"Sweet Caroline" was written and performed by Neil Diamond and released as a single with the title "Sweet Caroline (Good Times Never Seemed So Good)".

Diamond, known to be a great manipulator of the media, has shifted his story about this song to fit the occasion.  There was longtime speculation that the song is about Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of the President John F. Kennedy.  Diamond has since revealed that this Caroline gave him the idea for the song name but had nothing to do with the song's inspiration.

Diamond originally said that he was a young, broke songwriter in the '60s when he saw a cute photo of Caroline Kennedy in a magazine. Said Diamond:  "It was a picture of a little girl dressed to the nines in her riding gear, next to her pony.  It was such an innocent, wonderful picture, I immediately felt there was a song in there."  A few years later, Diamond wrote the song in a Memphis hotel in less than an hour.  Caroline was 11 years old when the song was released.

Diamond kept that tidbit to himself for years and only broke the news after performing the song at Kennedy’s 50th birthday in 2007. "I’m happy to have gotten it off my chest and to have expressed it to Caroline," Diamond said. "I thought she might be embarrassed, but she seemed to be struck by it and really, really happy."

The plot thickened in 2014, however, as Diamond told the gang at NBC’s TODAY that the song is really about his first wife, Marsha.  "I couldn’t get Marsha into the three-syllable name I needed,” Diamond said.  "So, I had Caroline Kennedy’s name from years ago in one of my books. I tried ‘Sweet Caroline,’ and that worked."

Released in 1969, "Sweet Caroline" rose to #4 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Even though the song has nothing to do with the Boston Red Sox, baseball or New England, it is played at Red Sox home games in Fenway Park before the Red Sox bat in the 8th inning.  Amy Tobey, who worked the music at Fenway, first started playing the song in 1997 - it's often reported that she played it in honor of a Red Sox employee who named her newborn daughter "Caroline," but Tobey told NPR that she simply liked the song.  It caught on with the fans, becoming a popular selection between innings where it has been played ever since.

Various Sources