Marshall Locke: Poet, Playwright, Songwriter … Outfielder
I delivered this talk Thursday evening, March 2, 2017, at the annual NINE Spring Training Conference in Tempe, Arizona.
Last week the New York Times highlighted “Walden: A Game,” an improbable new video game that prompted players to “collect arrowheads, cast their fishing poles into a tranquil pond, buy penny candies and perhaps even jot notes in a journal — all while listening to music, nature sounds and excerpts from [Thoreau’s] meditations.” After picking my jaw up from the floor — go outdoors, dammit — I spotted these offhand words from the game’s lead designer, Tracy J. Fullerton, which played off some of the thoughts I had been gathering for this evening’s talk.
“Games are kinds of rehearsals,” she said.
Yes, I thought, they are: rehearsals for the struggles to come in real life … beyond the vicarious replays of mysteries in the sacred grove.
Today, because of their ubiquitous media coverage and salaries befitting a Hollywood star, we think of professional athletes as not only champions for our dimly understood longings but also as champions of a shared present-centered ethos. The connection of sports heroes to Hollywood is periodically reinforced by crossover cameos (think Space Jam) but, once upon a time, the link between sport and stage was profound. It has been preserved as if in amber by the use of the word “player” to describe athletes and actors in a variety of settings from theater to ballyard to burlesque to vaudeville and, in its earliest days, cinema.
Such musings attach to the obscure major league outfielder Marshall Locke, who played in seven games for Indianapolis in the 1884 American Association. Until recently little had been known about him beyond his baseball statistics. I will proceed to fill in some blanks this evening, even if he is most useful as a crowbar to pry open the greater subject of Plays, Players, and Playwrights.
Let’s consider first why professional baseball players were, in the years before 1920, shunned by respectable people who would neither sup nor stay with them at first-class establishments. Like their counterparts on the stage, ball players were widely regarded as base: actors for hire, following a script. Al Spalding wrote, in a letter to Al Spink, recalling the climate of professional baseball in the early 1870s:
… the game in several large cities, especially in New York and Philadelphia, was largely under the domination of the gambling element. I do not mean by this that the club officials were gamblers, but some of those officials were of the opinion that professional baseball, like horse racing, must have the extraneous aid of betting in order to attract the public.
Players were regarded as uncouth members of a lower caste, along with actors and card sharps and women of flexible virtue. It is a story far older than baseball.
Edmund Kerchever Chambers writes, in the early pages of The Mediaeval Stage, that the mimetic instinct was strong among Mediterranean peoples but less so among the Romans. “Roughly speaking,” he writes, for Greek comedy and tragedy the Empire substituted farce and pantomime.”
In Rome actors, like prostitutes, were part of a caste system which relegated sons and daughters to follow in the same profession and the same social class. The actors, or histriones, were always either freed-men, strangers, or slaves, and they were broadly held in contempt, even if they were paid well; the pay for these disreputable players was called lucar, deriving from the word for grove; it is not a far stretch to filthy lucre.
In the later Empire, women took part in the performances, and at the Floralia, loosest of the Roman festivals, the spectators claimed it as their right that the female dancers play naked. One may see why, a century after the fall of Rome, Pope Saint Gregory the Great thought to destroy all the pagan temples and theaters. But he changed his mind and preserved them from demolition. From Chambers:
And so the church and the open space around the church continued to be, what the temple and the temple precinct had been, the centre, both secular and religious, of the village life. From the Christian point of view, the arrangement had its obvious advantages. It had also this disadvantage, that so far as obnoxious elements still clung to the festivals, so far as the darker practices of heathenism still lingered, it was precisely the most sacred spot that they defiled.
In those converted pagan courtyards were born our current ballparks … but that is a story for another day, as is the linkage between the wandering minstrel of medieval times and the itinerant players of later periods.
Let’s get back to theater and baseball, and the caste occupied by its practitioners in the mid-19th century.
