Jack Norworth never cared much for baseball, but he wrote a song about the game that sports fans have been belting out for 102 years.

Norworth was a vaudeville entertainer best known for his spirited hoofing and blackface routines. He also dabbled in songwriting. The story goes that in summer 1908, he was riding the New York subway when he saw a sign: “Baseball Today at the Polo Grounds.” The ad for the New York Giants home game got him thinking. Was there a better example of a nationally shared experience than a ball game? Always on the lookout for commercial ideas, he scribbled down a verse and a chorus with the title “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” (those original handwritten lyrics are now on display in the Baseball Hall of Fame).

Norworth took the words to composer Albert Von Tilzer, his collaborator on turn-of-the-century hits such as “Meet Me in Apple Blossom Time” and “Honey Boy.” Von Tilzer wasn’t much of a baseball fan either, but he recognized a potential hit and dashed off a jaunty melody that fit the lyric like a well-oiled glove.

The first recording of “Take Me Out,” by the Haydn Quartet, a singing group led by tenor Harry Macdonough, was a huge success. Sheet music and piano rolls of the song flew out of music stores. While there had been other baseball songs in the early 20th century—“The Baseball Polka,” “It’s Great at a Baseball Game” and the similarly titled “Take Your Girl to the Ball Game”—they were only base hits to the home run of “Take Me Out.”

What really knocked the song out of the park, of course, was its near instant ubiquity at baseball stadiums across the country.

Not all of the song was heard, though.

Norworth and Von Tilzer had begun with a lengthy verse:

“Katie Casey was baseball mad,

Had the fever and had it bad.

Just to root for the hometown crew,

Ev’ry sou [common slang at the time for low-denomination coin]

Katie blew … ”

It’s interesting that the songwriters chose a woman as the subject of the verse, as baseball was traditionally a man’s sport. But as the verse progresses, the clever set-up unfolds with the gal telling her fella to forget the show because she wants to go to a ball game.

In time, fans would forget the verses in favor of the catchy refrain. That didn’t stop Norworth from writing new verses in 1927, trading Katie Casey for another Irish girl named Nelly Kelly and plugging the popular beach resort Coney Island. Again, those words sat on the bench at games.

One of Norworth’s plugs did have an effect, though. Decades before product placement kickbacks, Norworth did a huge favor for Fritz and Louis Rueckheim, who manufactured a popular mixture of caramel-coated popcorn and peanuts called Cracker Jack. The mention in the lyric ensured that it would be the snack of choice at ball games for years to come.

By the 1950s, the song was the unofficial anthem of baseball’s seventh-inning stretch. It had also appeared in movies such as A Night at the Opera, The Naughty Nineties and the Frank Sinatra-Gene Kelly vehicle Take Me Out to the Ball Game, as well as a famous episode of I Love Lucy featuring Harpo Marx.

In 1971, legendary Chicago sportscaster Harry Caray lent his boundless enthusiasm and marginal musical talent to the song, establishing a sing-along tradition at both White Sox and Cubs games for three decades.

In 1994, the song got another boost with a sultry version by Carly Simon that was featured in Baseball, the award-winning Ken Burns documentary series. In 1996, the Goo Goo Dolls cut a rocked-out version that continues to be featured on ESPN broadcasts of baseball games.

Norworth died in 1959 (he finally made it to his first ball game in 1940), Von Tilzer in 1956. Their song, now 42 years in the public domain, can be performed royalty-free—another reason it continues to thrive at America’s stadiums, and probably will for as long as umpires cry, “Play ball!”

Of the song’s enduring appeal, the great sportswriter Harold Rosenthal once said: “Of the several hundred songs written for or about the National Game, ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’ looms above them all—like a Stan Musial coming to bat in the ninth inning. It was so good that the song is probably familiar to 999 out of every 1,000 persons in the United States.”

—By Bill DeMain

From Performing Songwriter Issue 109, May 2008

Category: Behind The Song