Can a forgotten, 70-year-old song become the new White Sox anthem?

June 11, 2024

For years, it could only be found in those strange, forgotten corners of the Internet, those 1990s-era Geocities-style websites, the ones that fill your screen with a massive block of text, the ones where you have to actually click a blue link in order to download a WAV file to hear a song, because embedding technology didn’t really exist.

After four or five decades of total obscurity, that’s where “Go-Go Sox” — no, not that one — existed for the past 15-20 years.

Well, there and in the recesses of South Sider Anthony Brown’s brain.

“I was becoming obsessed with this song,” he said. “And I had been building a list of songs that I might like to record some day, maybe recording an album. I thought a good place to start to see if that would be viable would be to record one song. So why not ‘Go-Go Sox?’ Because that’s the one I’m most obsessed with at the time. And it’s timely with the White Sox being on the cusp, hopefully, of winning a championship, right?”

Most baseball fans and just about every Chicagoan have probably heard “Let’s Go, Go-Go White Sox,” the team’s fight song. The song, performed by Captain Stubby and the Buccaneers, caught fire in 1959 as the Sox won their first pennant since the Black Sox scandal in 1919, and has been a staple at Sox games ever since, joining the likes of “Go Cubs Go,” “Here Come The Hawks,” and “The Super Bowl Shuffle” among the great novelty songs in Chicago sports history.

But eight years before ol’ Captain Stubby made his mark on the city, a songwriter named Seymour Schwartz penned “Go-Go Sox,” a jazzy, swingy ode to the South Siders performed by Paul Mall and the Bleacher Boys. Opening with the enticing line, “Come with me to the South Side of Chicago …” the song never really caught on — the Sox finishing 17 games behind the first-place Yankees in 1951 might have had something to do with it — and faded into history.

Now, 70 years after the song debuted, the Sox are again chasing down a pennant and a World Series. So Brown, under the stage name Anthony Augustine, is trying to bring it back.

“The Sox were pretty good in 1951, but they weren’t as good as they were in subsequent years,” Brown said. “So ‘Go-Go Sox’ was bad timing by this guy. The stars didn’t quite align for that song at that time. But maybe they will now.”

So how does a UPS finance and accounting system supervisor become the potential voice for a World Series run? Well, Brown is a true renaissance man. (Full disclosure: he’s a longtime friend of mine, dating back more than 20 years to our days at Northwestern). And there aren’t many like him. He’s the kind of guy who wears a shirt that just reads “VERISIMILITUDE” on it, able to talk with equal depth and passion about baseball as he is tax policy or global geopolitics. He flirted with the idea of running for Congress a few years back, and would have made a hell of a candidate. And after years of working nights and weekends, one of the first things he did upon getting a “normal” job was turn his attention back to performing, something he hadn’t done since his college days. He acts in community theater, he sings in jazz clubs, and now, he’s chasing his dream of actually making music.

So Bradley Williams, a local jazz pianist with his own recording studio in Oak Park, laughed when Brown reached out to him a few months ago, sheepishly asking if Williams remembered him from a vocal workshop they attended at the Bloom School of Jazz a couple of years earlier.

“I told him, ‘You’re kind of a hard guy to forget,’” Williams recalled.

Brown sent Williams a scratchy MP3 of the original song, filled with odd-timed claps, baseball sound effects and shouted asides from some background voices. Williams termed it “boogie-woogie,” and went to work rearranging the song — tailoring it to Brown’s vocal range and imbuing it with more of a 1950s R&B sensibility. Williams rounded up some musicians on Brown’s dime, and the group recorded the song in just three takes. Brown released the song on Amazon, Spotify, Apple and other digital streaming services on Monday, cementing himself as an officially professional musician.

Williams actually worked on the soundtrack of a movie called “Wrigley Field: Beyond the Ivy” in 2001, but he’s not really a baseball guy.

He just dug the song.

“I certainly hope it catches on,” Williams said. “Novelty songs, particularly when you have a built-in audience like a baseball team, and historical credibility, they can work. And it’s great how there are so many of them. I love that part of Chicago. This one just kind of got overwhelmed by the (other) popular Sox song.”

Brown has hopes, but no expectations. Every time a song is streamed, it nets the artist some seven-tenths of a cent, so you need Taylor Swift numbers to make real money. The best-case scenario, Brown said, is for the song to get licensed by Fox to be played on a national broadcast during the playoffs, but he’d be content just to recoup the costs of the band and the studio time.

“I would be impressed if I broke even,” he said. “I guess you can say it’s a passion project.”

At 43 years old, Brown said he’s on a “dual track.” He feels fortunate simply to have the kind of stable job that allows him the opportunity to pursue more creative outlets. But for now, it remains a passion, not a career.

“I don’t have any delusions that I’m a performer or singer at the level of the people who have inspired me as a singer — I’m not Kurt Elling or Andy Bey,” he said. “I’m a pretty good singer. I think that I can be a very good singer. I think I can improve. But then, my chosen avenue for this is jazz, which is not exactly hugely mainstream. I’m not saying I would reject (the idea of pursuing a career in music) necessarily, but I’m at a point in my life where I don’t want to have to hustle.”

Whether or not his song ever finds its place among the other hallowed Chicago novelty songs remains to be seen. Just like Schwartz, the man who wrote the song seven decades ago, Brown’s fate is likely tied to that of the Sox.

So, the most important question of all: Will the Sox win the World Series?

“I have been incredibly impressed at their ability to find ways to win games with all the injuries they’ve had,” Brown said. “Their pitching staff has been very healthy, and the strength of the team. Put it this way: I really hope the White Sox win the World Series, because in the song it says, ‘You’re champs through and through.’ And I very much want that to be true.”

(Top photo of Anthony Brown courtesy of Paul Goyette Photography)

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