How Casey at the Bat Became The Epic Poem of America’s Pastime

 

An illustration for a 1912 edition of Casey at the Bat.

On June 3, 1888 Casey at the Bat: A Ballad of the Republic Sung in the Year 1888 appeared for the first time in the San Francisco Examiner.  It was credited to Phin.  That was shortened from Phineas, a nickname of sportswriter Ernest Lawrence Thayer in his days as a Harvard student.  The poem was picked up and reprinted in papers from coast to coast.

Thayer, the son of wealthy New England textile mill family, did not lay public claim to the poem for years and only stepped forward when competing claims of authorship were being made.  Even the King of the Diamond himself, Boston’s Mike Kelley claimed authorship.  It so offended Thayer that he never acknowledged what everyone knew—that Kelly was the model of the Mighty Casey.

                                        Sportswriter Ernest Lawrence Thayer published Casey at the Bat  under a nom de plume and didn't take public credit until 1905.

The poem really gained fame when popular stage star and baseball fan DeWolf Hopper started reciting it.  He first performed it privately for members of the Chicago Cubs and New York Giants after a game on August 14.  He would go on to recite it over 10,000 times in vaudeville houses, at banquets, and as a curtain call for his successful performances in musical plays.  He recorded it in 1906 and made an early Lee DeForest Phono Film sound-on-film process short in 1922 that was finally exhibited in theaters in 1926.

                            Casey at the Bat was publicly recited by comic actor DeWolfe Hopper.  He also made an early recording and a 1922 Lee Deforest sound film short. 

Thayer finally claimed authorship of the poem when he read it—very badly it is reported—at his Harvard class reunion in 1905. 

Innumerable editions of the poem have been published, most lavishly illustrated, especially after it lapsed into public domain.  In addition to DeWolf recordings go back to a Columbia Gramophone cylinder by Irish dialect comedian Russell Hunting in 1898.  More recently came Hall of Fame catcher Johnny Bench and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in 1973, Pitcher Tug McGraw with Peter Nero and the Philly Pops in 1980, and James Earl Jones with the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra in 1998.

                                                Wallace Beery and Zasu Pitts starred in a 1927 Paramount silent film.

Wallace Beery, Ford Sterling, and ZaSu Pitts starred in a 1927 silent movie feature.  The poem got a big pop culture boost when Jerry Colonna narrated a version as a part of Walt Disney’s anthology film, Make Mine Music.  It was released as a stand-alone cartoon short in 1954 and was frequently shown on the Disneyland and Wonderful World of Color TV shows. 

Walt Disney's animated version narrated by Jerry Colonna has enthralled generations of children since it was first shown in 1953.

In 1986 Elliott Gould starred in Casey, the Shelley Duvall’s Tall Tales and Legends adaptation of the story, also featuring Carol Kane, Howard Cosell, Bob Uecker, Bill Macy, and Rae Dawn Chong. The screenplay was written by Andy Borowitz, now the acclaimed New Yorker news satirist.

“There is no joy in Mudville,” has become a catchphrase use in many ways to denote ironic disappointment.

The poem still strikes a chord with the public.  Possibly because it was obviously not set in a big league ballpark.  Mudville stood in for every small city or town that fielded a team in the baseball obsessed Gilded Age.

 

Casey at the Bat: A Ballad of the Republic Sung in the Year 1888

 

The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day;
    The score stood four to two with but one inning more to play.
    And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same,
    A sickly silence fell upon the patrons of the game.

 

    A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. The rest
    Clung to that hope which springs eternal in the human breast;
    They thought if only Casey could but get a whack at that–
    We'd put up even money now with Casey at the bat.

 

    But Flynn preceded Casey, as did also Jimmy Blake,
    And the former was a lulu and the latter was a cake;
    So upon that stricken multitude grim melancholy sat,
    For there seemed but little chance of Casey’s getting to the bat.

 

    But Flynn let drive a single, to the wonderment of all,
    And Blake, the much despis-ed, tore the cover off the ball;
    And when the dust had lifted, and the men saw what had occurred,
    There was Johnnie safe at second and Flynn a-hugging third.

 

    Then from 5,000 throats and more there rose a lusty yell;
    It rumbled through the valley, it rattled in the dell;
    It knocked upon the mountain and recoiled upon the flat,
    For Casey, mighty Casey, was advancing to the bat.

 

    There was ease in Casey’s manner as he stepped into his place;
    There was pride in Casey’s bearing and a smile on Casey’s face.
    And when, responding to the cheers, he lightly doffed his hat,
    No stranger in the crowd could doubt ‘twas Casey at the bat.

