Source link : https://las-vegas-news.com/11-songs-that-became-unofficial-anthems-without-ever-being-written-as-one/
Some songs get written for a moment. Others get written for no particular moment at all, and then history hands them one anyway. Stadiums, protests, weddings, and locker rooms have a strange way of adopting music that was never meant to carry that kind of weight, turning personal lyrics into collective ones almost by accident.
What follows are eleven songs that took on a second life their writers never planned for. None of them set out to become a rallying cry. All of them ended up as one.
1. “Sweet Caroline” by Neil Diamond
Neil Diamond wrote this one in 1969, reportedly inspired by a young Caroline Kennedy, and for decades it was just a warm, catchy pop tune with no connection to sports at all. That changed at Fenway Park, where the tradition dates to 1997, when team employee Amy Tobey played “Sweet Caroline” in Fenway Park, since she knew someone who had recently given birth to a baby named Caroline.
For a few years it stayed occasional. Then executive Charles Steinberg pushed for it to become a fixture, and by the early 2000s it had become inseparable from the Red Sox experience, a staple of Fenway Park since 1997, and of the eighth inning stretch at Fenway Park since 2002. A song about a specific person became a stadium-wide singalong about nothing in particular except togetherness.
2. “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey
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Author : Matthias Binder
Publish date : 2026-09-10 07:24:00
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