Justification
A poster for a Vaudeville show
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma02/easton/vaudeville/vaudeville.gif Athletes playing Baseball during the Great Depression
http://www.pophistorydig.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/1929-word-series-gm4-75.jpg Irish immigrant workers taking a lunch break while on a beam
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/09/21/article-2206050-0059AA091000044C-332_964x756.jpg A photograph of what a ballgame looked like at the time the song was released
http://www.ushistory.org/us/images/00001894.gif |
Take Me
Out to the Ballgame is as American as apple pie and, well, baseball. But the
seventh inning stretch hymn was not written for the ballpark; it was written
for Vaudeville, a term that describes both a style of entertainment and a
circuit of theaters popular in the 1800's. As the song soared to the top of the
Vaudeville charts, Vaudeville itself was dying. By the 1930's, Vaudeville was
dead, rendered obsolete by a new, more exciting form of entertainment: the
movies (Shmoop Editorial Team).
Critics have described the lyrics as crude, but singable, and puzzle over the chartbuster's instant success. Fans of the song, however, insist that it is the sheer simplicity and straightforwardness of the words, gender-neutral and shrewdly crafted so as not to name or favor any one team, coupled with von Tilzer's luring waltz-like rhythms and unforgettable melody that sealed the baseball ditty's success ("Take Me Out to the Ball Game [article]”). Though Take Me Out to the Ballgame originally was a vaudeville song, it jumped from one form of entertainment to another. After vaudeville died out, Baseball filled an important role of providing entertainment to entire families. In the early 1900’s, Baseball became an escape from the harsh realities of The Great Depression and continues to be an enduring part of America’s history (Shmoop Editorial Team). Much of the reasons that people were still attending the games was for a break from the reality of their everyday lives. Their lives were maybe consumed by the problems that the country was going through and baseball was an escape for them. Many of these people might in fact have been eating their only meal at the ballpark during a game. If they were in the stadium for four hours out of a day then that was four hours that they were not dealing with the reality of the world outside those walls (Sullivan). To determine the setting of Take Me Out to the Ballgame, we would need to focus on the forms of mass entertainment that existed in American cities in 1908. And since this song is about a young Irish woman who is an avid baseball fan, it might be argued that the song’s setting was the world of entertainment enjoyed by Irish working-class women in cities like New York (Shmoop Editorial Team). Irish men were treated in a very negative way, there was a common saying: “Let Negroes be slaves, and if not Negroes, let Irishmen fill their place” but Irish women were often hired as chamber maids, cooks, caretakers of children. These jobs were often looked down on, and Irish women were often prized as servants (Steele). Around the turn of the century, though, young Irish women began to find more and more work in the booming factories of the city, especially in the garment industry. These women, no longer isolated in their employers’ homes, built their own distinctive culture. They attended Vaudeville shows, went dancing in the city’s ballrooms, and took in the ball games at the Polo Grounds(Shmoop Editorial Team). |