I have always loved thoroughbred horse racing. I mean, I love sports in general: baseball (Yankees), football (Giants), real football - aka "soccer" (Arsenal, from north London), hockey (Islanders). But there's a difference with horse racing. Because the bettors are so much a part of the sport, you feel involved in racing in a way that's hard to compare to just sitting in a seat rooting for your team to win. In racing, you're rooting for YOU to win.
Of course, you can gamble on other sports, but I'm actually not a gambling man, except for the races. The Daily Racing Form, the racegoer's bible, gives you tons of info on each horse in each race, so the thing becomes a kind of intellectual challenge: here are 20 horses; here's everything they've done so far; here's some info on their jockeys and trainers, their sires and dams, and how well they've been exercising lately. We've given you this information, and everyone else has it too. Now you decide: which of these 20 will be this year's Kentucky Derby winner?
But being a racing fan can be somewhat lonely. Except for the Kentucky Derby and the rest of the Triple Crown, and perhaps the Breeders Cup races in the Fall, most Americans don't notice horse racing anymore. That's why I like the first Saturday in May, when people start singing "My Old Kentucky Home" and "Camptown Races" and "Fugue For Tinhorns" (better known as "I Got The Horse Right Here" from Guys And Dolls). These are songs that remind us of a time when horse racing was a big part of American popular culture. Now, if you want to recapture that feeling, you have to go to Saratoga in August. (This, by the way, is why I go to Saratoga every August.) There, everyone seems to be talking about the day's races, or the next day's races - the clearly well-off couple at the hotel bar, the harried parents with their kids at the table next to you, the guys at the gas station pumps, and of course the newspapers in the Capitol District, where the races are front page news each day of the month. It's like the famous NY Times sportwriter Red Smith once wrote: to get to Saratoga, take the NY Thruway north to Exit 13, make a left, and go back 100 years.
I could go on - and have, in the book Bloodlines: A Horse Racing Anthology, where my chapter recounts some of the misadventures of a lifelong horseplayer - but the point is, horse racing used to be important to Americans as a people, and that's reflected in the amount of songs, and even full-length musicals, that were written about horses and tracks and the people who worked and gambled there. But all of that was way before my time, so this Saturday's Kentucky Derby gives me an excuse to look back at a part of American musical history that's largely forgotten too.
Tell us: Do you have a favorite song about horse-racing?
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John Schaefer has hosted Soundcheck since the show’s inception in 2002. He has also hosted and produced WNYC’s radio series New Sounds since 1982 (“The No. 1 radio show for the Global Village” – Billboard) and the New Sounds Live concert series since 1986.
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