 

    Ten thousand eyes were on him as he rubbed his hands with dirt;
    Five thousand tongues applauded when he wiped them on his shirt.
    Then while the writhing pitcher ground the ball into his hip,
    Defiance flashed in Casey’s eye, a sneer curled Casey’s lip.

 

    And now the leather-covered sphere came hurtling through the air,
    And Casey stood a-watching it in haughty grandeur there.
    Close by the sturdy batsman the ball unheeded sped–
    “That ain’t my style,” said Casey. “Strike one,” the umpire said.

 

    From the benches, black with people, there went up a muffled roar,
    Like the beating of the storm-waves on a stern and distant shore.
    “Kill him! Kill the umpire!” shouted some one on the stand;
    And it’s likely they’d have killed him had not Casey raised his hand.

 

    With a smile of Christian charity great Casey’s visage shone;
    He stilled the rising tumult; he bade the game go on;
    He signaled to the pitcher, and once more the sphereoid flew;
    But Casey still ignored it, and the umpire said, “Strike two.”

 

    “Fraud!” cried the maddened thousands, and echo answered fraud;
    But one scornful look from Casey and the audience was awed.
    They saw his face grow stern and cold, they saw his muscles strain,
    And they knew that Casey wouldn’t let that ball go by again.

 

    The sneer is gone from Casey's lip, his teeth are clenched in hate;
    He pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate.
    And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go,
    And now the air is shattered by the force of Casey’s blow.

 

    Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
    The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
    And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;
    But there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has struck out.

 

   –Ernest Lawrence Thayer

Ring Lardner Was Baseball’s Bard and an Accidental Literary Man

 

                                             Ring Lardner, the quintessential sports writer at work.

Note: Spring Training is in full swing already and the baseball starved heart beats faster. My beloved Cubs, coming off of a disappointing season and the loss of superstar players are tearing up the Cactus League—almost too good to be true. Meanwhile our woeful South Side rivals have yet to win a game.

 

The fun of following baseball has always been wrapped up in those who told us about the games we could not be in the stands for and the radio and TV voices calling play by play and adding color. Looking back old time sports writers for the highly competitive newspapers created much of the mythos and culture of America’s pastime. None were more essential than Ring Larder. 

 

The most surprising thing about Ringgold Wilmer Lardner, who was born on this date in 1885 in Niles, Michigan, is that he came from a family of considerable wealth and social standing. If you read the stuff he churned out later in life as Ring Lardner, you would assume he was one of those scruffy up-from-the-bottom whiskey drinking newspaper men who with a minimum of education muscled their way out of industrial serfdom or barefoot rural poverty to become an ink stained wretch. 

 

He was the youngest of nine children of a distinguished family who held high hopes for him. His name was chosen at the suggestion of his uncle, Rear Admiral James L. Lardner in honor of an Annapolis classmate, Rear Admiral Cadwalader Ringgold. The boy, naturally, hated both the moniker and all of the expectations of achievement and glory that went with it. He settled on going by Ring, which he admitted didn’t make any sense. He struggled indifferently through high school, more interested in sports and carousing with friends than academics. His parents, having given up on the idea of him getting a top flight education at a service academy, an Ivy League college, or the University of Michigan, shipped him off to study engineering at the Armour Institute of Technology in Chicago, which they considered little better than a trade school. 

 

Young Larder could not, or would not, even hack it there. He dropped out before completing his first semester. Lardner seems to have stumbled into journalism for want of anything better to do. He began covering sports for the South Bend Tribune in Indiana shortly after his escape from academia and while still a teenager. It turned out to be a good match from the beginning. He had a casual, easy way with words and a knack for telling stories from a just off-center perspective that made him stand out from the beginning from others on the sports beat. 

 

On a personal level, the life of a sports writer had great appeal—he was by necessity out of the office and the constricting supervision of bosses for much of the day. Moreover it was his job to hang out with athletes, attend games, and generally carouse and hobnob with the colorful characters who haunted ball parks, race tracks, and boxing arenas. He loved hotel lobbies, drafty railroad coaches, and saloons—the camaraderie of men in straw boaters and loud suits chomping cigars, swilling whiskey, and telling lies. 

 

It did not take long for Lardner’s talent to get noticed—or for him to take advantage of it. He began a period of frequently changing jobs, each time hoping to better paying and more prestigious newspapers. After six months at the Tribune, he skipped to its competitor the South Bend Times. By 1907 he was in the big town, Chicago where he worked in rapid succession for the lowly Inter-Ocean then moved up to William Randolph Hearst’s Chicago Examiner, and then to the prestigious Chicago Tribune. By 1900 Lardner was in St. Louis where Taylor Spink of the nationally circulated Sporting News let the writer go beyond reporting on games—by this time he was writing almost exclusively about baseball—and gave him Pullman Pastimes a humor column  based on the off the field conversations and high jinx of players.

