![]() Not until 1967 would organ music return to a Cubs home game. )įor reasons not clear, that first organ at Wrigley Field had disappeared when the Cubs returned from their next road trip. ( See how baseball is played around the world. But that was long ago, in a baseball universe far away. In olden times the organist would have celebrated solo with a jaunty tune. This is where the DJ takes over, and some indecipherable, pounding victory theme thunders from the stadium’s speakers. The right fielder runs to the wall, stops, and slaps his glove in frustration as the ball sails into a delirious sea of screaming bleacher bums. The ball lifts into the air, a spherical white Sputnik in the dark night sky. As Ruhel raises the organ’s pitch a half-step each time, the chant becomes something akin to a call-and-response prayer.Īs the pitcher goes into his set, Ruhel abruptly ceases playing-that’s the rule-but he’s unleashed an unstoppable tsunami. “Let’s Go Dodgers!”-Ruhel’s two-note theme and the fans’ reflexive chant-is echoing through the cavernous stadium. Dodgers slugger Max Muncy is at bat with two men on base. The Dodgers have fallen behind 5-3, and Ruhel is playing both the organ and the crowd like a master. (The opening claps of Rose Royce’s “Car Wash” are a universal choice, as is DJ Casper’s ballgame and wedding reception standard “Cha Cha Slide”-specifically the part that goes “Everybody clap your hands!”). Unlike stadium organists of yore, who were strictly one-man or one-woman bands, these days baseball keyboardists share the game with DJs, whose encyclopedic array of song samples demand spectator collaboration. Tonight, the Dodgers’ present-day organist, Dieter Ruhel, is rippling off his nightly assortment of “charge!” fanfares, full-length musical interludes (The Doors’ “Touch Me Babe”), and dozens of song fragments like The Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke,” all of which inevitably morph into the sing-song chant of “Let’s Go Dodgers ( clap, clap, clapclapclap)!” The Tribune urged readers to send the organist “any number you’d like to have rippled off some afternoon.” This prohibition even precluded Nelson from tossing off the Cubs’ team song at the time, a little Irving Berlin ditty called “When That Midnight Choo-Choo Leaves for Alabam.” Before the game started at 2:30 p.m., Nelson had to “still his bellows,” as the Chicago Tribune put it, because the game was being broadcast on the radio, and the team had not gotten permission from the music publishing company BMI to perform their songs on-air. ![]() Wrigley had installed a pipe organ behind the grandstand, and by all accounts the crowd of 18,000-plus was thrilled by the performance of organist Ray Nelson.īut the premiere was not without complications. Unauthorized use is prohibited.īaseball is a game of tradition and record keeping, and this year marks a particularly nostalgic milestone: Eighty years ago this April 26, at hallowed Wrigley Field in Chicago, the strains of organ music drifted across a professional baseball field for the first time. Gladys George died on December 8, 1954, in Los Angeles, California, of a cerebral hemorrhage.Please be respectful of copyright. Her marriage in 1933 to millionaire Edward Fowler helped her continue her career in talking films, the first of which was Straight Is the Way (1934) with the company MGM. Her first silent film was Red Hot Dollars (1919). Gladys was born into an artistic atmosphere and turned to the theater at an early age, and after her teens, she became a Broadway star. Among her most important works are The Roaring Twenties (1939), The Maltese Falcon (1941), and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Fowler (1933-1935), then married actor Leonard Penn. She married actor Ben Erway (1922-1930), then married Edward H. An American actress, born in Patten, Maine, on September 13, 1900, to a British father, who was knighted for his service with the British army in India.
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