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Terry Cashman - Press and Reviews

Terry Cashman

 

Terry Cashman
Terry Cashman's Bio
Discography and Music
Contacting Terry Cashman


 

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."