Swing Time: A Celebration of Golf and Music 1870-1939

Winner of the 2022 Murdoch Medal

Winner of the 2022 ISHY Award for Sports Book of the Year

From the 1870s until the start of the Second World War, leading American and British composers and lyricists created a profusion of songs and sheet music with golf themes. Though largely unknown today, a thriving tradition of golf music led to the publication of more than 600 golf songs during these decades. Once hugely popular, selling tens of thousands and in a few cases millions of copies, this remarkable corpus of golf music tells extraordinary stories about the connections between golf and popular culture.

Swing Time: A Celebration of Golf and Music 1870-1939 is a lavishly illustrated survey of golf music that features more than 200 golf songs, many created as stand-alone songs and some written to accompany theatrical productions and early films. Many of these songs were written by the premier composers and lyricists of the day; leading artists created the beautifully illustrated covers. The ephemeral nature of sheet music has rendered examples of golf sheet music exceedingly rare; only a single known copy survives for many of the songs featured in this volume. Most of songs highlighted in the book are published here for the first time for modern audiences.

Written by Dr. Rand Jerris and Peter Lewis, two of the game’s premier historians, Swing Time illuminates a rich tradition of golf music that runs long and deep, across every continent where the game is played. (Hardcover) 324 pages.

Recognizing Swing Time as a major literary contribution and the year’s most outstanding publication on golf history, Jerris and Lewis received the 2022 Murdoch Medal, the British Golf Collectors Society’s most prestigious award.

Please note there is no Member discount for this book. 100% of the sale price of every copy of Swing Time will be donated to the USGA Foundation to support the mission and activities of USGA Golf Museum and Library.

For all Swing Time order destinations to the UK and Europe, please order via Grant Books Ltd.