You'll Never Walk Alone: How A Song Became More Than A Song

00:00:31 Speaker 1: Sports teams and their songs come in all shapes and sizes among all sports and leagues. College football has some of the best stadium in song pairings, like Virginia Tech with Enter Sandman and Wisconsin Football with jump Around. You also have some classics that applied to several teams across the pro and college levels within the same state, such as Sweet Caroline for both Carolinas and take Me Home Country Roads for many teams in West Virginia. Then they're this somewhat generic ones that you're definitely going to hear at any random high school football game you attend. Think Seven Nation Army or Welcome to the Jungle. There's also the weird pairings. As a DC sports fan, the song baby Shark is forever ingrained in some deep recess of my brain thanks to the Nationals adopting it as an anthem during their twenty nineteen championship run. Baby Shark. Of all sports, one stands above the rest in terms of songs, and that's soccer, which all be referring to as football from here on out. Why well, in addition to the entire rest of the world calling it football, I think it would also be a little bit confusing to refer to the sport that Liverpool FC plays as soccer, when the FC stands for football club. Football fans don't just have one song in their arsenal. That's a joke because there's a team called Arsenal in the Premier League. And yeah, anyway, they have a jingle for every player on their team, and profanity lace chance for every single opposing team player too. It's honestly pretty impressive, even when you can't understand exactly what they're saying. If there's one song synonymous with football fandom across the globe, it's You'll Never Walk Alone. Tens of thousands of Liverpudlians. Yes that's a real word used to describe people from England's Merseyside area aka Liverpool. As I was saying, tens of thousands of Liverpudlians belt the song out before every one of their home matches at Anfield stadium. And here's where things get interesting. This song, sung by thousands of fanatical Liverpool supporters at bowl Blast in a stadium in Europe, was originally created over seventy years ago for an American Broadway musical Hey Everyone, I'm Willgatchel. This is Sports Dot MP three, and today we're going to be diving into the story of how a song written for an American musical became the anthem and much more for one of the most popular football clubs in the world. Normally I'd play the intra music right about now, but instead, and as a Liverpool supporter, it feels just wrong to play any song here except You'll Never Walk Alone. In fact, I may just play a snippet between every segment instead of the normal transition music. You heard it here first, so without further ado, enjoy You'll Never Walk Alone, as sung by a few thousand Liverpudlians at anfield. You'll Never Walk Alone originated as a show tune. It's a term I had not heard prior to researching this episode, and it means a song written for musical theater or film, like anything from Wicked Le Miz or my personal favorite Phantom of the Opera dot dot dot m It was written by Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein, the second who undoubtedly has the coolest name I've ever used on this podcast, unless he has a son with the same exact name. There's something way cooler about a third. Together, two formed a theater writing team known as Rogers and Hammerstein, one of the greatest duos in the history of Broadway. As someone who, as you might have guessed, isn't well versed in the nuances of musical theater, I was shocked to find out that Rogers and Hammerstein were responsible for approximately fifty percent of all musicals I can list, including Oklahoma, South Pacific, The King and I, The Sound of Music, a certified banger if I do say so myself, and Carousel, the production they wrote You'll Never Walk Alone for When Carousel opened at Broadway's Majestic Theater. That's the name, not a description. It was a huge hit. Apparently it was sort of like The Sopranos for theater. Its plot was super intense, and its main character was an anti hero. If you haven't watched The Sopranos, think Walter White from Breaking Bad and maybe a question which life choices of yours led you to a point in life where you haven't watched The Sopranos yet. I Never Walk Alone was one of the musical's standouts, and considering it was a hopefully optimistic song about unity that aired only a few weeks before the end of World War Two. It's not surprising why it resonated with the masses. Kersel became so popular that it was adapted into a movie in nineteen fifty six, But that still begs the question, how did this American Broadway song end up as the beloved anthem of one of the biggest football clubs in Europe. Well I neglected to mention that a handful of musicians, including Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, had made covers of the