Bang the Drum Slowly was a sequel to The Southpaw (1953), with A Ticket for a Seamstitch (1957) and It Looked Like For Ever (1979), completing the tetralogy of baseball novels by Harris.

For this novel, Harris chose to write it in the vernacular of pitcher Henry Wiggen, who narrates the story in an inimitable fashion.

The version of the song that he sings contains the lyrics, "Oh bang the drum slowly and play the fife lowly, and play the dead march as you carry me along..."[7][8] Harris's narrator Henry "Author" Wiggen, a star pitcher, tells the story of a baseball season with the New York Mammoths, a fictional team based on the New York Giants, as noted in the author's book Diamond: The Baseball Writings of Mark Harris.

"[9] New York Times sports columnist George Vecsey, wrote about the book; “[it] has one of the loveliest last lines in American literature, a regret from Wiggen for the way the players made fun of a slow-witted and now-dead teammate: ‘From here on in, I rag nobody.’”[1] Cordelia Candelaria, author of Seeking the Perfect Game: Baseball in American Literature, rated The Southpaw and Bang the Drum Slowly among the top five baseball novels ever written.

The TV adaptation was faithful to the first-person singular style of the novel, by having Wiggen (Newman) periodically step out of the movie to address the audience.

[3] Harris wrote the screenplay for the 1973 film adaptation, with Michael Moriarty portraying Wiggen, Robert De Niro as Pearson and Vincent Gardenia as manager Dutch Schnell.

De Niro was nominated and won Best Supporting Actor, from the New York Film Critics Circle for his role of Pearson.