The B Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song - Hardcover

Yagoda, Ben

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1594488495 ISBN 13: 9781594488498

Publisher: Riverhead Books, 2015

Synopsis

From an acclaimed cultural critic, a narrative and social history of the Great American Songwriting era.
 
Everybody knows and loves the American Songbook. But it’s a bit less widely understood that in about 1950, this stream of great songs more or less dried up. All of a sudden, what came over the radio wasn’t Gershwin, Porter, and Berlin, but “Come on-a My House” and “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” Elvis and rock and roll arrived a few years later, and at that point the game was truly up. What happened, and why? In The B Side, acclaimed cultural historian Ben Yagoda answers those questions in a fascinating piece of detective work. Drawing on previously untapped archival sources and on scores of interviews—the voices include Randy Newman, Jimmy Webb, Linda Ronstadt, and Herb Alpert—the book illuminates broad musical trends through a series of intertwined stories. Among them are the battle between ASCAP and Broadcast Music, Inc.; the revolution in jazz after World War II; the impact of radio and then television; and the bitter, decades-long feud between Mitch Miller and Frank Sinatra.
 
The B Side is about taste, and the particular economics and culture of songwriting, and the potential of popular art for greatness and beauty. It’s destined to become a classic of American musical history.

About this title

About the Author:

Ben Yagoda is a journalism professor at the University of Delaware. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of twelve books, including About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made; How to Not Write Bad; Memoir: A History; and Will Rogers: A Biography. He contributes to The Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Lingua Franca” blog and has written for Slate, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and The American Scholar, among other publications. Yagoda lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, with his wife.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Prologue

Premises, Premises

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the pianist Keith Jarrett sat down for an interview with Robert Siegel of National Public Radio. Jarrett had just released an album called Somewhere, which included his trio’s rendition of the songs “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” (written in 1932), “Stars Fell on Alabama” (1934), and “I Thought About You” (1939). Jarrett has a reputation as an avant-garde jazz artist, but this was only the latest of a series of albums—others include Standards, Vol. 1; Standards, Vol. 2; and Setting Standards—that featured his trio’s renditions of classic American popular songs written roughly in the second quarter of the twentieth century. That is, standards.

Siegel started off by saying, “Standard tunes, first of all, what do they mean to you and why have you recorded so many of them on this disc?”

“First of all, they are anything but standard by today’s standards,” Jarrett replied. “They’re exceptional. There was a period of time in American history where so many things came rushing in, especially in popular music.”

Siegel wondered, “Do we not have more songs like this for lack of people trying to write them? Is it unfashionable?”

“Yes, is the short answer to that,” Jarrett said. He suggested parts of a longer answer as well. First, in that long-ago period of time, there were “people who were actually good at writing melodies.” Second, he talked about the importance of singers. He recounted that Miles Davis was once asked who he learned his phrasing from. His answer: Frank Sinatra. Today, Jarrett said, “there are also no important singers, so maybe it’s all part of the same pancake mix. If there’s no singers and there’s no good songs, which came first?”

The pianist said it once occurred to him to try to write a standard, a song that had the quality of having “existed before.” He eventually came up with a tune he called “No Lonely Nights.”

“But it wasn’t that easy to do,” Jarrett said.

·   ·   ·

The standards, as Jarrett said, “came rushing in”—from the 1920s through the 1950s, but most quickly and intensely in a two-decade span starting in about 1925. The best of them are said to make up the “Great American Songbook” (the term was first used as the title of a 1972 album by the jazz singer Carmen McRae), the size of which varies depending on who’s counting. In his definitive book American Popular Song, Alec Wilder puts forth about three hundred entries.

What are the attributes of these few hundred songs? The composer Jule Styne once gave a concise definition to a young friend of his, the jazz pianist Bill Charlap: “What’s the secret to a great popular song? It must be melodically simple and harmonically attractive.” Expanding on that, standard songs are sophisticated (in several senses of the word) and melodic, constructed with, at the minimum, superior craftsmanship, and sometimes with remarkable innovation and artistry. Charlap is speaking of Styne’s “Just in Time,” but he could be referring to any of hundreds of songs: “It has an innate sense of structure. There are rests, points of emphasis, and overall balance and taste. It’s so pliable, and very American.” Although the standards are roughly divided into ballads (slow) and rhythm tunes (fast), the categories are fungible and a given tune can be interpreted in many different ways. Fast or slow, standards are jazz-inflected in rhythm and harmonic possibilities and, especially in later years, show the influence of modern European composers like Ravel and Debussy. The main criterion for songs’ status as standard is the music, but most of them have lyrics that rise to the occasion and are wedded to the melody: sophisticated, once again, and sometimes dazzlingly inventive. The internal rhymes and wordplay from a Cole Porter or Lorenz Hart can suggest W. S. Gilbert with an American accent. But even when dealing with commonplace tropes of love and longing, as in Irving Berlin’s “Always,” “How Deep Is the Ocean,” or “Count Your Blessings (Instead of Sheep),” a standard can have a palpable honesty and conviction and can be emotionally affecting without being schmaltzy. Or at least it can be delivered that way by the right singer.

