KANNAPOLIS — Many summer nights, Dale Burris sat in the stands at Fieldcrest Cannon Stadium and listened to someone croon the national anthem before the minor-league baseball club took to the field.
But the 38-year-old Richfield man had no idea that he’d be standing by the first-base line Saturday delivering his rendition of the ode to broad stripes and bright stars. Not until his wife, Lori, told him last week.
“I was out of town on a business trip,” said Burris, “and when I came home, she said, ‘Guess what I signed you up to do.’ If it hadn’t been for her, I probably wouldn’t have been here.”
Burris joined 22 other folks from Rowan, Cabarrus and surrounding counties at the home of the Class A Kannapolis Intimidators to try out to open games with “The Star-Spangled Banner” this season.
Well, they weren’t so much trying out as warming up. Marshall Smith, the team’s community relations director, played master of ceremonies and explained that with 70 home games, they’ll all get a chance to shine.
“Nobody’s going to get aced out,” Smith said. Still, the team needed to hear them, so one by one and a cappella, singers took the microphone, their voices bouncing around the empty stadium over the public address system at the stadium.
The shyer singers — mostly women and girls — turned their backs to the small group of performers and supporters as they performed. Others, aspiring Mariah Careys, or at least Britney Spearses, seized the opportunity to give the august old song a completely new arrangement.
Some just did what came naturally.
“... O’er the land of the fweeee, and the hooome of the bwaaaave,” sang 4-year-old Arisa McDonald of Salisbury, as her mom, Lisa McDonald, hoisted her up to shoulder level.
Arisa, like her mom and others, has sung here before. In fact, Lisa McDonald wants to get her daughter into the Guinness Book of World Records as the youngest person ever to sing the anthem before a game, which she first did in 1999.
“I sang the big song that we sang today, and ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’ when I was 2 years old,” said Arisa. With little prompting, she went ahead and sang that seventh-inning-stretch standard to an audience of two standing on the stadium’s concrete steps. Her mom said Arisa knows more than 90 songs.
Others came a little less sure. Spencer Ann Bowden, 9, played the title role in “Annie” at her school, Salisbury Academy, and sang solo for Christmas at her church. But she almost talked herself out of singing Saturday.
“I couldn’t really make up my mind,” she said, adding that the prospect of singing before thousands made her nervous. “I never sang at a baseball game before.”
Even after arriving at the stadium, she hedged at getting on the field until her mom, Kim Bowden, promised to rent a limousine to bring her and eight friends to the game the night Spencer sings.
Spencer doesn’t know yet when that will be, because Smith said the team wants to match singers with particular themes for home games. Opening night, an A.L. Brown High School student will perform for Kannapolis Night.
Other nights during the season beginning April 5 will include recognitions for Salisbury, China Grove, Landis and Rowan-Cabarrus Community College.
Concord resident Betsy Quigley could sing on Concord Night or on Canada Night, if the team decides to hold one honoring her native country. She’d happily sing “O Canada,” and she hopes to get a gig doing that at a Charlotte Checkers minor-league hockey game.
The 42-year-old, who sang professionally with the Buffalo (N.Y.) Philharmonica “when I was younger,” calls herself a “baseball nut” who has performed this nation’s anthem at baseball games here and at hockey games in New York.
Burris, the Richfield resident, has been singing since he was 15 but has never performed the national anthem. But he explained its allure for singer or spectator, especially at an event as American as a baseball game.
“I like to get here in time for the anthem; it’s always a patriotic feeling,” he said. “It’s just a piece of Americana, coming to a baseball game and hearing the national anthem, much less singing it.”
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