 

He was beginning to write in the semi-literate vernacular of the players, Lardner was finding his voice. He continued to contribute to the Sporting News even after moving on to another big city daily, the Boston American. 

 

Sometime in the midst of this game of musical desk chairs, Lardner wooed and won Ellis Abbott of Goshen, Indiana, a town not far from where he started his career in South Bend. The couple wed in 1911 and Ellis gave him four sons and stuck by him even as the normal heavy drinking of a newspaper man became more and more serious. 

 

Perhaps a new wife and family were enough to end his vagabond ways, In 1913 Lardner returned to Chicago and the Tribune where he took over the paper’s flagship sports column In the Wake of the News  after the death of its originator Hugh Keough. He would remain with the paper and the column through 1919 and help make the column a nationwide success syndicated in over 100 newspapers. 

 

It was during this period that Lardner became exceptionally close to the players on the Chicago White Sox, the dominant team of the American League. He began to draw on some of the players for inspiration for a new series of short stories, six of which ran in the Saturday Evening Post. The stories were framed as letters home to a pal by bush league player Jack Keefe who was barely literate about his life in baseball and his rise and travails as a member of the White Sox. The letters were written not only in vernacular but riddled with spelling and grammar errors, just the way such a rube ball player would write. They were also funny as hell, as well as occasionally insightful and even touching. George H. Doran Co., then the nation’s most prestigious publisher with authors like P. G. Wodehouse, Arnold Toynbee, Theodore Roosevelt, Arthur Conan Doyle, O. Henry, Virginia Woolf, Frank Harris, H.G. Wells, W. Somerset Maugham, Sinclair Lewis, and H.L. Mencken under contract, was convinced the Post stories could be made into an epistolary novel. 

                                        The original George  H. Doran Co. edition of You Know Me Al later re-issued and re-packaged as serious literature by Scribner's.

Lardner did not believe that they were anything special. He regarded them as ephemera no more enduring than a daily sports column. In order to create a cohesive manuscript, Lardner had to beg the Post to return his original stories to him—he had not bothered to keep copies. When You Know Me Al was first published, it was not a huge immediate success, despite the continuing popularity of the Keefe stories in the Post. But a lot of very serious writers, from Virginia Woolf to the youthful Ernest Hemingway took notice of the book and admired it for both its style and its human depth. 

 

The opening of the first story famously set the table to hear the tale told in Keefe’s voice: 

 

Friend Al: Just a line to let you know I am still on earth. My arm feels pretty good again and I guess maybe I will work in Detroit. Violet writes that she can’t hardly wait to see me. Looks like I got a regular girl now Al. We go up there the twenty-ninth and maybe I won’t be glad to see her. I hope she will be out to the game the day I pitch. I will pitch the way I want to next time and them Tigers won’t have such a picnic. I suppose you seen what the Chicago reporters said about that game. I will punch a couple of their jaws when I see them. Your pal, Jack 

 

Despite the moderate success of the first printing of You Now Me Al, the character and the series remained popular for a long string of more stories in the Post and more collections which were steadily gaining loyal fans. More than one compared his gifts of observation, satire, and the deft use of first person dialect to Mark Twain. As both a sports writer and an almost-against-his-will literary figure, Lardner’s work contrasted with others who tried to bridge those worlds. 

 

Colorado raised Damon Runyon came of age as a newspaperman on the virtual frontier amid colorful sporting men—gamblers, touts, and pimps. When he came to New York City his mentor was an old friend from out West, the gunman and sometime lawman Bat Masterson, who taught him about fixing fights and horse races and introduced him to underworld gangs and gamblers who inhabited the edge of sports. 

 

Grantland Rice, on the other hand, was a son of the Southern aristocracy and a college man. His passions were for intercollegiate athletics, especially football and the gentlemanly game of golf. He saw athletics as a noble contest and athletes as classic heroes embodying the best in civilization. He wrote elegantly, even floridly to lift up his flawless heroes. 

 

Lardner was somewhere in the middle. His game was baseball, a professional sport for decades already played mostly by young men from hardscrabble backgrounds who were in it as much to escape a life of drudgery as for glory. He liked those men. He felt, despite his own privileged background, to be one of them. He always knew there were fixers on the edge, but believed that, on the whole that the spitting, cussing, scratching, and brawling boys of the bench shared a certain code of the game that usually put them out of the reach of the worst connivers. 

