Terry
Cashman Press and Reviews:
"An original who has captured the spirit
of America in his songs about baseball"
-
Bob Costas NBC-TV
"Terry is one of a kind. Nobody writes
songs about our National Pastime like him.
Every time I hear "Cooperstown" it
moves me"
-
Larry King CNN
"Terry Cashman's songs about baseball are
as good as it gets. I saw him perform his
music once and I couldn't stop talking about
the experience for a month"
-
Ed Goren FOX SPORTS
"When it comes to songs about baseball,
Terry Cashman is the Big Leagues"
-
John "Boog" Powell
"He's the one and only. The
"Balladeer of Baseball."
-
Bill Madden NY DAILY NEWS
Baseball's
Hit Man
Terry Cashman is the national pastime's
songwriter laureate - and now he's teeing off,
too.
(from THE DAILY NEWS: June 29, 1997)
Swingin'
baseball here.
With the Yankees winning the World Series last
year and The New York Interleague Subway
providing a booster shot this season, baseball
in New York has come out of the coma caused by
the strike of 1994.
It
almost makes a fan want to sing.
There is no better man for the job than Terry
Cashman, the sports troubadour who filled the
summer silence caused by the 1981 baseball
strike with a now legendary song called "Talkin'
Baseball® (Willie, Mickey and The Duke)."
"I thought "Talkin' Baseball®"
would be the only baseball song I'd ever
write," he says in his East Side
apartment decorated with baseball memorabilia.
"Back in 1959-60, I played minor-league
baseball in the Detroit Tigers organization.
At the same time, I was the lead singer for a
group called the Chevrons and we had three
chart hits and we were even on 'American
Bandstand.' I knew after a year that I
wasn't good enough for big league baseball.
So I went full time into the music
business."
Cashman, whose real name is Dennis Minogue,
the son of an Irish cop from Washington
Heights - whose partner just so happened to be
Yankee Manager Joe Torre's father - took a
promotion job at ABC Records. He'd already
been fleeced by unscrupulous record producers
in his Chevron days and wanted to learn the
music business from the inside.
In 1966, he assumed the Terry Cashman pen name
so that ABC wouldn't know he was moonlighting
as a writer, and with friend Gene Pistilli he
wrote a No. 1 hit for Spanky and Our Gang,
"Sunday Will Never Be the Same"
After
that, neither was his life the same. The
hits just kept coming.
"But through it all, I was a walking
encyclopedia of baseball trivia and I was
always in search of a good baseball
argument," Cashman says. "A few
people told me I should write a baseball song.
I laughed and said, 'Who the hell wants to
hear a song about baseball?'"
Then one day a friend from the Mets gave
Cashman "the best baseball photograph
I've ever seen" - a picture of Mickey
Mantle, Willie Mays and Duke Snider walking
with their backs to the camera, numbers
showing, in from the outfield at an old-timers'
game at Shea Stadium.
I took one look at the photograph, picked up
my guitar and 20 minutes later a song that had
been in my blood all my life was
finished," he says. "I owned a
record company, so I released it."
It became a hit Cashman stretched into a home
run: "Talkin' Baseball®" quickly
replaced "Take Me Out to the
Ballgame" as the anthem of modern
baseball.
"I realized it wasn't so much about
baseball as it was about me, about the kid who
grew up loving baseball," he said.
"It was about every fan who ever loved
the innocence of baseball and what the game
means to the kid in all of us. It came out in
the middle of the 1981 strike and it filled a
void. People reacted to the song because it
was about baseball before the greed. It harked
back to the '50s, brought people back to a
simpler time when guys like Mantle, Mays and
Snider played the game for the pure love of
it."
On
to Cooperstown
Major League Baseball quickly adopted the song
and played it over a marvelous montage of
baseball highlights. "I was even
invited to Cooperstown," Cashman
says, the Little Leaguer who lives in his
eyes, still amazed. "I never made it out
of the minors and here I was at Cooperstown at
the Hall of Fame induction. They asked
me to write a song about it and I did."
By 1994, Cashman had written enough baseball
songs to justify a 21-song album called "Passin'
It On - America's Baseball Heritage in
Song."
"We were going to market it on TV, with an 800
number, during games. Then the 1994 strike
hit, the World Series was canceled, and the
last thing anyone wanted to hear was a song
about baseball," he says.
Over the years, Cashman developed a fondness
for another summer game played on grass -
golf. "I got very interested in the
history of the game, the same way I've always
been fascinated by the history of
baseball," he says. "So I decided to
research it and write and produce and oral
history of the U.S. Open."
The result is "A Champion Forever; The
Cry of the U.S. Open," by golf
broadcaster Jim Karavellas, featuring
interviews with golf greats and a few original
tunes by Cashman.
"With the 50th anniversary of Jackie
Robinson breaking baseball's color line and
the emergence of Tiger Woods in golf, one of
the things that struck me most is that golf
has never had a color line," Cashman
says. "A black and an American Indian
played in the [U.S.] Open in 1896, the second
year of the tournament. And it's never had a
color barrier since, even though it has always
been perceived as an all white sport."
"I think baseball is finally back from
the last strike," Cashman says. I
don't know if it will ever get its innocence
back. But I think fans might want to
hear someone sing about it again."