The record deal came down to a single demand, a challenge from Marvin Holtzman, the A&R director at Epic Records, to Ted Worner, a New York press agent with an idea for a novelty song.
“We’ll do it if you can get me Willie Mays to appear on the record,” Holtzman said.
Worner paused.
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll get Willie.”
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It was 1954, and Mays, 23, was already morphing from precocious baseball star to cultural icon. He graced the cover of Time Magazine that July. He won the World Series in the fall, making The Catch in the process. His catalog of endorsements included sunglasses, furniture and Minute Maid. Just three years after his rookie campaign with the New York Giants, Mays was omnipresent in the American imagination — his MVP form chronicled in the morning papers, his neighborhood stickball prowess covered in national magazines.
Amid the mania, Worner, an eccentric PR man, had come up with a plan to capture the moment in song. Worner had no experience in the music industry and little in the way of musical talent. But one thing he did have was a relationship with Willie Mays, a connection that was forged at Rickwood Field, the site of Thursday’s “Tribute to the Negro Leagues” between the Giants and Cardinals — an event that turned into a memorial for Mays following his death on Tuesday at 93.
In the fall of 1953, Worner was busy promoting Jackie Robinson’s major-league All-Stars during an offseason barnstorming tour of the south. The series, which Worner had worked on for years, included a stop in Birmingham, where local authorities — including commissioner of public safety Bull Connor — prohibited Black and White players from playing on the same field. This time, Robinson’s All-Star team was integrated, featuring a select number of White players, including Dodgers teammates Gil Hodges and Ralph Branca. As Worner and Robinson relented, and Hodges, Branca and others prepared to spend the game in the Rickwood bleachers, Mays — at home in Alabama on military leave — emerged as an unofficial replacement, collecting two hits and charming the Birmingham crowd.
When Mays returned to the major leagues for the 1954 season, the buzz was palpable. He had missed most of the 1952 season and all of 1953 while serving in the military. Worner, fresh off the experience at Rickwood, had a project in mind — a musical tribute to the “Say Hey Kid.” He went to work building a Motley crew. He enlisted a young composer named Jane Douglass to write the music. He found a journalist named Dick Kleiner to crank out the lyrics. According to his son Peter, Kleiner was a Dodgers fan who was left brokenhearted when the club eventually left for Los Angeles. But he pushed aside his fandom and penned the song’s refrain: “That Giants kid is great.”
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“I don’t know of (any) other published songs,” Peter Kleiner said.
When Epic Records agreed to a record deal, the result was “Say Hey (The Willie Mays Song),” a novelty recording performed by The Treniers, an R&B group from Alabama, and arranged by a young Quincy Jones, who would go on to become one of the most legendary producers in music history.
“Willie Mays the biggest there was back then …,” Jones wrote in 2015. “I produced this song, although I don’t think they gave me credit except for (the) arrangement.”
The sound of the record harkens back to a different era in music, one on the eve of rock ‘n’ roll and still predicated on regional markets and tastes. The song channels the blues of Big Joe Turner and the R&B of Ray Charles. Yet there is another unmistakable ’50s aesthetic.
“It’s a novelty song,” said Jack Hamilton, a professor of American studies at the University of Virginia and the author of Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination. “Novelty records have always been big. They really have existed for as long as people have been trying to sell records. But in the ’50s, I would argue they were more prominent than in the eras we currently live in.”
Released in the summer of 1954, the creation of “Say Hey” presaged another national trend: the arrival of Mays as more than a ballplayer. He was not just a preternaturally gifted center field with a blend of power and speed. He was becoming a cultural force, another superstar in baseball’s golden age, a poster child for a changing America. As James Hirsch noted in his biography of Mays, “Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend,” by the summer of ’54, Sports Illustrated had already declared Mays as “one of the all-time greats.”
It wasn’t just the sports writers. There were three different songs written about Mays in 1954 alone — the King Odom Quartet released “Amazing Willie Mays,” while “Say Hey Willie Mays” was recorded by the Wanderers. What perhaps set apart the Treniers’ recording of “Say Hey” was the voice of Mays, who appeared in a short skit during the intro, where he refers to teammate Monte Irvin.
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To promote the song, Epic Records sent Janis Paige, a Broadway star, to do a photo op with Mays at the Polo Grounds. It played on radios across the city that summer, though it wasn’t quite the smash hit that Worner expected. It found new life, however, when it appeared in Ken Burns’ “Baseball” documentary in 1994, and in the years that followed its release, Mays’ stature as a crossover star only grew. He appeared in sitcoms and on late-night shows. He added more endorsements to his stable. What other baseball players could say they were name-dropped by artists as different as Chuck D, Chuck Prophet, and John Fogerty? As the actress and Giants fan Tallulah Bankhead famously said, “There have only been two authentic geniuses in the world, Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare.”
After the release of “Say Hey,” the people who came together to record it never worked together again. Worner went back to his day job as a press agent. The Treniers didn’t find success on the charts but helped fully integrate the entertainment scene in Las Vegas. Douglass kept composing songs and became an assistant producer on the television show “Name That Tune.” Kleiner moved to Los Angeles and wrote about Hollywood.
And on Thursday night, seven decades later, baseball returned to Rickwood Field, the stadium where Mays once played, and, say hey, the roots of a song were born.
(Photo of Willie Mays taking batting practice on June 24, 1954: John Lent / Associated Press)