Lardner quickly turned around his short stint as a war corespondent into a book that combined stories he filed for  Colliedr's with reflection.

 

Two things changed Lardner’s perspective. The first was first hand exposure to the horrors of World War I. Collier’s Magazine sent Lardner to France to cover the war. He was not a front line correspondent, but he saw enough and talked to enough Doughboys—young soldiers who often resembled his beloved ball players—to be wised up to some brutal truths. Out of this experience Lardner mined a personal memoir, My Four Weeks in France. But he also let Jack Keefe get drafted and shipped off to the trenches which was chronicled by the unfortunate pitcher in more letters to Al in Treat ‘em Rough. 

 

The second thing was the Black Sox Scandal. Lardner had been covering and traveling with the Chicago White Sox for years. Many of White Sox figures, from shrewd and cheap old Charles Comiskey and manager Kid Gleason, were used by name in You Know Me Al and others were only thinly disguised. Lardner became suspicious that something was afoot during the 1919 World Series games against Cincinnati. There was an inexplicable lack of sharpness, particularly on crucial defensive plays and certain pitchers seemed to be offering up batting practice. Some say that Kid Gleason, who had been elevated to manager that year, tipped Lardner off that the series was fixed.

 

Ring Lardner's role in exposing the  1919 Black Sox scandal was central to the film Eight Men Out.  Lardner was portrayed by a virtual doppelganger--screen writer and director John Sales.  Seen here with Studs Terkel as a Tribune sports writer and John Mahoney as Sox manager Kid Gleason.
 

Lardner covered the whole unraveling scandal, including the exile from baseball of players he had considered close friends. He felt betrayed. Ever after his baseball writing, while still rife with humor, took on a darker world view, almost an assumption that on some level the fix was always in. 

 

Lardner was also broadening out from writing just baseball stories. He began contributing other satirical tales to the Post and other magazines which were collected and published to acclaim including Gulible’s Travels in 1917, Own Your Own Home in 1919, The Young Immigrunts in 1920, and The Big Town in 1921.  

You Know Me Al became a popular newspaper comic strip in the 1920's and  Lardner picked up extra income not only for the rights to his stories, but for penning the scripts.

 

Own Your Own Home represented a big change for Lardner. After the Black Sox scandal, he left Chicago to relocate his family to the leafy and tony Hamptons on Long Island. He dropped his daily column but kept up his popular weekly syndicated pieces which he could write from anywhere. The move was made possible by the very comfortable living his work was now providing him. But it was motivated by a long cherished dream of writing plays to be produced on Broadway. 

 

Although not successful on Broadway in a George M. Cohan production starring Walter Huston, Elmer the Great became a big hit in 1933 for Joe E. Brown, a physical comic who had played baseball. 

 

He had mounted an original play back home in Niles, Michigan while still a teenager. Despite his success as a writer, Lardner found producers immune from the charms of his scripts, which were chockfull of nonsense and whimsy and included music and lyrics by the playwright. Some of his sketches and songs were used in various productions of the Ziegfeld Follies including one baseball sketch featuring Will Rogers. In 1928 George M. Cohan produced his baseball comedy Elmer the Great starring Walter Huston, but it was unsuccessful. It was made into a 1933 Joe E. Brown film that was a hit. 

At the White House on the way to a Senators game with President Warren G. Harding, another hard drinking former newspaper man.
 

Finally, in 1930, Lardner had a hit, June Moon written in collaboration with George S. Kauffman for which he also wrote the songs. During his residency in the Hamptons, Lardner spent many evenings in New York City and with the introduction of Prohibition partied hard. He enjoyed the Jazz Age. Young F. Scott Fitzgerald came under his wing and guidance. Lardner was asked to proof drafts of The Great Gatsby in which a character was based on him. In his last novel Tender is the Night, Lardner was depicted as the drunken Abe North at a fatal party. 

 

In the mid-‘20s Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald’s legendary editor at a Scribner’s became convinced that Lardner should be re-packaged as a writer from comic relief to a serious, if humorous short story writer. Scribner’s obtained rights to Lardner’s earlier books and re-issued them in a uniform series to highlight their importance. That included a new edition of You Can Call Me Al which had inexplicably gone out of print. Now presented as literary fiction, it found new and appreciative audiences. Perkins helped guide the story collections of the late ‘20s that included many of Lardner’s most admired. The wry title of the first of these collections How to Write Short Stories was suggested by Fitzgerald who knew that Lardner still harbored a lingering suspicion he was a fraud as far as a literary figure goes. 

