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

You'll Never Walk Alone is now synonmous with Liverpool Football Club, but it didn't start that way. Today's episode explores how a 1946 Broadway show tune turned into an anthem, and much more, for one of the world's most popular football clubs.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:31):
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

(00:54):
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

(01:16):
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

(01:39):
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,

(02:00):
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

(02:23):
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,

(02:44):
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

(03:05):
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.

(03:25):
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

(04:25):
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

(04:50):
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

(05:11):
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

(05:34):
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

(05:55):
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

(06:16):
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

(06:39):
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

(06:59):
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

(07:51):
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.

(08:12):
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

(08:35):
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

(08:56):
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

(09:21):
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,

(09:43):
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

(10:06):
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

(10:28):
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

(10:49):
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

(11:11):
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.

(11:35):
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

(11:56):
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

(12:18):
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

(12:41):
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

(13:03):
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,

(13:23):
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

(13:47):
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

(14:09):
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

(14:30):
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

(14:53):
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

(15:14):
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

(15:35):
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

(15:59):
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,

(16:22):
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

(16:44):
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

(17:05):
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

(17:26):
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

(17:50):
never walk along