Most Liverpool supporters could sing You’ll Never Walk Alone in their sleep, yet a fair few would struggle to tell you where it actually came from. The answer surprises some people. Before it belonged to the Kop, it belonged to Broadway, with the journey it took to get from a New York stage to the Anfield terraces being one of the odder stories in football. The song was written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II for their musical Carousel, which opened in New York in 1945. It was the pair’s follow-up to Oklahoma!, and it is not the cheeriest of shows.
@rodgersandhammerstein You’ll never walk alone. 💙 #carousel #musical #film #liverpool #liverpoolfc #fyp ♬ Youll Never Walk Alone from Carousel – Rodgers & Hammerstein
The song arrives at one of the darkest points in the story during the stage show, sung to console the character Julie after the death of her husband, Billy. The whole point of it is comfort in the middle of grief, which is worth remembering given where it eventually ended up. Over the following years, it became a standard that all sorts of singers had a go at, from Frank Sinatra onwards. By the early 1960s, it was simply a well-known tune, with no connection to football whatsoever. That was about to change, though, and it would change because of a band from Liverpool.
Gerry & the Pacemakers Take it to Number One
Gerry & the Pacemakers were a Merseybeat group managed by Brian Epstein, the same man who looked after The Beatles. In the October of 1963, they released their version of You’ll Never Walk Alone, and it went straight to the top of the charts in the United Kingdom, staying at number one for four weeks. A song from a 1945 American musical had become a hit record sung in a Scouse accent. You can see why the city took to it.
Here is the part that a lot of people don’t know. Back then, the powers that be at Anfield used to play the week’s top ten singles over the tannoy before kick-off. It became commonplace for those in attendance to sing along with the number one record. When a single made by a local band reached the very top of the charts, the Kop did what any proud set of supporters would do and sang along at full volume. That was in the 1963-1964 season, and the timing could hardly have been better. Yet the interesting bit is what happened next.
As the weeks passed by, the single slipped down the charts and eventually fell out of the top ten altogether, so it stopped being played before games. The supporters were having none of it. They kept singing it anyway and complained when it disappeared from the pre-match playlist. A pop song that should have faded away like any other instead dug in and refused to leave. By the time Bill Shankly’s side were sweeping to the title, it had stopped being a chart hit and started being the song that we all know and love as part of our pre-match ritual.
Shankly himself understood exactly what he had on his hands. The words were later set into the wrought iron of the Shankly Gates, unveiled in 1982, and You’ll Never Walk Alone was eventually woven into the club crest. Not bad for a tune that began life comforting a grieving widow in a musical. The other thing worth noting is that Liverpool didn’t keep it to themselves, even if they’d probably liked to have done so. Supporters of Celtic, Borussia Dortmund, Feyenoord and a handful of other clubs have all adopted it down the years, which tends to irritate some Reds no end.
That, of course, is the price of having an anthem good enough that everyone else wants a piece of it. When Gerry Marsden died in the January of 2021, tributes poured in from across football, and Anfield now carries a memorial to the man whose recording started it all. He didn’t write the song and he certainly didn’t write it for a football club. He just happened to sing the version that a city decided to make its own. Although Dortmund use a different, punkier, version, the meaning is very much still the same and the emotional resonance remains the same for them as for Liverpool fans.
Here are the lyrics that are belted out before, and sometimes after, the match:
When you walk through a storm,
Hold your head up high
And don’t be afraid of the dark.
At the end of a storm,
There’s a golden sky
And the sweet silver song of a lark.
Walk on through the wind,
Walk on through the rain,
Though your dreams be tossed and blown.
Walk on, walk on
With hope in your heart
And you’ll never walk alone.
You’ll never walk alone.
Walk on, walk on
With hope in your heart
And you’ll never walk alone.
You’ll never walk alone.
