LONDON — Sweet Caroline, one of Neil Diamond’s biggest hit songs, has been downloaded more than two million times and is one of the world’s most requested karaoke songs; as well as being covered by Frank Sinatra, Julio Iglesias and Elvis Presley, among others. The 74-year-old Diamond still sings it while on tour.

Yet the singer reportedly didn’t actually want to record the song that was officially released as a single on June 28, 1969. Sweet Caroline, which was arranged by the respected arranger Charles Calello, was recorded at American Sound Studio in Memphis, Tennessee. In his book Memphis Boys, author Ruben Jones interviewed lead guitarist Reggie Young, who said: “We all loved that song. We knew Sweet Caroline was a hit when we cut it but I don’t think Neil Diamond was really pleased with the arrangement.”

Drummer Gene Chrisman said: “Neil didn’t even want to cut Caroline.”

Tommy Cogbill, the bass player who was also part of the studio’s house rhythm section, was even more adamant: “Neil didn’t like the song at all,” he said. “I actually remember him not liking it and not wanting it to be a single.”

However, upon its release, Sweet Caroline quickly went platinum, with sales of one million singles, and it reached No 4 on the Billboard chart and No 8 on the United Kingdom singles chart in 1971. Diamond has given different accounts of the origin of the song. At one point, he said it was about his second wife, Marcia Murphey, whom he married in 1969 (they divorced in 1995). He needed a three-syllable name to fit the melody, however, so “Sweet Marcia” didn’t work. He had written down Caroline and decided it fit the song structure perfectly, so that’s what he used.

However, in 2007, he told the Associated Press that the inspiration for his song was John F Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline, who was 11 years old at the time it was released. “I’ve never discussed it with anybody before — intentionally,” he said. “I thought maybe I would tell it to Caroline when I met her someday. I’m happy to have gotten it off my chest and to have expressed it to Caroline. I thought she might be embarrassed, but she seemed to be struck by it and really, really happy.”

Diamond said he was a young, impoverished songwriter when he saw a photograph of Caroline Kennedy in a magazine. “It was a picture of a little girl dressed to the nines in her riding gear, next to her pony,” said Diamond. “It was such an innocent, wonderful picture, I immediately felt there was a song in there.”

In 2007, Diamond performed the song via satellite at Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg’s 50th birthday party. Kennedy, the only surviving child of the former president, is now United States’ ambassador to Japan. THE DAILY TELEGRAPH