Seventh-inning stretch at Wrigley Field, Chicago (date unknown), with Harry Caray leading the singing. Photograph: MLB Photos via Getty Images/Jon SooHoo

Jack Norworth was riding the New York subway early in the spring of 1908 when he happened to notice a gaudy, lithographed poster of a silk-hosed baseball player standing with a bat on his shoulder. By the time he reached his destination 30 minutes later, Norworth, a leading vaudeville performer and songwriter who, it was said, had never attended a professional baseball game, had dashed off the lyrics for a song (with doodles in the margin) about a baseball-mad girl named Katie Casey. Written as a waltz, his verses tell the story of how, when Katie’s beau invites her to a show, she, in emboldened Gibson girl fashion, demands instead to be taken to a baseball game. Set to music by Tin Pan Alley composer Albert von Tilzer, who had partnered with Norworth on previous hits (and who also had never attended a game), the new song, in the key of D major, debuted sometime in late April that year, most likely at Brooklyn’s Grand Opera House. A century later, few people in America cannot sing or at least hum its catchy chorus:

Take me out to the ball game
Take me out with the crowd.
Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack,
I don’t care if I never get back,
Let me root, root, root for the home team,
If they don’t win it’s a shame.
For it’s one, two, three strikes, you’re out,
At the old ball game.

“Take Me Out to the Ball Game” ranks eighth on a list of top songs of the 20th century compiled by the National Endowment for the Arts—sandwiched between the original cast recording of West Side Story and the Righteous Brothers hit, “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’.”

Music has always been a part of baseball, from the late 1850s when the first baseball song (“The Base Ball Polka”) was written, to the brass band era of the 1880s and 1890s, to the current day, when rap and rock and roll reverberate throughout stadiums and players define themselves with favorite anthems, played as they come up to bat. Many of the earliest baseball tunes were instrumental pieces written for the new dance crazes and honoring local teams: “Live Oak Polka,” published in 1860 and dedicated to the Live Oak Baseball Club of Rochester, New York, for example, or “Home Run Quick Step,” which was “respectfully dedicated” to members of the Mercantile Base Ball Club of Philadelphia. Several songs—a polka, a march, and a schottische—celebrated baseball’s first professional team, the 1869 Red Stockings of Cincinnati. In 1908, the year Norworth wrote “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” at least eight other baseball songs were written—and soon forgotten.

The surge of baseball music also provided an unlikely testament to the emerging independence of women at the turn of the 19th century. The 1895 baseball song “Who Would Doubt That I’m A Man?” was dedicated to “the new woman.” And in May 1908 the prolific George M. Cohan, who had already scored a hit with “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” published “Take Your Girl to the Ball Game.” The sheet music cover depicted a well-dressed young lady watching a game with her beau. That same month Norworth published his new tune featuring Katie Casey, whose independent spirit is apparent in the rarely sung and little-known first verse:

Katie Casey was baseball mad,
Had the fever and had it bad;
Just to root for the hometown crew,
Ev’ry sou Katie blew.
On a Saturday, her young beau
Called to see if she’d like to go,
To see a show but Miss Kate said, “No,
I’ll tell you what you can do.”
Take me out to the ball game. . . .

Norworth’s tune in short order eclipsed Cohan’s (despite an avalanche of advertising by Cohan) and all others. This may have been due partly to Norworth’s fame—he was among the best-known vaudeville performers—and that of his wife Nora Bayes, also a highly popular vaudeville star. Changes to the song’s subtitle over the years track its ascendancy, as the publisher changed it from “The Sensational Base Ball Song” to “The Famous Baseball Song” when the copyright was renewed in 1936, and then to “The Official Baseball Song” in 1949. If baseball had long been recognized as the national pastime, it now had an official song, whose second verse presaged the tune’s future role for millions of fans:

Katie Casey saw all the games,
Knew the players by their first names;
Told the umpire he was wrong,
All along good and strong.
When the score was just two to two.
Katie Casey knew what to do,
Just to cheer up the boys she knew;
She made the gang sing this song.

Norworth’s career paralleled the evolution of the entertainment industry: He moved from the theater to film to television (his final appearances, as a guest celebrity, were on the Milton Berle Show and Ed Sullivan Show). In 1952, living then in California, he founded the Laguna Beach Little League and began a tradition—continued by the league to this day—of handing out Cracker Jack at the opening game.

Amy Whorf McGuiggan is a writer based in the Boston area. Her essay is drawn and adapted from Take Me Out to the Ball Game: The Story of the Sensational Baseball Song (copyright © 2009 by Amy Whorf McGuiggan), by permission of the University of Nebraska Press.