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Was Illinois native behind popularity of 'Ball Game' song?
JOLIET -- In the Chicago area, "root, root, root for the home team" can mean "Go Sox!" or "Go Cubs!" But maybe it should also mean "Go Nora Bayes!" Go who? Legend has it that Bayes, a Joliet-born vaudevillian, was the first to publicly sing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," written 100 years ago by lyricist Jack Norworth and tunesmith Albert Von Tilzer. The story goes that Bayes heard Norworth singing the song backstage at a theater where they were both booked. "She stuck her head into his dressing room and said, 'I like that song. Can I have it?' And he said, 'You can have it as long as you take me along with it,'" said Tim Wiles, author of a new book to mark the song's anniversary, "Baseball's Greatest Hit." Of course, the same story is also told about another of Norworth's songs, "Shine on Harvest Moon." And, cautions Wiles, Norworth was a tale spinner with "a zeal for self-promotion." "You might as well repeat the story. Everyone else does," said University of Chicago professor emeritus Allen Debus, who has written about Bayes and has some doubts about her role in "Ball Game" as well. Still, Bayes certainly helped make the song a sensation in the early 20th century. With a flair for drama herself, the now-forgotten Bayes rose to the heights of stardom (a New York theater once bore her name) and was married five times, leading one catty columnist to observe that she seemed to wed as a "hobby." A comedienne who sometimes sang gold-digger songs, she joked that the "Wedding March" was her national anthem. "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" was published on May 2, 1908, and originally included a verse not heard in ballparks today. That verse tells the story of a "baseball mad" girl named Katie Casey, who ``had the fever and had it bad.'' Invited to the theater, she tells her beau she'd rather he ``take me out to the ballgame, take me out with the crowd.'' The song was a sheet music hit and proved to be a smash on stage for Bayes. Several other singers recorded it that fall to capitalize on a baseball frenzy stoked by a close pennant race between the Cubs and the New York Giants, said Wiles, who is research director of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.. Bayes and Norworth — who married a week after they met — were known as "the happiest couple" in America until, Bayes said, "Jack cheated." Their marriage lasted six years. Norworth died in 1959; Von Tilzer passed in 1956. Today, royalties from "Ball Game" support programs for young composers. Bayes died broke in 1928 at age 48, after undergoing an abdominal operation. Obituaries printed at the time noted that she felt lifelong disdain for Joliet, which she left as a teenager. "I spent 18 years there, although I hadn't done anything to deserve it," she once said. E-mail this story | Print this story | Search archives | RSS Show comments |  Hide comments | Hide comments on all stories |
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