29 July 2008
Giants of Tin Pan Alley
Many leading “standard” composers were Central and East European immigrants
(The following is excerpted from the U.S. Department of State publication, American Popular Music.)
Jewish immigrants, particularly from central and eastern Europe, played a central role in the early 20th-century music business, as composers, lyricists, performers, publishers, and promoters. In vaudeville and then throughout the entertainment industry, they often encountered less anti-Semitism than was present in other established businesses. As a result, many, but by no means all of the era’s most successful songwriters were Jews.
Irving Berlin, born Israel, or Isidore Baline (1888-1989) arrived with his family on New York City’s Lower East Side at the age of four, a refugee from the Russian pogroms. He was on the streets by age eight, selling newspapers, and at 14 he left home for good. He worked as a guide for a blind street musician, as a saloon pianist, and as a singing waiter.
The song that first brought Berlin mass acclaim was “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” published in 1911. It sold 1.5 million copies almost immediately. Like other Tin Pan Alley composers, Berlin wrote songs for the Broadway stage and for the new medium of sound film (he wrote music for 18 films). An Irving Berlin song, “Blue Skies,” was performed by Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer. The 1942 film Holiday Inn introduced one of Berlin’s most successful songs, “White Christmas,” and music for the 1946 Broadway musical Annie Get Your Gun, composed by Berlin, probably included more hit songs than any other show (“They Say It’s Wonderful,” “The Girl That I Marry,” “Doin’ What Comes Naturally,” and “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” among others). Berlin was the most prolific and consistent of Tin Pan Alley composers, with an active songwriting career spanning almost 60 years.
The career and achievements of George Gershwin, born Jacob Gershowitz (1898-1937), the son of an immigrant leatherworker, are unique. At the time of his tragically early death at the age of 38 (from a brain tumor), he was already world famous, and to this day he remains probably the most widely known of American composers. Alone among his many distinguished Tin Pan Alley contemporaries, Gershwin sought and achieved success in the world of concert music (“Rhapsody in Blue,” “An American in Paris”) as well as popular music. Together with his brother the lyricist Ira Gershwin, George composed scores of Tin Pan Alley classics, including standards like “I Got Rhythm,” “Fascinating Rhythm,” and “Oh, Lady Be Good!”
Both Gershwin’s popular songs and his “classical” works demonstrate a sophisticated incorporation of stylistic devices derived from African-American sources – such as syncopated rhythms and blue notes – that far surpasses the rather superficial use of such devices in most other white American music of the time. Gershwin’s greatest composition, Porgy and Bess (1935), which he called an “American folk opera,” represents his most thoroughgoing synthesis of European classical, mainstream popular, and African- American stylistic influences – a synthesis that remains his own but that also celebrates the wide diversity of American culture.
Cole Porter (1891-1964) was born into a wealthy Indiana family and studied classical music at Yale, Harvard, and the Schola Cantorum in Paris. His lasting contributions to the “American songbook” include “Night and Day,” “I Get a Kick Out of You,” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” Richard Rogers (1902-1979), who produced many of the period’s finest songs in collaboration with lyricists Lorenz Hart (1895-1943) and Oscar Hammerstein II, was the college-educated son of a doctor and a pianist. Among his hits were “Isn’t It Romantic” and “Blue Moon.”
The songs written by these men and a few others represent an achievement in terms of both quality and quantity that appears extraordinary to this day. Many of their finest efforts fed the long-standing and mutually beneficial relationship between Tin Pan Alley and the nearby Broadway theaters, which enjoyed great success featuring musical revues and “Follies” which, with their sequences of diverse skits, songs, dances, and performers, were an obvious successor to vaudeville. Berlin, Porter, the Gershwin brothers, Rodgers and Hart, and other prominent songwriters of this period all wrote the scores to Broadway shows.
Popular song both reflected and helped to shape the profound changes in American society during the 1920s and 1930s: the intermixing of high and low cultures, the adoption of new technologies and expansion of corporate capitalism, the increasingly intimate interaction of white and black cultures during period of virulent racism, and the emergence of a truly national popular culture. These songs no longer dominate popular taste as they used to. Nonetheless, they continue to be rediscovered by new generations of musicians and listeners. Tin Pan Alley and the singing style known as crooning were important (if often unrecognized) influences on rhythm & blues and rock ’n’ roll during the 1950s and 1960s. Many Tin Pan Alley songs are still used by contemporary jazz musicians as a basis for improvising. Current pop stars still perform them – for example, Elvis Costello’s recording of “My Funny Valentine” (composed by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart), Willie Nelson’s version of “Blue Skies” (Irving Berlin), Bono’s duet with Frank Sinatra on “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” (Cole Porter), and the Smashing Pumpkins’ revival of “My Blue Heaven” in 1996. In the early 1990s the veteran crooner Tony Bennett appeared on MTV’s Unplugged series, finding a new audience among fans of “alternative” music, who valued the combination of emotional intensity and sophistication in Bennett’s style and in many of the old standard songs themselves.
[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.]
