Nearly every American knows "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." Or they think they do.
Fans have been belting out the chorus during the seventh inning stretch of Major League Baseball games ever since announcer Harry Caray started the tradition in Chicago 50 years ago.
But there's a lot more to this early 20th century song than "peanuts and Cracker Jack."
The most popular baseball song of its time…and ever
Written in 1908 in response to an epic baseball season — a dramatic, three-way National League tie-breaker led to the Chicago Cubs vanquishing the Detroit Tigers to win the World Series — "Take Me Out" was by far the most popular of the many new songs that hoped to capitalize on the sport's immense and growing popularity.
"There was so much hype that it really boosted the sales of the songs," said Susan Clermont, a retired Library of Congress senior music reference specialist and expert on baseball songs.
The rollicking waltz by lyricist Jack Norworth and composer Albert von Tilzer was an instant vaudeville theater favorite. It was performed by such well-known singers of the day as Edward Meeker, who recorded the track for the Edison Phonograph Company. Millions of copies of the sheet music were sold, displaying portraits of the top artists who'd sung it on their covers.
"Take Me Out" was not only catchy, "it also had very unusual lyrics," Clermont said. At a time when women did not yet have the right to vote, but were playing in women's leagues and filling the stands at occasional "Ladies Days," "Take Me Out" celebrates a fictional young woman's deep and abiding passion for baseball:
Katie Casey saw all the games.
Knew the players by their first names.
Told the umpire he was wrong.
All along, good and strong.
"She didn't want to just go to the ballpark, sit in the bleachers and be silent or whatever," Clermont said of the song's hard-hitting protagonist. "She wanted to participate."
The real Katie Casey?
One baseball music expert has even worked to identify the specific, real-life woman who may have inspired Katie Casey.
"Trixie Friganza was a major vaudevillian star and a noted suffragist," said George Boziwick, the author of the recent book The Music of Baseball. "She was putting ads in the paper and getting people to show up for suffrage rallies in New York City."
Boziwick said there's no way of knowing for certain if Friganza served as the song's muse. But he said she was having an affair with "Take Me Out" lyricist Jack Norworth at the time. And her portrait appears on some versions of the sheet music.
"She was not necessarily a baseball fan, but she was independent and modern," Boziwick said. "And I think she just fit the bill."
From Katie Casey to Nelly Kelly
In 1927, Norworth wrote a different version of "Take Me Out" and changed the name of its leading lady from Katie Casey to Nelly Kelly. The lyrics in the updated version are still quite punchy, but Boziwick said the song's new protagonist isn't as strong-minded as her predecessor.
"In the 1927 lyrics, Nelly Kelly 'frets and pouts' to be taken to a game. In the 1908 lyrics, Katie Casey was more self-assured and just confidently asserted her preference to be taken to a ballgame," Boziwick said.
Still, it was Nelly and not Katie whom Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly immortalized in their rendition of the song in the 1949 movie Take Me Out to the Ballgame.
After organs started to appear at ballparks in the 1940s, '50s and '60s, "Take Me Out" gradually made its way from the vaudeville stage and silver screen to the stands. Today the song — or at least its chorus — is among the three most recognized tunes in the U.S., alongside "Happy Birthday" and that other obligatory game day song, "The Star-Spangled Banner."
Jennifer Vanasco edited this story for broadcast and digital. Chloee Weiner mixed the audio.
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