First among Marshall Locke’s predecessors was Arthur T. Markham, an outfielder for the Brooklyn Excelsiors in the late 1850s, before the arrival of Jim Creighton. After having a small part in an 1859 production of Richelieu that featured Edwin Booth, he began to focus his attention on acting, adopting the stage name of Frank Mordaunt. His stage career endured for more than four decades.
Among 19th century players, Bud Fowler and Ted Sullivan are both known to have written plays. (The Fowler play of 1912, The Retired Black Planter, is a recent discovery by Hugh MacDougall and was reproduced in full in the journal Base Ball in 2013.) Another veteran of that journal, Rob Edelman — who is among us at this conference — wrote a wonderful survey article titled “Baseball on the Boards,” for the Spring 2010 number. I will not retell his tales of DeWolf Hopper debuting “Casey at the Bat” between acts of Prince Methusalem in 1888, or Cap Anson’s starring role in Hoyt’s Runaway Colt seven years later. However, I was struck by his inclusion of, in a list of baseball plays before 1900, A Double Play, by Marshall Locke, a three-act opus whose text may survive, though I have not seen it.
Such little-noted plays, Edelman wrote, “have for decades been languishing in obscurity. One would have to pore through countless big-city and small-town newspapers to determine whether any of them were ever produced — anywhere. But they did exist, at least on paper, and their authors expectantly submitted them to the Library of Congress for copyright.”
So where in all this do we place Marshall Locke? As Ken Burns is fond of saying, chronology is God’s way of telling a story, so let’s begin at our nominal subject’s beginning. On March 12, 1857, Marshall Pinckney Wilder Locke was born in Ashland, Ohio, but by 1860 his family relocated to Indianapolis. The Locke family was related to the Wilders, notably Marshall Pinckney Wilder, a famed botanist and New England politician. His nephew Marshall Pinckney Wilder became a celebrated author and actor and friend of DeWolf Hopper. This might explain not only our subject’s given names but also his schooling at Phillips Exeter Academy, from which he graduated with the Class of 1876. Family heritage may also explain young Marshall’s being drawn to the footlights; Charles E. Locke, his uncle, was a theater and opera producer in New York and San Francisco.
Rather than go on to Yale or Harvard, as would have been expected of an Exeter lad, the 19-year-old Marshall Locke returned to Indianapolis, entered law school, and for the next few years resided in boarding houses while pursuing his two primary passions: writing and baseball. In 1883 he published his first play, The Hunting of the Snark; or, The Professor’s Dream, in a Prologue and Five Acts. He also played right field for the “Famous Browns” of Danville, Indiana, whose first baseman was future Hall of Famer Sam Thompson.
In the Indianapolis city directory for 1884, the year of his brief stay in the majors, Locke is still listed as a law student. But in fact he pursued gainful employ as a ballplayer for the next few years before he gave up the dream. In March 1885 he was signed to play center field for Cleveland in the new Western League, but at some point he was released; I have not found a playing record. In June it was reported that:
Marshall Locke got even with the Cleveland club yesterday by having the entire club arrested for playing ball on Sunday. They were taken before Justice Smock, pleaded guilty and were fined each one dollar and costs. When Locke found that the individual players and not the club had to pay the fine, he was sorry he made the complaint [saying] that it was Tom Johnson, who is the backer of the Cleveland club, and not the players, that he desired to reach when he had the latter arrested…. Locke charges that Johnson broke the contract he had with the club.
He sued the club, though he moved on to play with Omaha and with Birmingham later that season. This rebellious streak would crop up periodically in the years to come, such as when he held a street rally for free silver in August 1896. The police ordered the crowd to move along; Locke stood his ground — “on Constitutional rights,” he said — and was arrested.
He joined a Kansas League club outside Organized Ball, probably in Salina, in 1886 and 1887, but by this time he was 30. Though he may have continued to play ball somewhere, by March of 1889 the Indianapolis Journal reported that among local players, “Marshall Locke has not yet found a resting place.” Washed up as a player, Marshall Locke the playwright, poet, and lyricist was a young phenom.
