26 July 2008
The Birth of Tin Pan Alley
The music publishing business coalesces in Manhattan
(The following is excerpted from the U.S. Department of State publication, American Popular Music.)
By the end of the 19th century, the American music publishing business had become centered in New York City. The established publishers, who had made their fortunes in classical music and genteel parlor songs, were, from around 1885 on, challenged by smaller companies specializing in the more exciting popular songs performed in dance halls, beer gardens, and theaters.
These new publishing firms – many of them founded by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe – had offices along a stretch of Manhattan’s 28th Street that became known as “Tin Pan Alley,” a term that evoked the clanging sound of many pianos simultaneously playing songs in a variety of keys and tempos. The 1890s saw the rise of the modern American music business, an industry that aimed to provide “hits” for an expanding urban mass market. For the first time, a single song could sell more than a million copies.
By the turn of the century vaudeville, a popular theatrical form descended from music hall shows and minstrelsy, had become the most important medium for popularizing Tin Pan Alley songs. Vaudeville shows consisted of a series of performances – singers, acrobats, comedians, jugglers, dancers, animal acts, and so on. Every city had at least one vaudeville theater.
Tin Pan Alley songs dominated the American music industry for almost 70 years. The romantic parlor song remained popular, as did “Irish” and waltz songs. Plantation songs, descended from the minstrel song tradition, were also popular. One of the best-known and most successful composers of plantation songs was James A. Bland (1854-1911), the first commercially successful black songwriter. Bland wrote some 700 songs and became popular in Europe. In stylistic terms, Bland’s songs are similar to those of his white contemporaries. Although Bland has been criticized by some later observers for pandering to white misconceptions about blacks and lionized by others for his supposed championing of “authentic” African-American music, the real situation is more complex. Bland, the product of a comfortable middle-class home, was determined to achieve the same level of economic success as his white contemporaries. Like many other black musicians who sought access to mass markets, he had to work through the imagery of blackness already established in mainstream popular music.
[This article is excerpted from American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, published by Oxford University Press, copyright (2003, 2007), and offered in an abridged edition by the Bureau of International Information Programs.]