 

But stories like the gripping, tragic Haircut from his 1926 collection The Love Nest and Other Stories showed that Lardner was indeed the master of the short story, a literary form that flourished for a time in this country. Lardner continued to write successfully. In addition to his general interest short stories, he wrote a satirical autobiography The Return of Wonderman in 1927 and returned to baseball in 1933 with Lose With a Smile. 

 

But years of heavy drinking and carousing were taking a toll on his health. At home his wife tried to care for him and he did pay attention to his four sons, all of whom he made sure had had the best educations—the kind he had purposefully escaped from—at prestigious Ivy League schools. Drinking affected his heart and he suffered at least one heart attack. He was sent to a sanitarium in Arizona to dry out and also recover from symptoms of tuberculosis in 1931 and sought similar treatment in California two years later. When it became apparent he did not have long to live, he returned to his home in the Hamptons where he died in his sleep surrounded by his wife and two of his sons on September 23, 1933 at the age of 48. 

 

Lardner's four sons--John and Jim on top, Ring Jr. and David on the bottom--as young men. All went on to successful careers as journalists and writers but were stalked by tragedy. Jim died fighting with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, David was killed as a World War II war correspondent,  and Oscar winning screen writer Ring Jr. spent a year in prison as one of the Hollywood 10 and was blacklisted for work in films for years. 

 

His heritage as a newspaper man and writer, as well as someone with a deep sense of the injustices of the world, was carried on by his four sons. The eldest, John Lardner, born in 1912 became a correspondent for the International Herald Tribune in Paris before returning to the States to become a sports columnist for Newsweek and a World War II war correspondent. James Lardner was also an accomplished journalist who gave it up to enlist in the International Brigades fighting fascists during the Spanish Civil War. He was killed in Spain. 

 

 The most famous of the brothers, Ring Lardner, Jr. was a leading Hollywood screen writer whose work included Woman of the Year, a film that won him an Academy Award for Original Screenplay in 1942, Laura in 1944, Brotherhood of Man in 1946, and Forever Amber in 1947. Later in ’47 he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee for supposed Communist connections but refused to name names. He became one of the famous Hollywood 10 and spent a year in prison. Blacklisted in Hollywood he moved to England where he worked under a variety of pseudonyms. When the Blacklist was finally broken he worked on such classic films as The Cincinnati Kid and M*A*S*H, for which he won a second Oscar. He died in New York City in 2000, the last surviving member of the Hollywood 10. 

 

The youngest son, David Lardner worked for The New Yorker as a general reporter and war correspondent before he was killed by a landmine near Aachen, Germany in October 1944, less than one month after his arrival in Europe.

Christmas in My Home Town Charley Pride—Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival 2024-‘25

                                                                                  Christmas in My Home Town by Charley Pride.

 Charley Pride, the first Black singer to carve out a long and successful career in country music died of complications of the Coronavirus at the age of 86 in 2020.  Some other performers speculated that he might have been exposed at the Country Music Association Awards (CMA), which were held indoors at the Music City Center in Nashville, Tennessee, on November 11 and where he was presented the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award.  

Despite the pandemic, 2020 had been a career crowning year for Price.  In addition to his CMA Lifetime Achievement Award he was at long last inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.  Previous honors included three American Music Awards, four Grammies including a Lifetime Achievement Award, the Academy of Country Music Pioneer Award, and three previous CMA Awards for Entertainer of the Year and Male Vocalist of the Year.  He was one of just three Black members of the Grand Ol’ Opry along with harmonica whiz DeFord Bailey and Darius Rucker. 

 

Charley Pride's performance on the CMA Awards show in November 2020 was his last major public appearance.

Country music roots were tangled inexorably with Black folk music, each influencing the other.  African slaves brought the banjo and Scotch-Irish fiddling was adapted to Black dancing.  Ballads like John Henry, Frankie and Johnnie, and House of the Rising Sun were sung and adopted by both.  European hymns became Black gospel music and showed up again in White churches in the new form. Field shouts and call and response laid the foundation of the blues.  Delta bluesmen introduced the slide guitar style that would become a backbone of country music and Western Swing on the electric steel pedal guitar.  Louis Armstrong played on Jimmy Rodgers’ famous Blue Yodel #9 recording.

According to Patrick Huber, a history professor at Missouri University of Science and Technology in his 2013 essay Black Hillbillies: African American Musicians on Old-Time Records, 1924-1932, hillbilly music featured a higher frequency of integrated recording sessions than any other genre except vaudeville blues. Nearly 50 African-American singers and musicians appeared on commercial hillbilly records between those years because the music was not just a white agrarian tradition, but a fluid phenomenon passed back and forth between the races.  Black and white musicians often played the same barn dances even in the Deep South.

