From the very beginning, this song has always had a special resonance and meaning beyond its context and function within the score for Carousel. During the musical's original Broadway run, with the world at war, many in the audiences who had a husband, a brother, a son or a lover fighting overseas, found solace in its meaning and its message.

In addition to numerous recordings of the song on Carousel cast albums and the motion picture soundtrack, "You'll Never Walk Alone" has been recorded by dozens of pop, rock, gospel, country western, and opera stars, including: Louis Armstrong, Chet Atkins, Shirley Bassey, Glen Campbell, Ray Charles, Perry Como, Michael Crawford, Placido Domingo, Aretha Franklin, Judy Garland, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Marilyn Horne, Mahalia Jackson, Patti LaBelle, Cleo Laine, Mario Lanza, Darlene Love, Jim Nabors, Olivia Newton John, Pink Floyd, Elvis Presley, The Righteous Brothers, Nina Simone, Frank Sinatra, Kiri Te Kanawa, Conway Twitty and Dionne Warwick.

"You'll Never Walk Alone" has a unique history in Great Britain where it was adopted as an anthem of the Liverpool Football Club and has, over the decades become a standard at virtually every British soccer stadium. True to the song's intent, it has also provided inspiration in times of peril, and has served as a potent fundraiser for causes borne out of disaster. In 1985, for instance, a recording of "You'll Never Walk Alone" featuring British pop and rock stars, was put together to raise funds for victims of the Bradford Stadium Tragedy and did; the song was a Number One single in Britain throughout the summer of 1985, and raised hundreds of thousand of pounds for the cause.

In the United States in recent years, "You'll Never Walk Alone" long associated with Jerry Lewis' Labor Day Muscular Dystrophy telethons, has also been adopted by such causes as Hurricane Andrew relief and the annual national AIDS Walk campaigns. Marilyn Horne, Joan Baez and others have sung You'll Never Walk Alone at AIDS Walk rallies in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Chicago, and in 1992 Patti LaBelle made a new recording of the song for a national AIDS Walk public service announcement. Bringing the song full circle, at the 1994 AIDS Walk New York, Shirley Verrett and the cast of the Broadway production of Carousle sang "You'll Never Walk Alone" on the Great Lawn in Central Park before a crowd of 30,000.

From Rec.Arts Communications.