Apr
2
Major League Baseball opened the 2007 season last night, with the New York Metropolitans defeating last year’s World Series champions, the St. Louis Cardinals, 6-1. With baseball season underway (and college baseball, which I follow more closely, has been swinging since February), it’s worth musing on the most familiar, popular baseball song of all time, Take Me Out to the Ball Game. Did you know that neither lyricist Jack Norworth nor composer Albert Von Tilzer had never been ‘taken out’ to a ball game at all? Mark Steyn has written an informative and entertaining piece on the history of the 7th-inning-stretch sing-along classic.
Bonus question: Think about the oom-pa-pa tune. Aren’t there some hymns from the turn of the 20th century that sound eerily similar? Bonus points if you can name some…
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