But by the early 1930’s recording companies were splitting their record labels and marketing into white hillbilly music and “race music.”  Only occasionally on the vaudeville stage were a handful of African-Americans allowed to perform with white acts as comic relief and usually adopting minstrel show stereotypes and even blackface.  DeFord Bailey was the only performer from the cross-fertilization period to finally allowed to join the early WSM Grand Ol’ Opry.  But Bailey’s race was mostly hidden from his radio audience, and when he did go on tour with the Opry, he was forced to find separate accommodations in a segregated South. “He was a mascot—he was very much treated paternalistically,” Huber said.  Bailey was fired unceremoniously in 1941 and spent the rest of his life shining shoes.

 

 

DeFord Bailey with a megaphone strapped to his harmonica at the WSM microphone.  He was a founding member of the Grand Ol' Opry and the last until Charley Pride.

As hillbilly music, cowboy music, and Western swing blended together in post-World War II America as country music it was as whites only as a Mississippi drinking fountain or lunch counter.

Rhythm & Blues (R&B) star Ray Charles first breached the wall in 1962 with his phenomenally popular Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music which included his hit I Can’t Stop Loving You.   Not only did he top the R&B and Country Charts but also crossed over to pop chart success.  The album was such a hit that it helped boost all of country music to a mainstream audience. Charles went on to make a follow-up,  Vol. II, but afterwards turned from country music to play bluesy jazz and soul music and to take a career hiatus while he battled heroin addiction.

 Ray Charles' Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music was a smash hit on the Country, R&B, and pop charts, but it was an anomaly.

That was the world Charley Pride found himself in when he tried to break into country music in the mid-1960s.

Pride was born on March 18, 1934, in Sledge, Mississippi, the fourth of eleven children of poor sharecroppers.  He came by his love of country music because it was all he heard on the radio.  By his teens he was noodling around on an old guitar and trying to imitate the twang of his heroes like Roy Acuff, Hank Williams, and Ernest Tubbs.  

But his dream was to follow his older brother into baseball.  In 1952, he pitched for the Memphis Red Sox of the Negro American League. In 1953, he signed a contract with the Boise Yankees, the Class C farm team of the New York Yankees. During that season, an injury caused him to lose the mustard on his fastball, and he was sent to the Yankees' Class D team in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.  His career was interrupted when he was drafted into the Army in 1956. After basic training, he was stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado, where he was a quartermaster and played baseball team which won the All Army championship. When discharged in 1958, he rejoined the Memphis Red Sox.  As a Negro League player he was a two-time All Star and tried out with the Major League Angels and Mets in the early ‘60s but failed to make either team.

 A baseball card from Charley Pride's time with the Memphis Red Sox of the Negro American League.

He was out of baseball and working construction in Helena, Montana when he was recruited to play for the semi-pro East Helena Smelterites where most of his earnings were from a job reserved for players at local Asarco lead smelter.  That was grueling, hot work and exposed him to all of the hazards of toxic lead.  But his seemingly dead-end baseball career opened a door to another possibility when Pride’s manager heard him singing in the locker room and hired him to sing for 15 minutes before home games.  He was paid $10 for each performance, the same as he was paid to play.  Soon he was playing around Montana covering country music favorites with his rich baritone voice and authentic twang.

Before he even left Montana Price was trying to get Nashville interested in his music.  He was encouraged by some important singers like Red Sovine and Red Foley,  But in several trips there he found doors shut in his Black face at record labels.  Finally guitar legend and producer/executive Chet Atkins submitted a demo tape to the company without identifying him as Black.  The label signed him in 1966, and he released his first two singles with little fanfare or support but they got behind the third, Just Between You and Me, received the full support of the label’s A&R team.  Copies were brought to disc jockeys with promotional brochures calling the artist Country Charley Pride, but the customary photo was omitted, as was any mention of Price’s race.  The song reached #9 on Hot Country Songs list in 1967 and was nominated for the Song of the Year Grammy the next year.

Charley Pride in the 1960s.  His first singles were sent to DJs without promo photos like this.

Pride race was not a total secret.  He and a back-up combo had played club dates in Montana, Tennessee, and Texas, but most radio listeners and record buyers were still unaware.  He had a hard time booking major venues or joining packaged tours of country stars until he got a shot at a show at Olympia Stadium in Detroit. The Motor City was the home of a large Appalachian diaspora community attracted by the auto industry and World War II Defense plants.  Since no biographical information had been included with his singles, few of the 10,000 country fans who came to the show knew Pride was Black and only discovered the fact when he walked onto the stage.  Enthusiastic audience applause trickled off to silence Pride later remembered. “I told the audience, ‘Friends, I realize it’s a little unique, me coming out here—with a permanent suntan—to sing country and western to you. But that’s the way it is."  His strong show won them over.

