by Ben Yagoda
Harris’s phenomenal success introduced the idea that one could make money, even a good deal of money, by writing popular music. It also spawned a whole new style of song, with such self-explanatory titles as “The Picture That Is Turned Toward the Wall,” “The Letter That Never Came,” and “The Pardon Came Too Late.” The last two were the creations of Paul Dresser, who surpassed even Harris as an apostle of sentiment. He was known to burst into tears at the sound of a touching song, especially one of his own compositions. His brother the novelist Theodore Dreiser, on the other hand, described Dresser lyrics as “mere bits and scraps of sentiment and melodrama in story form, most asinine sightings over home and mother and lost sweethearts and dead heroes such as never were in real life.”*
The American songs of the period that are still sung, or hummed, today display a kind of forced nostalgia, hammered home by their customary 3/4 waltz time. They put forth a rural or (less often) urban ideal; when they express longing or love, the object is idealized, sentimentalized, and/or distant. The following were all Tin Pan Alley productions written between 1892 and 1910 but somehow seem much older, as if they had emanated from a prehistoric period of pure Americana: “In the Good Old Summer Time,” “Down by the Old Mill Stream,” “Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two),” “The Sidewalks of New York,” and “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.”
Charles K. Harris couldn’t read or write music and did not consider that an impediment. He wrote in After the Ball: “The reader will naturally wonder how it was possible for me to write music to a song when even to this day I cannot distinguish one note from another. The answer is simple. As soon as a melody occurred to me, I hummed it. Then I would procure the services of a trained musician . . . hum or whistle the melody to him and have him take it down on paper, with notes. He would then arrange it for the piano. This method is known as arranging.” His compositions’ lack of musical complexity not only wasn’t a problem, it was a virtue. In an era before radio or recordings, songs were disseminated by means of sheet music, bought in music shops and department stores. Middle-class families customarily had pianos in their parlors and one or more members with the ability to play them. “Ability” was a relative term, and therefore most songs were fairly basic melodically and harmonically. The lyrics, too, had to be simple enough for memorization.
The trade grew year after year. “Nowadays,” The New York Times remarked in 1910, “the consumption of songs in America is as constant as their consumption of shoes, and the demand is similarly met by factory output.” The high-water mark was 1917, when more than two billion copies of sheet music were sold in the United States; it had become common for a popular individual title to sell five million. In fairly short order, a new group of entrepreneurs took over the major publishers, many of them having come from backgrounds in selling: Isidore Witmark had sold water filters; Joseph W. Stern and Edward B. Marks, neckties and buttons; Leo Feist, corsets; Max and Louis Dreyfus, ribbons and picture frames. These men were resourceful and opportunistic, and in its mature phase the song industry was more vertically integrated than the shoe industry, with the sheet music publisher controlling the structure and taking a cut of every transaction.
Once a song met a publisher’s approval, a complicated chain of events was set in motion. The publisher might suggest or demand changes to the song itself or the title. Upon taking it on, he would commission an illustration (very important, since music was often an impulse buy), then print copies, frequently offering a variety of orchestrations. Then it was time for the song plugger to do his stuff. In his 1930 study Tin Pan Alley: A Chronicle of the American Popular Music Racket, Isaac Goldberg gave a good description of this vital job: “He it is who, by all the arts of persuasion, intrigue, bribery, mayhem, malfeasance, cajolery, entreaty, threat, insinuation, persistence and whatever else he has, sees to it that his employer’s music shall be heard.” “Bribery” is a harsh word, but without a doubt, in order to get vaudeville and dance-hall entertainers to add the song to their repertoires, pluggers customarily provided them with substantial amounts of what would come to be called payola.
Given the scale of the enterprise, it’s not surprising that songwriters were near or at the bottom of the ladder in terms of power and money (they generally sold a publisher all rights to a song for a modest sum, plus a royalty of a penny or two per copy sold). In the words of a 1908 book, “With a few notable exceptions, America’s popular songwriters are unknown. Such songs are almost impersonal. They do not bear the stamp of the composer’s individuality so much as they reflect the taste of the day.” Some of the “notable exceptions” have been mentioned. Another one is George M. Cohan, who established his own lucrative corner of the industry in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth with rousing numbers like “Give My Regards to Broadway,” “The Yankee Doodle Boy,” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag.”
The lack of respect accorded to songwriters didn’t stop waves of hopefuls from showing up on Tin Pan Alley to sell their wares like so many Fuller Brush men. Songwriting presented an attractive prospect to ambitious young folk with no other prospects, especially New York City’s hundreds of thousands of immigrants and immigrants’ sons from eastern and southern Europe. The upside potential was so high—you could get a good payday with just one thirty-two-bar hit song—and the barrier to entry so low. Anyone could offer his wares—that is, anyone who could handle the indignity of knocking on door after door and being summarily rejected time and again.
In the first two decades of the new century, the hallmark of Tin Pan Alley was novelty. Writers and publishers searched relentlessly for the angle, the pitch, that would sell, and when one of them hit on it, he was slavishly and copiously imitated. One year it was dream songs: “Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland” was a hit, and so it was succeeded by “Girl of My Dreams,” “My Little Dream Girl,” “Sweetheart of My Dreams,” “When I Met You Last Night in Dreamland,” “You Tell Me Your Dream and I’ll Tell You Mine,” and more. According to the publisher Ed Marks: “The jobbers became so confused that they numbered the dream songs and sold them by number instead of by title.”
