"Take Me Out to the Ball Game": the first century of baseball's enduring anthem: the Chicago Cubs were reigning world champions; John McGraw was in the early stages of his three-decades-long stint as manager of the New York Giants; Teddy Roosevelt occupied the White House; and the national pastime had a new song to call its own

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), July, 2008 by Andy Strasberg, Bob Thompson, Tim Wiles

IT IS THE THIRD MOST frequently sung tune in the U.S., after "Happy Birth" day and "The Star Spangled Banner." It is played on radio or television 365 days a year. It is heard at weddings and funerals alike. It is one of the first songs children learn to sing. It is trumpeted at every major and minor league baseball game, and is, as longtime broadcaster Warner Fusselle has remarked, "the happiest minute in sports." It purportedly was written on a subway car by two guys who said they never had been to a ball game, and it turns 100 years old this year. Let us all take a seventh-inning stretch and wish a happy 100th birthday to "Take Me Out to the Ball Game."

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Unlike most century-old songs, its popularity still is growing. It has been used in more than 1,200 movies and television shows. Virtually every American knows it, and it has been recorded over 500 times, by artists ranging from Frank Sinatra to Frank Zappa to LL Cool J to Liberace to Aretha Franklin to Carly Simon. It has been done in jazz, blues, country, rock, Dixieland, ragtime, bluegrass, rap, calypso, and by symphony orchestras as well as a cappella. It is, as filmmaker Ken Burns has said, "an amazingly flexible tune." Moreover, it is an American treasure. No other sport, in the U.S. or the world, has its very own song--it is baseball's anthem.

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The song arrived with a splash in 1908, first becoming a hit not in ballparks, but movie theaters. A century ago, theater owners usually could afford only a single projector, and so when the reel had to be changed, a live pianist played and sang music, while colored glass "lantern slides" were projected one at a time-and the audience enjoyed singing along. If a song was catchy, moviegoers would leave humming the tune--and often would pass sheet music stores on their way home. Inside the stores, song pluggers would be playing tunes on the piano, and customers would snap up the hits.

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The song sold well through the summer, but got a "Giant" boost in October, when one of the best--and most controversial--pennant races in history lit up baseball-mad New York and the rest of the baseball world. The season ended with the reigning world champion Chicago Cubs and the New York Giants tied, sporting identical records of 98-55. An extra game was played at the Polo Grounds, with the Cubs--led by the pitching of Morecai "Three Finger" Brown and the Hall-of-Fame double-play combination of Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance ("A trio of bear Cubs fleeter than birds," according to the popular poem)--defeating the Giants and their ace pitcher Christy Mathewson, 4-2. Gotham fans felt robbed, as a trick play had stolen a New York victory in September. A few baseball pundits even have gone so far as to point to this Windy City trickery as the source of a curse which, if the Cubs do not win the World Series this year, will mean a century of futility.

With no other team sports to speak of in the U.S. back in 1908, the fantastic baseball season remained a topic of discussion through the year's end, and helped three separate recordings of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" to top the charts. When Florenz Ziegfeld chose the song for the Ziegfeld Follies that winter, its fame was guaranteed--it was sung there by the star Nora Bayes, who recently had married Jack Norworth, who wrote the song along with Albert Von Tilzer.

The story of the song begins with the unlikely partnership of a sailor from Philadelphia and a shoe salesman from Indiana, who, according to one baseball executive, "did more to sentimentalize and popularize baseball in the heart of the American public than any other single factor in its history--with the possible exception of the fabulous bat of Babe Ruth." Norworth, the Philadelphia sailor, and Von Tilzer, the shoe salesman, wrote the immortal "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" with Norworth handling the lyrics and Von Tilzer the music. Who were these unsung heroes, and how did they come to write baseball's anthem?

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Norworth was born John Godfrey Knauff in Philadelphia on Jan. 5, 1879, the third child of Theodore Christian Knauff, a second-generation maker of pipe organs and an Episcopal choirmaster, and Louisa H. (Pearson) Knauff. As a boy, Jack sang in the choir at St. Mark's Episcopal Church, and presumably knew his way around a keyboard, given his father's occupation. While music was the family business, it was theater that called to young Jack, who recalled that" ... Me and a couple of friends used to walk through a neighborhood and wherever anybody was having a little party in their house, we would go in and put on a little show for cake and ice cream."

To cure him of the theater bug, Jack was sent off to sea in early adolescence, spending two years aboard the schoolship Saratoga, learning the sea trade. He then spent four years as a quartermaster on ships sailing back and forth from London to New York, while he also "flitted from one port to another in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia." While at sea, Norworth wrote and directed shows for the sailors and, thus, was prepared to embark on a theatrical career when he returned ashore before age 20, due to a case of rheumatism. Still not interested in joining the family business, he later remarked, "I didn't want to work all my life for $5,000 a year and a white beard." He soon moved to New York and its bright theatrical lights.