At about the same time after 10 years in Montana, Pride moved his family to Texas where he could more effectively pursue his career.  Not moving to Nashville was intentional.

He never became involved in the Civil Rights Movement or made political statements, which helped the country audience eventually accept him as a “good Negro.” He was criticized for this by some Black leaders, but it was the only way his career could thrive.  Even so, some of his appearances in the Deep South drew protests and occasional threats.  The public support of some of the biggest names in the business like Johnny Cash gave him some protection.

Pride’s career really took off with several singles charting over the next few years, his albums selling well, and he was booked on national TV shows.  In 1967, he became the first Black performer to appear at the Grand Ol’ Opry since founding member DeFord Bailey, who had last appeared in 1941—but he was not invited to officially join the Opry until 1993.

Between 1969 and 1971, Pride had eight singles that reached #1 on the US Country Hit Parade and also charted on the Billboard Hot 100 culminating in his 1971 crossover hit Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’ which became his signature tune and most honored song.  In 1969, his compilation album, The Best of Charley Pride, sold more than one million copies, and was awarded a Gold Record.  Elvis Presley was the only artist who sold more records than Pride for RCA Victor.  

He continued to chart hits through the ‘70s and early 80s.  Eventually, like most other older country stars he was banished by the new tightly formatted country radio stations that favored hot younger acts with a rock-influenced style.  But a loyal fan base continued to attend Pride’s concerts. 

In the first two decades of the 21st Century Pride was re-discovered by young country artists.  While the genre remained white dominated, he paved the way for Darius Rucker, the former front man of the pop group Hootie & the Blowfish and now a handful of new artists including Mickey Guytonr, Rhiannon Giddens, and even rapper Lil Nas X and Beyoncé.  He was also showered with career capping honors.

Today we will turn to Charley Pride’s title song from his 1970 RCA Victor album Christmas in My Home Town.

Cooperstown and the Hall of Fame in the Middle of Nowhere

With local boosters licking their chops and a somewhat embarrassed Major League Baseball trying desperately to hold on to a ridiculous origin legend for the game saddled on them by the Mills Commission of 1908, the National Baseball Hall of Fame opened its doors in beautiful but un-bustling Cooperstown, New York on June 12, 1939.

The pedigree of the National Pastime was somewhat murky.  Everyone knew that it grew out of ball, bat, and tag games like Rounders and Townball which had been played on village greens since at least the turn of the 19th Century.  It was assumed to be related in some way to Cricket, the English national game which began taking hold in big American cities with the establishment of clubs of well-heeled sportsmen.  The connection to Cricket, and even to Rounders, another game of English origins, offended the sense of cocky jingoism that accompanied the coincidental rise of baseball and America as a muscular new world power in the later half of the century.

If the paths of evolution were befogged in the mists of time, the actual beginning of modern baseball was not, and plenty of people knew it.  The game as we know it came into being with the formation of the New York Knickerbockers founded on September 23, 1845.  It was one of several amateur sporting clubs made up mostly of young clerks playing bat and ball games to a variety of rules.  Alexander Cartwright and other members hammered out the Knickerbocker Rules, the first ever published.  The adoption of these rules by other clubs made games between squads of rival clubs possible without long negotiations over field or day rules.

The known first baseball game at Hoboken's Elysian Fields on September 23, 1835.

The first inter-club game under these rules was played at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey on June 19, 1846.  The Knickerbockers, by the way, lost to a club called the New York Nine.  But it was pretty clearly THE first game.

By the onset of the Civil War baseball was being played by clubs adopting the rules throughout the Northeast, Mid-West, and Upper South, although various other versions were still played locally in small towns and villages. 

Many a lad packed his bat and ball with his kit when reporting for duty in the Union Army. Baseball games enlivened the deadly boredom of camp life between episodes of unimaginable horror in the big battles of the war. 

Young Abraham Mills—no known relation to my mother’s family—of the 5th New York Volunteers—Duryée’s Zouaves—participated  in one notable game on Christmas Eve of 1862 against members of other regiments before 40,000 troops camped at Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.

Mills returned from the war as a second lieutenant, completed law school and set off on a distinguished career.  But he kept his hand in baseball as the player manager of the amateur Olympic Base Ball Club in Washington, D.C.  Eventually his legal and business connections and baseball experience secured him the Presidency of the National League. 

