You’ll Never Walk Alone: the surprisingly dark history behind Capt Tom Moore’s anthem

Few songs in the history of music can claim as many lives in as many different guises as You’ll Never Walk Alone. In its latest incarnation, recorded in aid of the NHS by Michael Ball, with its first verse spoken as introduction by the redoubtable 99-year-old Capt Tom Moore of garden-walking fame, it has raced to the top of the Official Chart this week, selling 82,000 copies – and becoming the fastest-selling single of the year

The idea for the recording was not original: only a month ago, the folk-rock band Mumford and Sons released their own version to raise funds for victims of coronavirus and war orphans, accompanied by a home video directed by Marcus Mumford’s wife, the actress Carey Mulligan. And that, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg: as well as over a hundred recorded covers, the song has long been an anthem for the football terraces, funerals and solemn occasions.

What is it about You’ll Never Walk Alone that seems to touch such a universal chord in people’s hearts?

The song started life in 1945, as a climactic number in Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s musical Carousel. It makes two appearances in the show – at the end of the first act, when it is sung by motherly Nettie Fowler to console grieving Julie Jordan after her husband Billy Bigelow is killed during a botched robbery; and then reprised at the end of the second act, when Billy and Julie’s anxious daughter Louise is graduating from high school and in need of courage as she embarks on adult life.

Despite the simplicity of Hammerstein’s chin-up verse, Rodgers – happiest when composing waltzes – is said to have found the theme very difficult to set to music. His solution was inspired, however: a perfect match of melody and sentiment through a march in 4/4 time that also swells and subsides like a sob. Combining both optimism and melancholy, it resembles favourite hymns such as “Eternal father, strong to save” or an operatic aria such as Puccini’s “Nessun dorma” in being gently inspiring and acknowledging the sadness of things while refusing to surrender to despair.

Exactly who or what accompanies us on our “walk” and prevents us from being alone remains unspecified – it might be faith in God, it might be our fellows. But underlying it is a message that everyone can understand: if we endure, hope will sustain us and something better will be our reward on the other side of the ordeal.

As its key position at the climax of both Carousel’s acts indicates, the song was carefully calculated to be a tear-jerker. When the crooner Mel Tormé told Rodgers that it made him cry, the composer replied tartly: “It’s supposed to.” But he was justly proud of the tune, and he and Hammerstein would successfully repeat the formula, with the same time-signature, when they created the similarly inspirational Something Wonderful for The King and I and Climb Ev’ry Mountain for The Sound of Music.

Carousel was successful from the get-go, its emotional tone being sensitively attuned to a post-war period so tragically laden with bereavement and a sense of the nobility of those who had been lost in combat. But in 1963, You’ll Never Walk Alone took on a new status, independent of its context in the musical, when it was covered in the first wave of the Merseybeat craze by Gerry and the Pacemakers. Lead singer Gerry Marsden had loved the song ever since he’d heard Claramae Turner boom it out in the movie version of Carousel when he was growing up: and after the band was gazumped over an early song by Lennon and McCartney, the old Rodgers and Hammerstein number was substituted at the last minute.

Nobody expected anything much to come of it – its churchiness hardly matched the youthful exuberance of the era – but it became a smash hit, spending four weeks at the top of the charts, just after She Loves You. In the wake of the song’s success, it was promoted by Liverpool FC’s warm-hearted manager Bill Shankly, and uninhibitedly roared before all home games on the Kop at Anfield (as it still is). In 1992 it all became official, as the song’s title was adopted as the motto on the club’s badge.

Rodgers is said to have disapproved strongly when he heard reports of the mass chanting, and consulted his lawyers to see if he could put a stop to what he considered a travesty of his musical intentions – his friend, the great Broadway chanteuse Barbara Cook, explained that “Dick was very fastidious about how his songs were performed.”

To no avail: the song acquired even greater resonance following the Hillsborough disaster of 1989, in which so many Liverpool fans died and were subsequently blamed for their own deaths. A bewildering variety of other sports clubs have also adopted the song – among them football teams in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Greece, Spain, Japan and Bali, as well as an ice hockey team in Croatia.

You’ll Never Walk Alone is something we can all sing, and that is one of the reasons for its status: it’s not technically difficult, and Hammerstein’s lyrics stick indelibly once imprinted. But it can be sung well or badly, and here tastes will differ. Michael Ball gives it a no-nonsense direct belt; Marcus Mumford takes a more quietly subtle and imaginative approach.

Beyond these two newbies in the field, you can take your pick for style and gender. Rodgers envisaged it being sung grandly by an operatic contralto, and the recording of the first Broadway Nettie, Christine Johnson, evokes Dame Clara Butt throbbing out Land of Hope and Glory. Many opera stars in all vocal ranges have subsequently entered the field, among them Shirley Verrett, Kiri Te Kanawa, Bryn Terfel, the Three Tenors, Renee Fleming and Joyce DiDonato. All of them over-egg it, and none sounds altogether comfortable; the lighter Broadway voices of Barbara Cook, Audra MacDonald, Bernadette Peters and Josh Groban sound more natural and somehow dig a bit deeper into the words.

Others take a freer approach with the rhythms, breaking up its four-squareness. Aretha Franklin is magnificent, of course – she gives it not only heart but also soul, and makes you feel that you should stand to attention. For cocktail-time relaxation, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand are all super-smooth.

Notable rock versions include those by Pink Floyd, where the sound of the song being chanted on the Liverpool terraces is fed into the track Fearless on their 1971 album Meddle, and by Kevin Rowland of Dexy’s Midnight Runners, who sang it touchingly on My Beauty, his comeback album after a decade lost to drugs. Punk bands such as The Adicts have been less successful – their deconstructions of the song seem like parodies rather than tributes, and this is a song that you can’t sing ironically without leaving it sounding banal.

Perhaps the power of You’ll Never Walk Alone is best summed up by Marcus Mumford: “It has identifiable emotions but avoids being obvious. It shows that a great melody needs great lyrics to breathe longevity into it. It’s an example of greatness to any aspiring songwriter.”