Baseball Songs on Vinyl, Vol. 1: "The Baseball Serenade"
"The Baseball Serenade" by Gabby, The Baseball Serenader
When you obsess over things like I do — Baseball, Tiki drinks, Frankenstein, the Twist — you naturally want to know everything about them. Sometimes you reach the end of knowledge about a particular thing. It’s jarring.
Let me go back a bit.
When A) one is limited to one’s own 1200 square foot home because of a Global Pandemic, and B) one has no children, one realizes one has oodles of time to murder.
A Virgo, such as myself, will organize their obsessions (when not researching cemeteries), which in this case was my record collection. Enter the Angel/Demon that is DISCOGS. This is a seemingly helpful website, where one can log and organize their records. Delightful, I’ll do that. Turns out, I own 1,127 records (albums and singles). Cool. Now, I won’t accidentally buy something I already have. Cool cool. Oh, hey, there’s a marketplace. I can sell the records I don’t listen to any more? Great, I’m limited on space. I’ll do that. This is amazing!
EXCEPT FOR ONE THING. There’s also… a wishlist, called ITEMS I WANT. Oh no. Oh no no no no no.
That number is a very large number. As the saying goes, find someone who loves you like I love obscure, weird, old vinyl records.
A limiting faction was needed. A governor. Like on a rental truck that can’t go over 55 mph. I would only search Discogs for the aforementioned obsession: “Twist” records, “Halloween” records, and yes, “Baseball” records. By the way, I applied this governor early in my Discogs surfing. And I’ve still arrived at a very large number. God/Satan help me.
By the way, this is not going to be about “Centerfield.” I’m no CCR apologist, but John Fogerty can suck it for that terrible fucking song. Moving on.
So, one of my Tinker Taylor Soler Spiezio “beats” (ha) is going to be detailing the growing stack of obscure baseball songs on vinyl in my house. I’ll transfer them to digital, post ‘em on youtube, write about them.
First up is “The Baseball Serenade” by Gabby, The Baseball Serenader. Take a listen. Pretty fun.
This song was written in the 1960s; the single was released in the early 1990s (as best I can tell) on Fox Records out of Ft. Wayne, Indiana, a vanity label of sorts for Webb Foley, who was himself The Baseball Serenader. There’s more. Webb Foley was a stage name (combining Webb Pierce and Red Foley) for Don “Gabby” Hormann.
Hormann was, in fact, a semi-pro baseball player!
He played on several teams, but mostly notably for the Winona (MN) Chiefs from 1951-1954, where he was a catcher and outfielder.
In a column called The Casual Observer from the Winona Republican in May of 1951, writer Gretchen L. Lamberton wrote, “Catcher Gabby Hormann, who had been having a hilarious time taking movies of the boys in action, came over to pass the time of day. He’s a lean, quick-moving boy with laugh wrinkles and sun wrinkles around his eyes.”
In a 1958 season preview for the Huron (SD) Jims, he’s described thusly, “Bats and throws right, 5-11, weighs 185 and is single. No age listed. Played with pro and semi-pro teams since 1946. Batted .367 with Detroit Lakes (MN) last season and had .347 average with Valentine in 1956. Never batted below .300. Batted .306 with Salisbury, NC., in 1948 and was named most valuable player and most popular player.”
None of these teams were affiliated with MLB, so we have no Baseball Reference page, no baseball cards, no statistical compilation, to put his career on any kind of scale. Suffice it to say he was a popular and highly valuable player who had his ups and downs.
Hormann was sidelining as a Webb Foley, the singer, (occasionally dubbing himself The Baseball Serenader) as early as 1953. Foley released thirty or so singles over his decades-long career. No commercial hits, but if you’re a collector of Rockabilly compilations, you’ve heard “Be Bob Baby” (1956), “Little Bitty Mama” (1957), and the Johnny Cash sound-a-like “Makin’ a Plan” (1957).
Foley toured small clubs, military bases, and played anywhere he could, often with Dennis Puckett (“The Indiana Elvis”). From rockabillyhall.com, Puckett recalls, “We never rehearsed and he would pick up guys who said 'Hey, I play this or that.' We wound up with some real characters. Foley would get some girl to do the twist once in a while. I know he wasn't paid much. He pulled a trailer behind his Buick convertible. If we wanted to sleep, we'd go back there and put a canvas top over the instruments and have a sleep.”
For a man that lived an extraordinary life, the only obituary I can find is one comment on a blog from 2015, “Gabby died some years back. I chatted with his wife, etc.”
Woof. It’s the etc. that really gets you. I’m literally tearing up at the abbreviation of it.
We have the records, the 7” circles of vinyl. We have records of another sort, on scoresheets, and leaderboards, and in old newspapers. But still, I want more. So much more. It’s utterly, and I admit weirdly, heartbreaking that that’s end of the trail for Hormann/ Foley/ the Baseball Serenader. The trail ends with such nothingness. What a trail it must have been tho.
Here’s the b-side. The Baseball Serenader does spoken word comedy about the sport he clearly loved.
There’s a peak at my obsessions. Whatever your’s are, dig deep. That slim vein usually opens up into a chasm of cool shit, other like-minded weirdos, and records. So many records. Don’t forget to leave something behind.
Great read! He definitely deserves more than an etc!
I’m looking forward to your Baseball Project series!