their first game in 1940), but still managed to write the baseball song, simply attests to the immense popular appeal and near-mythic power of America’s pastime.
Forever Spring
Composer Fred Sturm provided the following commentary about Forever Spring:
Baseball and music have intertwined throughout my life. Dad was a Chicago Symphony cellist with a knuckleball that fooled me until I was 17, and opera diva Mom never missed any of my games. My rural boyhood home was filled with the sounds of string quartets, CSO recordings, and Cubs games on WGN. While the folks and I suffered through my music lessons, I dreamed of my hero Ernie Banks and me battling the ’61 Yankees in the World Series. Long after I realized I’d have an address in music rather than at Wrigley Field, my wife Susan and I built a backyard diamond for our two bonus babies and coached boys’ and girls’ baseball in the summertime. Playing hooky to cheer for the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers is now a fixture in my teaching life at the Lawrence University Conservatory of Music.
While living in New York in 1994, I was commissioned to compose A Place Where It Would Always Be Spring, an original work for orchestra and narrator celebrating baseball. Former New York Yankee shortstop and NBC sportscaster Tony Kubek narrated the first performances and delivered a copy of the recording to Mickey Mantle in the hospital only weeks before Mickey died.
The Baseball Music Project provided the catalyst for the creation of Forever Spring, composed as an extension of my symphonic efforts a decade earlier. Washington editor and college roommate Paul Kitzke compiled the text, finding the perfect prose and poetry to capture the universal magic of America's fields of dreams. Richard Hugo's From Altitude, the Diamonds provided a nostalgic view of the game from above. A citation from Thomas Wolfe's Of Time and the River portrayed the majesty of the major league stadium in The Miracle of Light. Douglass Wallop's Baseball: An Informal History recalled a boy's Saturday morning games and described A Place Where It Would Always Be Spring. Baseball great Pete Reiser's sweetest memories, preserved by writer Donald Honig, were quoted in When the Grass Was Real. The poetry of Rolfe Humphries described the mood, tempo, and rhythm of baseball in Night Game and Time is of the Essence.... Former Baseball Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti's The Green Fields of the Mind promoted the playing of the game in the only place it will last. The Empty Playing Field accompanied W.P. Kinsella's loving recollections of an empty fall stadium (from Shoeless Joe). Roger Angell's The Summer Game delivered a plan to keep the rally alive forever in Baseball's Time.
Forever Spring is dedicated to my Dad. Though I'll always be grateful for the countless musical events that he shared with me, I treasure most his image behind home plate (in chest protector and face mask) calling balls and strikes at my little league games. He died just two months after the premiere performance of the work, with the musical score and his umpire’s counter together on his desk.
Let’s Keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn
“Say, didja hear da news about what’s happening in Brooklyn?” asked Phil Foster in this 1957 song. The news was that Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley was planning on moving his team to California – plans that made him something akin to Public Enemy No.1 for fans of Dem Bums.
For well over 100 years, at least since the formation of the Excelsiors club in 1854, legions of little Roger Kahns had been pressing eyes to outfield fence knotholes or mounting neighborhood rooftops to watch baseball games in Brooklyn. Already by 1860 the Brooklyn Daily Eagle could write, “Nowhere has the now National game of Base Ball taken firmer hold than in Brooklyn, and nowhere are there better players.” Brooklyn loved baseball – in 1884, they even played a game there on ice skates. Besides the Excelsiors, Brooklynites cheered on such teams as the Putnams, the Eckfords, the Stars, the Bridegrooms, the Superbas, and the Trolley Dodgers, who later became simply the Dodgers. They came to watch players like Oyster Burns, Wee Willie Keeler, Zack Wheat, Deacon McGuire, Casey Stengel, Dazzy Vance, and Van Lingle Mungo.
In the modern era, Brooklyn teams had mixed fortunes, but the fans witnessed some remarkable events. They viewed the longest major league game in history, a 26-inning tie between the Dodgers and the Braves, in 1920. They saw Jackie Robinson break baseball’s color barrier by joining the team in 1947.
And they finally watched the Dodgers win their first World Series in 1955, following seven failed attempts, five of them against the cross-town rival Yankees. In that series alone, the fans were treated to Duke Snider’s double home runs in Game 5, and to Sandy Amoros’ running one-handed catch and relay throw to Pee Wee Reese for a spectacular game-clinching double play in Game 7.
The Bums were finally on top! No wonder that the fans felt betrayed by O’Malley’s decision to relocate the Dodgers to Los Angeles. He wanted a new stadium to replace the aging, cramped – albeit much beloved – Ebbets Field, but the city had failed to come up with a feasible plan. Even though when Phil Foster recorded Let’s Keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn he could still sing “it ain’t official yet,” by the end of the year it was. The Boys of Summer would play in Brooklyn no more. Since the New York Giants announced their move to San Francisco that same year, 1957 truly marked the end of an era for baseball in New York City.
Van Lingle Mungo
Who better to tell the story of a song than the composer himself? We may not be able to ask Jack Norworth and Albert von Tilzer about Take Me Out To The Ball Game, but we can ask Dave Frishberg about one of his most popular songs, which also happens to be a classic baseball tune. Below, Frishberg talks about how he came to write Van Lingle Mungo.
In 1969, I was working as a pianist in New York City and beginning to write songs. I composed a rather brooding melody in what I considered a "Bossa Nova" style – a wide ranging melodic line and a wandering tonal center. I equipped the melody with two different lyrics; one was an angry satirical message to Richard Nixon; the other was called "Don't Look Behind You" and soberly implored the listener to face the future. Neither lyric seemed to match the fancy melody line.