At first his sentimental ballads and dialect ditties appeared in Indiana papers, but soon his work was copied in the Chicago papers, too; this may testify less to his ability than to their need to fill space. I offer as the briefest of execrable samples the opening verse of “A Street Singer,” from 1889:
Only an air on a street organette,
Wheezy old music one likes to forget;
Sweet girlish voice sadly singing her song,
That face and voice to an angel belong.
Though denied baseball employ for 1889 Locke wrote the farce-comedy entitled “Baseball” which Edelman cited. It opened at the Grand in Indianapolis in the fall of 1889. The New York Press and Sporting Life reported:
Marshall Locke, of Indianapolis, has written a baseball comedy which holds the League up to ridicule in its methods of classifying and selling players. It is intended by the author to place the players’ side of the question on the stage and win for them public sympathy. While not intending to throw cold water on Mr. Locke’s enterprise, I don’t think anything of the kind is needed to manufacture sentiment on behalf of the players….
In 1890, when Judge Denis O’Brien ruled in favor of John Ward in a test of the reserve clause and the Giants’ request for injunctive relief, Locke composed an original poem for Sporting Life celebrating the victory: “A Case in Point; or, How We Thrashed ‘em.”
Later in the decade he wrote a libretto for a comic opera called Kettledrum, produced in Indianapolis. In a few years he would shift his attention to songwriting, collaborating with composer Barclay Walker, also of Indianapolis. Among the sheet music offerings are such plaintive tunes as “When Baby Combs My Hair,” “The Home of My Childhood,” “Mullaly’s Groc’ry Bill” — for which Locke provided both lyrics AND music — and, lest we forget, “He Was Looking for His Daughter in New York.” Alas, there are other works left unmentioned.
Baseball called again in 1908, when Locke published a parody of that season’s sensational hit, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Still fixated on free silver and Trust-busting, Locke offered “Daddy’s Rooting for Bryan.”
Daddy’s rooting for Bryan!
All the Trusts are for Taft —
Guess we won’t make that old Beef Trust pack!
We don’t care if it never gets back!
Then it’s root, root, root, boys, for Bryan!
If graft should win it’s a shame!
But its one-two-three strikes and out
For that old Trust game!
Other songs followed, on up until at least 1925, when Locke was 68. But in following the chronology of Locke’s career I have skipped over the work for which he is known in music circles to this day, even though he surely did not write it from “out of his head.” That song is “The Big Rock Candy Mountains,” well known to fans of Burl Ives and Pete Seeger. The song may have been published in the late 1890s by Harry McClintock (a.k.a. “Haywire Mac”), as he claimed, but in 1906 Marshall Locke and Charles Tyner set it down on paper and secured the copyright, publishing it via the Rock Candy Music Company of Indianapolis. (The Harry McClintock rendition of 1928, the song’s first recording, was included in the soundtrack for the 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?)
In truth, “The Big Rock Candy Mountains” was written on the wind. Like baseball, it has no lone genius as its creator. A ballad called “The Dying Hobo” was published in 1895, before either Locke or McClintock set it down, but the song may be traced to English and Scottish folk ballads perhaps a hundred years earlier. Here’s “a Hobo Poet,” followed by a verse from Locke’s version of “The Big Rock Mountains”:
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
There’s a land that’s fair and bright,
Where the handouts grow on bushes,
And you sleep out every night.
Where the boxcars all are empty,
And the sun shines every day
On the birds and the bees,
And the cigarette trees,
And the lemonade springs
Where the bluebird sings
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
Locke’s “magnum opus” is a return to the outcast, vagabond class with which he had always aligned. The dream, realized only in death, is to return.
Return to what? A romantically imagined past: one’s childhood, perhaps, or an idealized Eden. Both are summed up in baseball’s best word and place: Home.