song in the fifties. The trend took a little time to cross over the Atlantic Ocean, but by nineteen sixty three it had arrived, and that arrival was because of a young Liverpudlian named Jerry Masden. Jerry happened to come across Elvis Presley's cover of You'll Never Walk Alone and was immediately intrigued. Not too long after, he convinced his skeptical fellow band members to record a cover of the song. Considering the band was called Jerry and the Pacemakers, I'm not surprised Jerry got his way. I would bet that Jerry was surprised at how quickly it took for that cover to become a football club's anthem, especially when you consider that the other local band in the area was The Beatles. It's hard to envision just how technologically advanced some sports stadiums have gotten over the decades. It's almost like an arms race to see who can fit the most TV screens into their venue. Back in nineteen six sixty three, a PA system meaning public address system was some next level tech. One of the few clubs that did have a PA system at the time was Liverpool. Remember this was before the existence of pre show entertainment like t shirt launchers and skilled unicyclists juggling fine China. So Liverpool would use the PA system to play the top ten charts from the UK across all of Anfield Stadium. At the time, the top ten charts were dominated by Mersey Beat bands, a term spawned from a magazine called The Mersey Beat that covered Liverpool's local music scene. The Beatles. Yes, those Beatles are easily the most recognizable band to emerge from the area, but there were dozens of other talented groups too, like Jerry and the Pacemakers, who actually became the first band ever to produce three straight UK number one singles with their first three songs, how Do You Do It, I Like It and You'll Never Walk Alone, the last of which spent four consecutive weeks at the number one spot, meaning the speakers at Infield were constantly blasting the song for thousands of supporters to hear during pregame warmups. The cop a single tiered west stand filled with the club's most fanatical supporters, would sing most of the songs played through Anfield's PA system in the early sixties, but when You'll Never Walk Alone was played, it seemed like the whole stadium would join in a mixture of the song just being really catchy, its optimistic message coinciding with the hopes of the fans for their team to win, easy to remember lyrics in the band itself's Liverpool roots. When the song eventually dropped out of the UK Top ten charts, the Djakapa operator at Anfield stopped playing it and the fans got pissed, so at the of thousands of football fans screaming at him to play You'll Never Walk Alone, the DJ made the correct choice and not only played it, but kept it as a permanent fixture for Anfield's pregame playlist. Liverpool's supporters instantly adopted it as their unofficial anthem that very season, which was nineteen sixty three to nineteen sixty four, singing it out loud and very proud before every home game. Here's where things get even cooler. Ready, Liverpool Football Club won the league title that season for the first time in nearly twenty years. Come on, that's pretty crazy. To this day, Liverpool home games have featured a stadium full of fans except during COVID and some traveling haters singing You'll Never Walk Alone at full volume, and even the diehard fans of Liverpool's biggest rivals have been known to shed a tear when witnessing the magical moment in person. As with all things that survived through the decades, the tune has taken on a slightly different meaning overtime, and that's because in nineteen eighty nine ninety seven Liverpool supporters tragically lost their lives in one of the most deadly disasters in British sporting history. The Tragedy of Hillsborough, as many referred to it, took place on April fifteenth, nineteen eighty nine, during what was supposed to be a semi final match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup, a yearly knockout tournament featuring English clubs that has existed since eighteen seventy one. The match was to be played at a neutral field, and that field was Sheffield Wednesday's Hillsborough Stadium. The sold out match meant more than fifty three thousand fans would be in attendance for the three pm kickoff time, although they had more supporters attending than Nottingham Forest. Liverpool supporters were given the smaller section of the two sides of the stadium to sit in. In those days, hooliganism their word not mine was a common issue at football matches and a lot of decisions were made on the basis of preventing rivaling fans from being too close to one another, which could lead to them throwing things or punching people, rioting and other forms of hooliganism. The decision to make Liverpool fans use the entrance on the smaller side of the stadium called Lepping's Lane, was in part made to keep them as far away from the four