Albert Von Tilzer, the song’s composer, was born Albert Gumm in Indianapolis. One of six sons of Jacob Gumbinsky and Sarah Tilzer, immigrants from Poland, Albert’s father ran a shoe store in Goshen, Indiana, before moving to Indianapolis. The family was quite musical. Albert’s older brother Harry became a popular songwriter and partner in the music publishing company Shapiro, Bernstein and Von Tilzer, and helped his younger brother land a job at the company’s Chicago office. Albert also assumed the Von Tilzer name and became a prolific Tin Pan Alley songwriter.
Tin Pan Alley was both a cultural concept and a physical place. The physical place was a grouping of apartments, offices, rooms, and spaces located on West 28th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues in Manhattan. Its ordinary appearance today belies the fact that at the turn of the 20th century, this block embodied a creative and commercial dynamism that had an enormous impact on American music.
It was Harry Von Tilzer who gave the place its appellation. He said that when he walked through the area, the sound of so many pianos being played sounded like people beating on tin pans. Another one of Harry’s creations was the Von Tilzer name itself. He took their mother’s maiden name and added the German nobility particle “Von” to make it sound classier. Four of the five Gumm brothers adopted it.
Albert had dropped out of high school to work in his father’s shoe store, but like Harry he also hoped to compose music. After working as a musical director for a vaudeville group, Albert was hired in 1899 as a staff pianist for the Chicago branch of Shapiro and Bernstein. In 1900 he moved to New York City, the center of the music publishing industry. In order to earn a living, Albert continued to work as a shoe salesman in a Brooklyn department store. Harry then joined Albert in New York, where he opened his own music publishing house, the Harry Von Tilzer Music Company. In 1903, Albert and his other brother Jack formed the York Music Company. From then on it published all of Albert Von Tilzer’s songs, most of which he wrote for individual vaudeville acts in collaboration with Jack Norworth.
“Take Me Out to the Ball Game” made Von Tilzer a pop music superstar. The song was such a success that he received a contract to tour the Orpheum vaudeville circuit in order to publicize it. Although neither Von Tilzer nor Norworth had ever been to a ballgame, the song captured the essence of one quite well. Students of music pointed out that the quarter-rest pause between “take” and “me” in the first measure of the chorus was the perfect spot for the “thwack” sound of a ball hitting a bat. By the 1920s, Von Tilzer was no longer writing for vaudeville but composing full scores for Broadway. He moved to Hollywood in 1930 to write songs for motion pictures, and retired there in the latter part of the decade.