By Kenneth Partridge, Mental Floss | The story of Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” has it all: love, baseball, Kennedys, Frank Sinatra, Elvis, and the triumph of the human spirit. It’s pop’s answer to the national anthem, and as any karaoke belter or Boston Red Sox fan will tell you, it’s way easier to sing than “The Star-Spangled Banner.” As the song celebrated its 50th birthday in 2019, now’s a good time—so good, so good, so good—to dig into the rich history of a tune people will still be singing in 2069.
“Where it began, I can’t begin to knowing,” Diamond sings in the song’s iconic opening lines. Except the “where” part of this story is actually pretty simple: Diamond wrote “Sweet Caroline” in a Memphis hotel room in 1969 on the eve of a recording session at American Sound Studio. By this point in his career, Diamond had established himself as a fairly well-known singer-songwriter with two top-10 hits—”Cherry Cherry” and “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon”—to his name. He’d also written “I’m a Believer,” which The Monkees took to #1 in late 1966.
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The “who,” as in the identity of the “Caroline” immortalized in the lyrics, is the much juicier question. In 2007, Diamond revealed that he was inspired to write the song by a photograph of Caroline Kennedy, daughter of John F. Kennedy, that he saw in a magazine in the early ’60s, when he was a “young, broke songwriter.”
“It was a picture of a little girl dressed to the nines in her riding gear, next to her pony,” Diamond told the Associated Press. “It was such an innocent, wonderful picture, I immediately felt there was a song in there.” Years later, in that Memphis hotel room, the song was finally born.
Perhaps because it’s a little creepy, Diamond kept that tidbit to himself for years and only broke the news after performing the song at Kennedy’s 50th birthday in 2007. “I’m happy to have gotten it off my chest and to have expressed it to Caroline,” Diamond said. “I thought she might be embarrassed, but she seemed to be struck by it and really, really happy.”
The plot thickened in 2014, however, as Diamond told the gang at NBC’s TODAY that the song is really about his first wife, Marsha. “I couldn’t get Marsha into the three-syllable name I needed,” Diamond said. “So I had Caroline Kennedy’s name from years ago in one of my books. I tried ‘Sweet Caroline,’ and that worked.”
It certainly did. Released in 1969, “Sweet Caroline” rose to #4 on the Billboard Hot 100. In the decade that followed, it was covered by Elvis Presley, soul great Bobby Womack, Roy Orbison, and Frank Sinatra. Diamond rates Ol’ Blue Eyes’ version the best of the bunch.
“He did it his way,” Diamond told The Sunday Guardian in 2011. “He didn’t cop my record at all. I’ve heard that song by a lot of people and there are a lot of good versions. But Sinatra’s swingin’, big-band version tops them all by far.”
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Read the whole story here:
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/unraveling-the-many-mysteries-of-neil-diamond-s-sweet-caroline
Kenneth Partridge is a music and pop-culture writer based in Brooklyn. He’s written for such publications as Billboard, The AV Club, Pitchfork, and Refinery29. His hobbies include reading, running, shopping for records, and attempting to justify his love of ska.