The melodies were written—to start naming the great names—by Berlin, by George Gershwin, by Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Duke Ellington, Arthur Schwartz, Harry Warren, Hoagy Carmichael, Richard Whiting, Vincent Youmans, Walter Donaldson, and Jimmy McHugh. They went with lyrics by Ira Gershwin (George’s brother), Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein II, Howard Dietz, and E. Y. “Yip” Harburg. Those men were all born within a seventeen-year span, from Kern in 1885 to Rodgers in 1902. A slightly younger group, consisting of Harold Arlen, Vernon Duke, Dorothy Fields, Frank Loesser, Johnny Mercer, Jule Styne, and Fats Waller, were born between 1903 and 1910. Burton Lane and Jimmy Van Heusen came on the scene in 1912 and 1913, respectively, and that was pretty much that. To be sure, not all their songs were gems, and even in the very heart of the golden age, a lot of hack tunesmiths turned out reams of lesser material. But not every painter in Renaissance Florence was a Leonardo or a Botticelli. The comparison might raise your eyebrow, or both of them. But the more you ponder the short list of places where intense creativity emerged from a core group of artists in a limited amount of time, the less far-fetched it begins to seem.

The place from which the Great American Songbook emerged was New York City. The highly concentrated music industry originated around the turn of the twentieth century on one Manhattan block, West Twenty-eighth Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, called “Tin Pan Alley” for the cacophony that blew out of music publishers’ offices. The designation persisted even after the publishers moved uptown, to various outposts centered around the Brill Building on Broadway at Forty-ninth Street. From the 1920s on, a growing number of the best songs originated in the scores of New York musical shows or revues. Henceforth, an ambitious fledgling songwriter’s goal was to have his number in the Broadway spotlight, figuratively and literally—clearly, a big step up from being a mere assembly-line worker in the pop music factory.

The first talking motion picture, in 1927, was a musical called The Jazz Singer, and for two decades after that, Hollywood was the western outpost of American songwriting, the home base for such outstanding practitioners as Warren, Mercer, Arlen, and Van Heusen, as well as lesser artisans. Bigfoot New Yorkers periodically went west for short sojourns. Some of the biggest furnished just three 1930s films starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers with an astonishing number of standards of the highest caliber: Irving Berlin’s score for Top Hat (“Isn’t This a Lovely Day [to Be Caught in the Rain]?,” “Cheek to Cheek,” “Top Hat, White Tie and Tails”); Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields’s for Swing Time (“The Way You Look Tonight,” “A Fine Romance,” “Pick Yourself Up”); and the Gershwin brothers’ for Shall We Dance (“They All Laughed,” “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” “They Can’t Take That Away from Me”). But gems popped up even in films that were less than classics. I’ll cite three examples from hundreds. Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s timeless “The Folks Who Live on the Hill” was introduced by Irene Dunne in a forgotten 1937 film, High, Wide and Handsome. “There Will Never Be Another You,” with music by Harry Warren and lyrics by Mack Gordon, is recognized as one of the greatest songs ever; go to a jazz gig in any city in the world, and you are likely to find it on the setlist. It first appeared in a 1942 Twentieth Century–Fox B movie called Iceland, starring skater Sonja Henie and John Payne as a U.S. Marine posted in—that’s right—Iceland. Another from the same year: the timeless “Moonlight Becomes You,” by Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen, originated as filler in a Bob Hope–Bing Crosby comedy, Road to Morocco.

The parity among the three sources of standards—Broadway shows, Hollywood movies, and one-off Tin Pan Alley compositions—is illustrated by a recent book of sheet music, The Great American Songbook: The Composers. The Hal Leonard Corporation book includes one hundred songs, from “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive” to “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To.” The roster is highly selective and (obviously) subjective, but it’s credible, and useful for giving a sense of where standards originated. Eighty-two songs in the book were written in 1950 or earlier. Of them, 33 percent came from Broadway, 33 percent from Tin Pan Alley, and 34 percent from Hollywood.*

The songs were composed with sundry goals in mind, producing great art rarely being one of them. But the songs—the best of them, anyway—took on lives of their own: it turned out they lent themselves to being interpreted in different styles and with different approaches by a range of singers and musicians. They became a repertoire, a canon, repeatedly redefined by distinctive performances, some of which were, in fact, works of art: Coleman Hawkins’s “Body and Soul,” Teddy Wilson and Gerry Mulligan’s “As Time Goes By,” Bunny Berigan’s “I Can’t Get Started,” Fred Astaire’s “Cheek to Cheek,” the Boswell Sisters’ “The Object of My Affection,” Artie Shaw’s “Begin the Beguine,” Billie Holiday’s “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” and so on. It was more than a matter of individual renditions. The songs provided the foundation of myriad laudable and important American enterprises: not only jazz and the Broadway and Hollywood musical, but popular dancing, the recording industry, radio (or the significant part of it devoted to music), and the crafts of singing, playing instruments, and arranging and conducting music for big bands. Collectively, they constituted one of the great cultural achievements of the United States in the twentieth century.

