From 'quaint' to 'classic'

Amy Whorf McGuiggan and baseball go back a long way. Her grandfather was a huge Red Sox fan, she was active in Hingham youth baseball when her two sons were playing, and the younger one, Jake, will be a co-captain of Hingham High’s baseball team next season.

After writing two books on New England subjects, she moved to baseball with “Take Me Out to the Ball Game, The Story of the Sensational Baseball Song,” published this spring by University of Nebraska Press. Below are excerpts from a recent interview with the Globe.

I love nonfiction research, and I love history, and I love to dig into old archives and files. For this book, one of the things I tried to do is put the song into historical context. Some of the readers are interested in how the new century evolved and all the variables that came together in that first decade of the 20th century and enabled this song and many others to gain popularity. One thing I mentioned is that without the advent of electric lights, you don’t have people going out into the evening. So now you’re lighting up cities and people are going out at night, and they’re looking for entertainment, and this is where you have this explosion of vaudeville house and nickelodeons and burlesque and legitimate theater.

The song was written for the vaudeville stage by a headliner named Jack Norworth. He penned the lyrics and brought them to his collaborator, Albert Von Tilzer, who was a Tin Pan Alley composer. The best I can determine is that the song was likely introduced in late April of 1908, probably by Norworth’s wife-to-be, Nora Bayes, at the Grand Opera House in Brooklyn.

Nowadays, there’s always the quip, ‘Why do we sing, take me out to the ball game, when we’re already there?' This has a classic Tin Pan Alley song structure of verse-and-chorus, verse-and-chorus, and you never hear the verses. The first verse sets it up; the girl’s boyfriend asks her to go to a show, and she says she wants to go to a ball game.

You can’t overlook the fact that Norworth and Bayes were really superstars of that time, and their presence did a lot to establish that song...Lots of celebrities were using it in their acts on vaudeville, which means it really did catch on with the public, and it stayed popular throughout the next 60 or 70 years and never went away.

But it was relegated to what’s often been described as ‘quaint, folk song status,’ -- one of those classic songs like ‘Bill Bailey’ or ‘Let Me Call You Sweetheart.’ It doesn’t show up in ball parks until [sportscaster] Harry Caray gets ahold of it in the 1970s.

Bill Veeck had become owner of the Chicago White Sox again in 1975, and so ’76 rolls around, and it’s the Bicentennial year and he’s looking for all kinds of new entertainment. So Veeck approached Harry and said, ‘You know, I hear you singing. I think the fans would like to hear it.’ And Harry said, ‘No, I have a terrible voice.’ And Veeck said, ‘Well, that’s exactly the point. They’ll all think they can sing it better than you.’ So Harry kind of reluctantly agreed to do it for a 7th inning stretch one day in ’76...and sure enough, a whole tradition was born.

Harry knew many singers. Nat ‘King’ Cole and Frank Sinatra were friends, and he loved music. When he sings, it’s a hammy version, but I feel he carries a tune pretty well.

I dug out an interesting article from a hobbyist magazine in 1958, about a year before Norworth passed away. At that stage in his life, he had become a premier collector of miniatures, so they were interviewing him about that. But of course, they ran through his career and all of his songs. But they lumped them all together, and actually, ‘Shine on Harvest Moon,’ gets a little more prominence in that list than ‘Ball Game.’ So I have to wonder that if Harry and Bill Veeck hadn’t dusted it off, whether it wouldn’t have just stayed a quaint folk song.