Last night I was doing research for a lecture I am going to give when I guide a trip to Nashville next fall. Nashville is most famous for the Grand Ole Opry and performers like Bill Monroe so I was looking at the history of Blue Grass – Monroe is the acknowledged creator of this form of music – and all of a sudden I was into baseball. Hard to imagine, but when a lecturer and college instructor begins researching the path can lead a number of directions. The passage from the book, Bluegrass, by Neil Rosenberg caught my attention was: “ At about this time Monroe added a new dimension to his show, taking advantage of his love of baseball to reconstitute the band as a baseball team. While the crew setting up the tent show finished their job (they traveled in advance of the band), Monroe or one of his band members would issue a challenge to the local ball club. Fiddler Jim Shumate, with Monroe in 1944-1945, recalls that “we had good crowds just for a ball game. We had a lot of fun. We played for keeps and had a good team. We had uniforms and everything. I played shortstop.” Former pro-ball player Clyde Moody pitched and Monroe, who would, but for his poor sight, “have liked to be a baseball player”…”

They would often have their tent show music right at the ball field and after the concert the musicians would change clothes and the ball game would commence. One of the band members said that “having the ball team was good for our spirit; it helped build morale in the band.” These road trips could be up to six months long and that wears on any performer so diversion was very important.

The concerts were very popular and the games probably drew more fans than most minor league games did. Monroe liked it so much that he formed two ball teams, one permanently in Nashville called the Bluegrass Ballclub, and one that toured – the Bluegrass All-Stars.

This was the age of barnstorming teams – image Ruth and Gehrig coming to your town to play against a local team! It was also an age when every town had a team. America was truly the National Past time and Monroe’s teams fit right in with the era. They would drive 3000 miles a week making their tent shows and ball games, always getting back to Nashville for Saturday night on Grand Ole Opry. With 5 or 6 games a week the team would play over 110 games a year.

Monroe loved to reminisce about the club, “When we would come to bat, we had two men that could, mind you, get on base. They was hard to get out. The third man, you couldn’t strike him out hardly at all – he could hit that ball. The cleanup man and the fifth man was mighty at drivin’ in runs. It was hard to get by them first five men up there. And we also had two men who could steal home.”

Monroe was not the first nor the only one to have a ball team. Louis Armstrong had a team called the Secret Nine and Cab Calloway Band’s team included both Cab and his bass player. These two black owned teams were before Monroe, but what set Monroe apart was the fact that he was White and no other white bands did this at that time. Later Tom Dorsey would sponsor a team as well as Lionel Hampton and Harry James.

Monroe’s biggest regret was that his team was scheduled to play The House of David Team and they cancelled the game. He really wanted that one, it would have felt like the majors to him. Monroe had arranged to have Dizzy Dean play for them if that game had taken place.

By the 1950s television changed things. Fewer fans went to see minor league teams play and there were fewer town ball teams. Monroe said, “It seemed like baseball kinda played out. I don’t really know what happened to it right there, but a in a lot of cities it just stopped.” Television would create new issues for the nation and for the sport. New revenue streams, more rich and poor teams, access to MLB in minor league cities. Monroe looked back at this change and said, “They’re a lot alike-it seems like the people that loves baseball are the people that loves bluegrass music.”

It is hard to imagine any sport being so ingrained into a national psyche the way baseball was. Maybe soccer in most countries has this status now, but in the first half of the twentieth century baseball was everywhere and the ultimate trip to the majors came through townball, school sports, semi-pro, minor league, independent leagues and finally the limited sixteen major league teams. The best of competitive athletes were baseball players.

http://research.sabr.org/journals/bluegrass-baseball-barnstorming-band-and-ball-club

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/266309/pdf