One night I was paging through the newly published Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia and my gaze fell on the name Van Lingle Mungo, star fireball pitcher with the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants during the 1930s and World War II. "Van Lingle Mungo" – the name scanned perfectly with a recurring melodic figure in my song, and I instantly sang it out loud. I knew then that the lyric had to be only names – not names of famous stars, but names that evoked musty memories and illuminated some fragments of forgotten baseball history. I dived into the book assembling names that scanned, rhymed and related loosely to those years, the years of my childhood passion for the game. Within a couple of hours I had a complete lyric.
About a month later I recorded an album of my songs including “Mungo”, and that turned out to be the only track that got any airplay.
I edited the lyrics in subsequent years and, in my opinion, improved the song. I took out certain names from the original lyric and replaced them with names from an earlier (wartime) era so that the nostalgic focus would be sharper.
Johnny Kucks and his rhyme mate Virgil Trucks had to go and were replaced by Lou Boudreau and Claude Passeau. The replacement of Roy Campanella's conveniently rhyming name was necessary because he was too recent. So I changed it to Art Pasarella (an umpire), and that seemed to do the job: Gardella, Pasarella, and Estalella.
I subsequently learned that Bob Estalella's name didn't rhyme in the first place, because it was pronounced as in Spanish: Esta- leya. So the whole rhyme scheme should have been scrapped, starting with "Danny Gardella". What did I know? I grew up in a minor league town and never heard Estalella's name uttered, only saw it in print. Same goes for Johnny Gee, whose name I mangled on the record with a soft "g". There may be other names I'm mispronouncing, but at this stage further corrections would only confuse me.
In my search for names that scanned, "John Antonelli" was an unfortunate choice, and it's annoying that he's in the song, because there turned out to be two John Antonellis whose major league careers nearly overlapped. I was thinking of the third baseman Antonelli who was up briefly with the Cardinals and Braves during the war. I wasn't even aware of the more famous Johnny Antonelli – the left hander for the Giants. By the time Antonelli #2 came along I had traded Duke Snider for Duke Ellington.
Dave Frishberg
Nolan Ryan’s Fastball
Nolan Ryan’s fastball indeed. The Guinness Book of World Records lists Ryan’s 100.9 mile per hour bullet fired in 1974 as the fastest pitch ever thrown. Of course, Ryan had the advantage of pitching in the presence of a radar gun, which such pitching legends as Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, and Chief Bender did not. Sports fans, writers, statistics hounds and experts will continue to debate this forever, but one thing is certain: no one yet has thrown so hard, for so many years, as Nolan Ryan. He hurled his 5000th strikeout at age 42, amassing a staggering 5,714 by the time he retired at age 46 in 1993. Ryan pitched his record-breaking 7th no-hitter at age 44 – his last pitch of that game was clocked at 93 miles per hour. Earlier that day, Ryan had told Texas Rangers pitching coach Tom House, “I feel old today.”
An eight-time All Star, Ryan set the record for single-season strikeouts when he fanned 383 batters in 1973, and he passed the 300 strikeout mark in six seasons, also a record. The National Baseball Hall of Fame notes that 1,176 different players were vanquished by the Ryan Express. Sportswriter Jack Curry called him “John Wayne with a baseball cap and a magnificent arm.”
A Musical Tribute to the National Baseball Hall of Fame
To close tonight’s concert, we turn to the music from two of the most beloved baseball films – Field of Dreams and The Natural, with scores by Randy Newman and James Horner, respectively – to help us pay tribute to all 259 members of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Themes of redemption and natural genius have always resonated deeply in the human heart, and sports of all types have been a wellspring of these themes at least since the time of ancient Greece. Baseball players are as human as all of us, capable of both exalted and occasionally lowly actions, yet Baseball – with a capital “B” – has always remained somehow pure, a remarkably resilient vessel into which we pour all of our dreams of perfection and beliefs in the higher aspects of human nature. Countless books like The Boys of Summer, poems like Casey at the Bat, and songs – nearly one thousand, a tiny fraction of which you’ve heard tonight – show how we Americans turn to our national pastime again and again to search for some deeper truth about who we are.
Baseball spoke profoundly enough to authors W.P. Kinsella and Bernard Malamud for each of them to turn to the sport for their first novels, Shoeless Joe (upon which Field of Dreams is based) and The Natural. The baseball diamond Ray Kinsella builds in his Iowa cornfield offers a glimpse of redemption for Shoeless Joe Jackson and his discredited White Sox teammates – for a moment, we’re permitted to remember these men for the great athletes they were, rather than for the terrible scandal that destroyed their reputations. The Natural’ offers redemption of a different sort for Roy Hobbs. Cut down just as his uncanny innate talent is about to be discovered, Hobbs vanishes for 16 years before he shows up to play in the major leagues at an age when, as the completely skeptical Pop Fisher notes, most ballplayers retire. Who among us doesn’t dream of a second chance, the “do over” we demanded as kids, at least once in our lives?
The belief in our heroes, these 259 timeless giants, as expressed in words, images, and music, allows us, in the words of Bart Giamatti, to keep “playing the game in the only place that it will last, the enclosed, green field of the mind. There, in that warm, bright place, what the old poet called Mutability does not so quickly come.”
Program Notes © 2006 by Rob Hudson