The most successful songwriters in the Great American Songbook period were recognized for their achievements, repeatedly interviewed in the popular press, and periodically turned into the subjects of biographical movies. Their names went above the titles on billboards for shows and movies. They garnered fortune as well as fame, through a number of different streams of revenue. The best-known but least common was the long run of a Broadway musical in which their songs appeared. Hollywood work was compensated by a weekly salary or a per-picture contract, so the upside was less spectacular, but the terms were generous and the work steady. The biggest potential financial boon was via United States copyright law and the efforts of a collective organization called the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). Composers and lyricists were paid a few pennies each time a recording of a song they’d written was played on the radio or bought at a record store. When a song was played and bought a lot—when it became a hit, as measured by the charts in the weekly Billboard magazine—the pennies added up to a huge payday.*

In the Music Division of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., you can request to see Irving Berlin’s ledgers. Berlin published his first song, “Marie from Sunny Italy,” in 1907, when he was nineteen, and his first big hit, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” four years later. Not long after that, he was acknowledged as the king of American songwriters, a designation he retained until his death at 101 in 1989. The ledgers are mammoth books, bound in red, the entries penciled in precisely by what must have been a small army of accountants. Slowly lifting the cover of the 1950 book, you will see royalties from record and sheet music sales broken down by song—from “White Christmas,” which netted Berlin $13,293.95 for the year, down to “Marie from Sunny Italy,” which earned a total of two cents (from foreign sheet music sales). The total royalties for the year amounted to $78,079.31, which translates to $771,030.67 in 2014 dollars. That figure does not include Berlin’s payments from ASCAP, which were about $72,000, or his earnings from the Broadway hits Annie Get Your Gun (which closed in 1949 after a three-year run) and Call Me Madam (which opened in September 1950).

Berlin’s “White Christmas” mechanical royalties were almost all due to Bing Crosby’s Decca recording of the song, originally released in 1942 and hauled out every yuletide. It hit the top spot on the Billboard charts for several years running, but in 1949 (the year reflected in the 1950 royalties) it was pushed aside by another holiday song and peaked at number five. The other song was the creation of a tunesmith named Johnny Marks, who was several rungs on the ladder down from Berlin. He had put to music a humorous poem, “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” written by his brother-in-law; cowboy singer Gene Autry’s recording reached number one on December 31, 1949. Despite the fact that, like Berlin and most other songwriters, he was Jewish, Marks would repeatedly return to this particular well, writing “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” “A Holly Jolly Christmas,” and other holiday songs. But none reached the heights of his first hit. A 1980 People magazine interview with Marks contained some illuminating statistics. To that point, Autry’s version of “Rudolph” had sold more than 12 million copies, and records by some five hundred other performers 130 million more. The magazine didn’t say how much money Marks had made from the song in total but did report that, at the time of the interview, it was netting him some $600,000 a year. That suggests his total “Rudolph” proceeds, by the time of his death five years later, had probably reached eight figures.

·   ·   ·

I draw these examples from 1949 and 1950 for a reason. In his scholarly book The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era, Allen Forte, a professor of the theory of music at Yale University, defined that golden era as lasting from 1924 through 1950. In American Popular Song, published in 1972, Alec Wilder covered work only by songwriters who were already established by 1950. When an interviewer asked why he instituted the cutoff date, Wilder said, “After that, the amateurs took over.” The statement is hyperbolic and a bit unkind, but its core of truth can be seen in the repertoire of singers and jazz musicians who have the luxury of performing the very best songs. From the 1950s through the present day, the concerts and CDs of Tony Bennett—the most justly celebrated singer of standards—have been dominated by songs written in the second quarter of the twentieth century. In 2014, Bennett released a collaboration with the pop singer Lady Gaga. Thirteen of its fifteen songs were written between 1928 (“I Can’t Give You Anything but Love”) and 1947 (“But Beautiful” and “Nature Boy”). The many singers from other genres who have turned to the American Songbook usually follow similar parameters. In 1978, the country singer Willie Nelson released Stardust, which was on the Billboard list of top-ten albums for two consecutive years and was ultimately certified as quadruple platinum, me...

About this edition

• Publisher: Riverhead Books
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1594488495
• ISBN 13: 9781594488498
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320