supporters as possible. On its own, that line of reasoning makes sense, but there were a litany of other, significantly more important factors that were ignored in doing so. David Duckinfield was the police officer in charge of policing the football match, a role that typically means that person has a working system in place of how to distribute the fans within the stadium, a solid understanding of the foot traffic flow, and problem areas in knowing which turnstiles lead supporters to which sections. Ducknfield didn't fit that description. In fact, he had just recently been promoted to that position, and by all accounts, probably should not have been, given his lack of experience in policing football matches. At two thirty pm, thirty minutes before kickoff, about four thousand of the expected ten thousand Liverpool fans had entered the stadium through the Leppings Lane entrance, which had only seven turnstiles to accommodate the crowds. As the match got closer to kickoff, the awaiting fans grew more restless to get inside, but a massive bottleneck had formed inside the small tunnel between the turnstiles and the central pen, a standing room only section directly behind the Liverpool goal that all the turnstiles funneled into to make matters worse, Fans without tickets who were turned away from entering the pens were unable to turn around and leave, creating even more crowding. At this point, an officer near Leppings Lane began calling for the match time to be to laid to prevent what was rapidly becoming a dangerous situation. Unfortunately, that officers please were ignored by the others. At two point fifty two pm, the paniced officials and policemen ordered all of the gates to be opened, hoping the massive crowd would disperse among the four pens that made up the visitor section they had been allocated. The more than two thousand Liverpool supporters who were suddenly led in streamed forward, and most went directly into the two central pens, which were already packed full from the bottleneck in the turnstiles. The tragedy that unfolded was awful. Too many people continued pushing to get inside, and that caused a crushing pressure that continued to build. Fans tried climbing the metal fencing between the pens to escape, and people in upper decks tried pulling those down below to safety up above. Less than six minutes into the match, police officials ran onto the field and ordered the game to be stopped. Ninety seven Liverpool fans, fathers, mothers, friends, loved ones and children lost their lives in that horrible, heartbreaking incident, and hundreds more suffered injuries and trauma. The aftermath of the Hillsborough tragedy is hard to talk about. In short, the police tried to blame drunk Liverpool fans as the cause, while covering up their own negligence. It took until twenty twelve, twenty years after the disaster, for a government panel to re examine the case and release its findings, which affirmed that there were enormous failures by the police and there was indeed a cover up, a very extensive one. The twenty fourteen Government inquest on the disaster led the jury to find that deaths unlawful and caused by gross negligence, which then led to Duckenfield being charged with manslaughter in two thousand and seventeen, nearly thirty years too late. I should also add, just for clarity's sake, that if you read articles or stories about the tragedy, many might state that ninety six people lost their lives that day, not ninety seven. The reason for that discrepancy is because Andrew Devine, who suffered life altering injuries at Hillsborough when he was just twenty two years old, passed away in twenty twenty one, and a coroner's inquest ruled that he was unlawfully killed as a result of the disaster, making him the ninety seventh victim. The journey for justice and accountability is still ongoing, and while nothing, not even time, can fully heal some wounds, the Liverpool faithful have found some form of relief and you'll never walk alone, if only for those few brief minutes when the world stops and all of anfield sings. But it's not just Liverpool's and not because other clubs have adopted it as their own too. It's because the song itself, its lyrics and message demand together, fareness and unity, even between rivaling fans. The song started as a show tune spread out through multiple covers, was adopted by a football club's fan base, became an anthem, and now now it's almost more like a living memorial, a way to mourn those who are no longer here to celebrate those around us, and above all else, it's a reminder that we're never truly alone and that does it. For today's episode of Sports Dot MP three, I'd like to dedicate this episode to the ninety seven victims of the Hillsborough disaster and Liverpool's very own Diogo Jatta and his brother Andre Silva, who both tragically passed away earlier this year in a car crash. No matter where you are, you'll never walk along