Thursday, October 27, 2016

The NRR Project #25: 'Take Me Out to the Ball Game'

‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’
Edward Meeker
Recorded September, 1908
2:11

Why is this song so popular? It’s a straight-up novelty waltz, Tin Pan Alley-style, in the trend of songs of the period such as “Come, Josephine, In My Flying Machine” and “Hello, Central, Give Me Heaven.” Neither of its composers, Jack Norworth and Albert von Tilzer, had ever seen a baseball game, or would until decades later. It wasn’t even played in a ballpark until 1934; it really wasn’t sung consistently during the seventh-inning stretch of major-league baseball games until Harry Caray popularized it during his time broadcasting for the Chicago White Sox during the 1976 season.

Here it’s essayed by the redoubtable Edward Meeker, a long-time Edison employee. We are still nearly 20 years away from the advances of electrical recording techniques, but the analog systems are getting better -- the sound here is less muddy, and the background instruments are balanced and differentiated.


The lyrics don’t contain a ton of inside data – the writers know that three strikes make an out, and that you’re expected to argue with the umpire. That’s about it. But, being good craftsmen, Norworth and von Tilzer came up with a nifty ditty – singable, easy to remember, jaunty, upbeat. The best songs seem to grab and hold an indefinable essence of their subject, and in “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” there is something genial and sunny and optimistic, like a baseball game on a summer afternoon. To date, it’s the only non-religious or –patriotic song to be ritually sung by the general American public.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.’




No comments:

NRR Project: “Light’s Golden Jubilee Celebration”

  “Light’s Golden Jubilee Celebration” NBC Radio Oct. 21, 1929 In 1879, Thomas Edison invented the incandescent light bulb in Menlo Pa...