Every Moment Has A Song

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Digging into Diamond’s inspiration and how the song became a staple at Fenway Park.

(via Mental Floss) by Kenneth Partridge

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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