Baseball’s Greatest Hits: The Music of Our National Game

Exhibition Home

February 9–December 31, 2017

Baseball and music have a basic affinity, as any fan knows. It is the only game, other than horseshoes, which punctuates every play with its own percussion section. Indeed, every pitch ends either with the satisfying pop of the catcher’s mitt or the tension-creating crack of the bat. —David Broder, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and loyal Cubs fan, 1991

This exhibition features baseball sheet music from the collections of the Music Division at the Library of Congress. Most of these works are original copyright deposits and represent only a small fraction of the more than 400 published songs about baseball in the Music Division’s custody. They illustrate the remarkable congruence between the evolution of the sport from before the Civil War to the present, and the musical counterparts that have chronicled in song baseball’s greatest moments.

Exhibition Location

Performing Arts Reading Room, 1st Floor, James Madison Building