Say Hey: The Willie Mays song with the connection to Rickwood Field in Birmingham

The record deal was based on a single requirement: Marvin Holtzman, A&R director at Epic Records, challenged New York press agent Ted Worner with the idea for a new song.

“We’ll do it if you can get Willie Mays to make an official appearance,” Holtzman said.

Wörner paused.

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll get Willie.”

It was 1954, and Mays, then 23, was already evolving from precocious baseball star to cultural icon. That July he graced the cover of Time magazine. That fall he won the World Series, becoming The Catch. His endorsement deals included sunglasses, furniture and Minute Maid. Just three years after his rookie season with the New York Giants, Mays was ubiquitous in the American imagination – his MVP form chronicled in morning newspapers, his neighborhood stickball skills covered in national magazines.

Amid the excitement, Worner, an eccentric public relations man, came up with a plan to capture the moment in song. Worner had no experience in the music industry and little musical talent. But he did have one thing: a relationship with Willie Mays, a bond that was formed at Rickwood Field, the site of Thursday’s “Tribute to the Negro Leagues” between the Giants and Cardinals – an event that became a memorial to Mays after his death Tuesday at age 93.

In the fall of 1953, Worner was busy promoting Jackie Robinson’s major league All-Stars during a tumultuous offseason tour of the South. The series, which Worner had worked on for years, included a stop in Birmingham, where local authorities — including Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor — banned black and white players from playing on the same field. This time, Robinson’s All-Star team was integrated and featured 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 stands, Mays — who was back home in Alabama on military leave — stepped in as an unofficial substitute, collecting two hits and charming the Birmingham crowd.

When Mays returned to the major leagues for the 1954 season, the excitement was palpable. He had missed most of the 1952 season and all of the 1953 season while serving in the military. Worner, fresh from the Rickwood experience, had a project in mind – a musical tribute to “Say Hey Kid.” He set to work assembling a motley crew. He hired a young composer named Jane Douglass to write the music. He found a journalist named Dick Kleiner to write the lyrics. According to his son Peter, Kleiner was a Dodgers fan who was heartbroken when the club eventually left for Los Angeles. But he put aside his fandom and wrote the song’s chorus: “That Giants boy is great.”

“I am not aware of any other published songs,” said Peter Kleiner.

When Epic Records agreed to a recording contract, “Say Hey (The Willie Mays Song)” was created, a novel recording performed by The Treniers, an R&B group from Alabama and arranged by the young Quincy Jones, who would become one of the most legendary producers in music history.

“Willie Mays was the greatest back then…” Jones wrote in 2015. “I produced this song, although I don’t think I was credited as a writer other than for the arrangement.”

The sound of the record recalls another era of music, an era on the eve of rock’n’roll that was still dictated by regional markets and tastes. The song recalls the blues of Big Joe Turner and the R&B of Ray Charles. And yet there is another unmistakable aesthetic of the ’50s.

“It’s a novelty song,” said Jack Hamilton, a professor of American studies at the University of Virginia and author of Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination. “Novelty records have always been big. They’ve been around for as long as people have been trying to sell records, really. But I would argue that they were more prominent in the ’50s than in the eras we live in today.”

The summer production of “Say Hey” announced another national trend: Mays was more than just a baseball player. He wasn’t just a preternaturally gifted center fielder with a blend of power and speed. He was becoming a cultural force, another superstar in baseball’s golden age, a poster boy for a changing America. As James Hirsch noted in his Mays biography, Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend, by the summer of 1954, Sports Illustrated had already declared Mays “one of the all-time greats.”

It wasn’t just the sportswriters. In 1954 alone, three different songs were written about Mays – the King Odom Quartet released “Amazing Willie Mays,” while “Say Hey Willie Mays” was recorded by the Wanderers. What perhaps set the Treniers’ recording of “Say Hey” apart was the voice of Mays, who appeared in a brief skit during the introduction in which he refers to teammate Monte Irvin.

To promote the song, Epic Records sent Broadway star Janis Paige to the Polo Grounds for a photo shoot with Mays. It played on radio around town that summer, but wasn’t quite the smash hit Worner had expected. But it found new life when it appeared in Ken Burns’ 1994 documentary Baseball, and in the years following its release, Mays’s reputation as a crossover star only grew. He appeared on sitcoms and late-night shows. He added more endorsements to his client list. What other baseball player could say he’d been mentioned by artists as diverse as Chuck D, Chuck Prophet and John Fogerty? Actress and Giants fan Tallulah Bankhead once said, “There have only been two true 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 returned to his day job as a press agent. The Treniers, while not successful on the charts, helped fully integrate themselves into the Las Vegas entertainment scene. Douglass continued to compose 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 hellothe roots of a song were born.

(Photo of Willie Mays at batting practice on June 24, 1954: John Lent / Associated Press)