ISBN-13: 9780803218918 / Angielski / Twarda / 2009 / 160 str.
For anyone who has ever sung Take Me Out to the Ball Game during the seventh-inning stretch and wondered why we sing it when we are already at the ball game, this entertaining book supplies the answers. And why did this song become the sport s anthem rather than one of hundreds of other baseball songs, such as George M. Cohan s Take Your Girl to the Ball Game, written the same month? This story, told here in full for the first time, evokes the bright hope of turn-of-the-century America, the backstage drama of vaudeville, and the beguiling charm of baseball itself.
Amy Whorf McGuiggan supplies the fascinating details behind the song s beginnings in 1908, when Jack Norworth, a vaudeville headliner and Tin Pan Alley songwriter who had never even been to a game, was inspired by a subway advertisement to create the song that, though a hit in its day, did not become a time-honored tradition until broadcaster Harry Caray and team owner and marketing genius Bill Veeck Jr. reintroduced it during the 1970s. Here is America s game and the American century seen through the prism of one impossibly catchy tune and illustrated throughout with vintage photographs, advertising images, and sheet music culled from America s premier collections."