The World Series moves to Chicago tonight, with the Cubs and the Cleveland Indians tied at one game each. For over a century, music has played a big part in lifting fans and players. Music has also helped document an early feminist revolution. David C. Barnett of member station WCPN in Cleveland reports.
Some fans show their sports pride by wearing team jackets and caps. Others go as far as painting their faces. And still others just sing.
MUSIC: “There’s No Place Like First Place” UP & UNDER
When he isn’t wielding a ukulele, Daniel Goldmark directs the Center for Popular Music Studies at Case Western Reserve University. This 1951 tune is one of dozens of songs celebrating the Cleveland Indians that fans bought as sheet music, over the past century.
As baseball became more popular in the early 1900s, a fad for team songs started to develop. Music publishers jumped on the trend, carefully hedging their bets on what would sell.
DANIEL GOLDMARK: The smart songwriter knows that if the Indians don’t end up in first place, maybe we can put in the name of another team and then you’ll sell more copies, once you’ve reprinted it with that team’s name.
As a graduate student in Case’s music department, Erin Smith researched another early 1900s social trend with a baseball connection --- the “New Woman Movement”.
ERIN SMITH: The “New Woman” happened to just become the catch-all term for women who were getting outside of the home, who were working, who wanted to go to college, who were suffragists --- so, it was like women who were getting out of the prescribed sphere.
Smith says many of these “new women” gravitated to baseball, discovering the ballpark as a place where they could root for and shout at the players. Newspaper editorials condemned this un-lady-like behavior. The controversy inspired vaudeville performer Ray Cox.
SOUND (Recording of Ray Cox “The Baseball Girl”): Hello Jack. How are you?
In this 1909 comedy recording, Cox played the part of a “New Woman” who loved going to baseball games and expressing her opinions.
SOUND: (Recording of Ray Cox “The Baseball Girl”)
A musical artifact of the New Woman movement is still heard today at almost every ballpark in the country.
SOUND: Harry Caray sings “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” UP & UNDER
That’s the late-Chicago Cubs broadcaster Harry Caray warbling his version of a song that dates back to 1908. What most modern listeners probably don’t realize is that “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” is actually about a forward-thinking young woman who longed to visit a ball park where she was free to be herself, unbound by cultural expectations. Erin Smith says that message was reinforced by illustrations that accompanied the music.
ERIN SMITH: She’s standing in a part of the park where women weren’t normally allowed to be, which shows that she’s this kind of baseball-mad, New Woman-type figure that’s really getting out of bounds of where a typical woman would sit at a baseball game.
Over the years, this early feminist ballad became much more mainstream. And musicians have reinterpreted it in a number of ways. Former Cleveland Municipal Stadium keyboardist Marge Adler used to play it this way.
MUSIC: Sneak in “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”
Tonight, as the Cubs and the Indians continue their championship battle… for a few minutes during the seventh inning, they’ll share a song with deep roots. A song that connects them to the beginnings of modern baseball.
MUSIC: UP & OUT
