It’s a deceptively difficult song to pull off in karaoke, what with the long vocal pauses for the synthesizer and the fact that there are so few notes. And the reality that you can’t even carry the few notes necessary to sing it. Still, “Sweet Caroline” is a crowd pleaser.
But who is this Caroline, with her hands reaching out, touching me, touching you? Songwriter and bedazzled performer Neil Diamond has finally revealed who inspired his greatest hit. And she’s not just any old Sweet Caroline ...
She’s Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg. Or, at least the little girl version of her.
Diamond explained:
“It was a picture of a little girl dressed to the nines in her riding gear, next to her pony,” Neil Diamond recalled of seeing caroline Kennedy in a magazine. “It was such an innocent, wonderful picture, I immediately felt there was a song in there.”
He actually wrote the song years later. A smash hit. But he refused to say who it was about, until he could tell the Caroline in person, which he did last month when he performed via satellite at her 50th birthday party.