In 1908 the former executive was put in charge of a special commission charged with investigating the origins of the game.  Privately it was understood that he was to discover a uniquely American pedigree un-besmirched by close association to British games. The Mills Commission did not work very hard or very diligently.

Union General Abner Doubleday of Cooperstown.  Despite the myth promoted by MLB he was decidedly not the inventor of baseball.

On the strength of a claim in one letter from a Colorado mining engineer, Abner Graves who claimed to have witnessed the first game played by Abner Doubleday, a future Union Army general, and students of the Otsego Academy and Green’s Select School in Cooperstown in 1839.  Despite numerous inconsistencies in the story, the Commission declared to the world that Doubleday was the founder and Cooperstown the cradle of baseball.

That was their official story, and they were sticking with it, even as mounting evidence year by year undercut the claim.

Cooperstown was a once thriving town off the beaten track in central New York State.  Near-by Lake Otsego is the source of the Susquehanna River.  Its other connection to fame was that it had been platted from a claim by the father of writer James Fenimore Cooper.  Once the center of a hops growing region, it had been hit hard first by Prohibition and then by the Depression which had cut deeply into a summer resort business.

Stephen Carlton Clark, whose family had made a fortune as co-founders of the Singer Sewing Machine Company and who had extensive holding in the town, including half-empty resort hotels began scheming to find some way to boost tourism.  He realized that the Doubleday connection was just what he needed.

He began promoting the idea of a Hall of Fame in his hometown in the mid-1930s.  Finally securing the blessing of Major League Baseball, he launched a well-publicized national campaign to elect the first members of the Hall while preparing his building in Cooperstown.

On January 29, 1936 the first “class” was elected  And quite a line-up it was—Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson, and Walter Johnson.  With the standards for on field performance—not personal behavior—set so high, no subsequent class would be admitted without controversy and argument. 

On the strength of those names, particularly Ruth, who had only recently retired and was still the Sultan of Swat to well-heeled Yankee fans for whom the tedious trip to Cooperstown was not quite so inconvenient, Clark finished his shrine and launched it to great hoopla.

It was an even greater goldmine than Clark ever imagined.

Currently there are 333 elected members of the Hall including former MLB players, Negro leagues (now recognizing those organizations as Big Leagues), managers, umpires, and pioneers, executives, and organizers. In addition sportswriters and broadcasters are also honored as are collectively the members of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.

This year there will be no players voted on by sportswriters inducted for the first time since 2013.  No player quite made the required cut despite the presence of at least three who would ordinarily be shoe-ins—pitchers Curt Schilling, Roger Clemens, and intimidating slugger Barry Bonds.  But all of them, like many top players of their era, have been tainted to one degree or another steroid use which a significant portion of the baseball writers currently feel should be disqualifying.  

The HOF class of 2020 will finally have their induction ceremony in Cooperstown this fall.  In additions to Jeter--a virtually unanimous pick on his first appearance on the ballot--and Walker the Modern Baseball Era Committee  which reviews players snubbed by the baseball writers' popularity contest included catcher Ted Simmons.  Players from the Negro Leagues were also selected.

There will, however, be inductees honored.  2020 additions to the Hall—Derek Jeter, Larry Walker, Ted Simmons, and the late Marvin Miller, the controversial Executive Director of the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA)from 1966 to 1982. Believe me, team owners and league executives hate that last selection and fought it for years. had their ceremonies canceled last summer by the Coronavirus pandemic.

The 2020 cancelation and the general Covid-19 travel shut down was a huge economic blow to Cooperstown, the Hall, and the Clark family.  With no new inductees the traditional Awards Presentation will remain an indoor, television-only event, Saturday, July 24.  There will, however, be an induction ceremony in September with very limited seating at the Clark Sports Center which has hosted it outside on the lawn since 1992.  But far fewer than the usual crowds which approached or surpassed 50,000 at five of the last six ceremonies from 2014-2019 will be on hand.

Before the pandemic about 315,000 fans annually made the still inconvenient pilgrimage to what is now considered a reverential shrine.  With a full 2021 season reviving enthusiasm for the National Pass Time, and the public eager to resume traveling, those numbers may well be exceeded next year.

Decedents of the Clark family certainly hope so.  They still sit on the Board and own just about all the available accommodations in town.  They are very good at counting money.

Like a Muslim Hajj, very devoted baseball fan is expected to make the pilgrimage at least once in his or her lifetime.  I haven’t met that holy obligation yet.  Contributions to the cause will be gratefully accepted.