Katie Casey, Spirit-Woman
"I'll tell you what you can do." -- Katie Casey
Katie Casey first entered America’s mythic consciousness through vaudevillian Jack Norworth’s 1908 song, “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” If you listen to Carly Simon’s rousing version from Ken Burns’ baseball documentary, you’ll understand why the song remains a hit today.
But that isn’t Katie’s only appearance in national song and story. She appears in Willa Cather’s novel, The Song of the Lark, published a few years after Norworth’s song. There, the spirit-woman is the inspiration for a successful 1890s railroad strike in Arizona that’s memorialized in a ballad sung by rail workers.
The story goes that Katie was a “Harvey Girl,” a waitress in the Winslow, Arizona “Harvey House” on the Santa Fe line. The restaurant was part of America’s first restaurant chain, and its workers were “known for their propriety as well as their professionalism,” as Winifred Gallagher put it in her work on the “New Women” of the Old West. Gallagher noted that the job paid well and helped lead to new economic status and opportunity for independent-minded women.
In the song, the railroad yardmaster was smitten with Katie, and when she was fired by Harvey House he shut down the rail line until justice prevailed and she was rehired.
Oh, who would think that Katie Casey owned the Santa Fe?
But it really looks that way,
All the crews is off their pay
She can hold the freight from Albuquerq’ to Needles any day
No further reference to the folk song Cather quotes could be found in the collections of the Library of Congress Music Division, but Cather must have heard it during her stay in the American Southwest. Music was central to Cather’s work. Her novels are full of references to music of all kinds, from folk songs to opera. It’s interesting that she chose to include this one, as her protagonist in The Song of the Lark, Thea Kronberg, is, like Katie, an independent force.
And so is Katie Casey of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” Here’s how the writer George Boziwick describes her in his terrific piece on Katie, the song, and baseball:
At the turn of the 20th century, as more women gained access to higher education, participation in the general workforce, and political activism, an “emergent ideal” of the “New Woman” began to take hold that “imbued a woman’s activity in the public domain with a new sense of female self, a woman who was independent, athletic, sexual, and modern.” According to the song’s second verse, the fictional Katie has all those qualities, and expressed them fully through her passion for the game of baseball.
Telling the umpire he was wrong, “all along, and she was strong,” is, in my informed opinion, a true and good thing to do, but as a demonstration of independence, I prefer the first verse when she rebuffs her “young beau” who wants to take her to a show:
Miss Kate said, “No,
I’ll tell you what you can do:
Take me out to the ballgame…
Boziwick believes Norworth’s inspiration for Katie was fellow vaudevillian, Trixie Friganza, who had captured Norworth’s heart. Friganza was also a suffragette who appeared frequently at demonstrations for women’s rights. Boziwick writes:
Like Casey, Friganza (whose real name was Delia O’Callahan) was known to be outspoken and independent, drawing large crowds to both the theater and the suffrage rallies at which she was often a key speaker.
Author Winifred Gallagher told me in an email, that “the US had lots of Katie Caseys.” By that I think she meant that Norworth and Cather’s use of a common Irish name was likely no more than coincidence. I’d rather read it another way. The U.S. has lots of Katie Caseys because she’s a spirit-woman who appears at different times and places representing an American ideal of equality and independence that’s been with us from the earliest years of the Republic.
Her spirit echoes through our nation’s history. I could point out that some believe the inspiration for Bob Dylan’s “Girl From the North Country” was his high school sweetheart, Echo Casey. Seriously, that was her name. Instead, I’ll just say that Dylan began his Theme Time Radio Hour show on baseball song and story with a mysterious, unexplained reference to an unnamed woman, a spirit maybe, who walks among us even now. Especially now.
It’s night in the big city
somewhere a car alarm goes off
a woman walks barefoot, her high heels in her handbag
With the exception of the first photo above of Trixie Friganzo from her Wikipedia page, all photos were assembled by George Boziwick for his original story.
Women's rights! I remember those.