YouTube Gold: Sister Wynona Carr Sings The Ball Game

A strange blend of gospel and baseball that somehow works perfectly

One of the sadder aspects of the decline of baseball is the simultaneous decline of great baseball songs.

We've featured several of them lately since it’s baseball season and it seems like time for one more: The Ball Game, by Sister Wynona Carr.

A native of Cleveland, Carr started off in gospel and like a lot of gospel singers of her era, felt drawn to both R&B and early rock ‘n’ roll.

She recorded across those genres in the 1950’s with one highlight song called Ding Dong Daddy, which you can probably surmise is not a gospel song.

In 1952, she released The Ball Game (Life Is A Ball Game), which used baseball as a metaphor for life and religion, and it may have been her biggest hit.

It got a lot more attention decades later when Garrison Keillor began to play it periodically on Prairie Home Companion and more recently, it was used in 42, the excellent movie about Jackie Robinson.

Sadly, Carr contracted tuberculosis in 1959 and her career began to wind down. She moved back to Cleveland and apparently suffered a good bit, surely from TB but also from depression, dying in 1956 at just 52 years old. Her work has been reassessed in recent years and one hopes she would be gratified to find a more appreciative audience today.