The Alley was also keyed to goings-on in the world at large. No significant event, fashion, or trend escaped a musical commentary, including the conflict in Europe, which spawned Al Piantadosi’s mildly pacifistic “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.” But when the United States entered the war in 1917, songwriters immediately adopted an extreme patriotism. Certainly, the pitch was right in George M. Cohan’s wheelhouse. “I read those war headlines and I got to thinking and humming to myself—and for a moment I thought I was going to dance,” he recalled. That same morning he wrote “Over There.” Within a week of the U.S. entry, “Good-bye Broadway, Hello France” was on the department stores’ sheet music counters, followed in short order by “I’m Glad I Raised My Boy to Be a Soldier,” “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Slacker,” “We Don’t Want the Bacon (What We Want Is a Piece of the Rhine!),” and scores of others. The war also made its way into love songs, including such kitsch classics as “Your Lips Are No Man’s Land but Mine” and “If He Can Fight Like He Can Love, Good Night Germany!”
A half-dozen years later, Gershwin, Porter, and Rodgers had joined Berlin and Kern in producing songs that do not seem quaint and are still being sung, played, and enjoyed. How did we get from “If He Can Fight Like He Can Love, Good Night Germany!” to this remarkable work? In hindsight, it’s possible to identify an array of interwoven factors.
Individual
The quintet of writers just named represented a rare flowering of genius; as noted, a comparison to Renaissance Florence may seem excessive, but then again it holds up to scrutiny. Unlike Italian painters, they did not all undergo extensive training. But the trailblazer, Jerome Kern, certainly did. Born to a middle-class German Jewish family in New York in 1885, he studied music in the United States and Heidelberg, worked as a Tin Pan Alley song plugger, and contributed numbers
to Broadway and London shows as early as 1905. His 1914 song “They Didn’t Believe Me”—with its stately, lingering melody; its 4/4 rhythm that could go fast or slow, syncopated or straight; and its simple, conversational (“and I’m certainly going to tell them . . .”), resonant lyrics by Herbert Reynolds—has been credibly nominated as the first modern American popular song. By his early thirties, Kern was the dean of Broadway composers, unmatched in the way he combined the influences of operetta, English music hall, and ragtime to create a new American sound.
Comparable in genius, close in age, Kern and the second great figure were different in almost every other way. Israel Baline, the son of a cantor, was born in Temun, Russia, in 1888. He came to New York at the age of four and by fourteen was on his own, with a new name—Irving Berlin—working as a saloon pianist and a singing waiter in a Chinatown joint called Nigger Mike’s. He had no musical training, and his piano skills were the most rudimentary of all the great composers, but he had an ear for melody and soon he began writing music as well. (Famously, Berlin only ever learned to play in the key of F-sharp, and had a specially designed piano that allowed him to transpose keys by turning a small wheel.) In 1911 came “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” which, while not technically a rag, had a syncopated vitality the American popular song had never seen before and which singlehandedly changed everything. Over the next forty years, Berlin produced hundreds and hundreds of first-rate songs. Alec Wilder said, “I can speak of only one composer as the master of the entire range of popular song—Irving Berlin.” Berlin appears in retrospect as a freak of nature. The combination of his lack of training, on the one hand, and seemingly inexhaustible, high-level production, on the other, spawned urban legends, which would persist his whole life, that he had between one and three “colored boys” in the back room who wrote his songs.
The Gershwins’ parents were Russian immigrants as well. But both George and Ira were born on this side of the Atlantic (Ira in 1896 and his brother two years later), and their father worked steadily and earned enough money for the family to buy a piano, which George learned to play magnificently. Rodgers (born 1902) came from a well-to-do German Jewish family in New York, and Porter (born 1891, a comparatively late bloomer), whose grandfather was known as the richest man in Indiana, went to Yale. Rodgers, Porter, Gershwin, and Kern all had significant musical training, were familiar with classical composition, and were amenable to incorporating the innovations of classical modernists into popular songs.
Genius is seldom a discrete phenomenon. It certainly wasn’t in the case of these groundbreakers. They were inspired and goaded to greater achievement by each other; Gershwin once remarked that it was Kern’s music that made him realize most popular songs were of an inferior quality. And their presence, in and of itself, inspired other talented young people to go into the field, where the bar of acceptability, and the bar of excellence, were now considerably higher than they had been. Among all songwriters, there was an implicit and sometimes explicit competition to advance the craft. With one exception, the inspiration these men provided was a result less of their personalities than of their artistic example. Kern and Rodgers were introverts, as was Berlin, whom many colleagues found cold and distant, especially as he got older. Porter tended to consort more with upper-class socialites than songwriters. The exception was Gershwin, who was charismatic, glamorous, and generous in encouraging younger songwriters such as Arthur Schwartz, Harold Arlen, and Vernon Duke. If he hadn’t died young, in 1937, he would have encouraged even more.
Technological
Early-twentieth-century changes in the way music was delivered generally disadvantaged publishers, favored the songwriters (or at least the best songwriters), and led to creative innovations. The first such change was the 78-rpm wax record, introduced in 1902. The technology had not matured very much by 1909, so when the Copyright Act of that year specified that copyright applied to “mechanical” reproductions of a musical work, what it had in mind were piano rolls. Nonetheless, the act applied to records as well, and Congress established a system whereby publishers received two cents for each recording or player piano roll. The Victor Talking Machine Company dominated the manufacture of both phonographs and records. The number of records it sold increased by an average of 20 percent each year from 1902 to 1923, from 1.7 million to 40.5 million. A milestone could be glimpsed in two 1920 hit songs (“Whispering” and “The Japanese Sandman”), which sold two million records each. By 1929, more than 105 million records and 750,000 phonographs were manufactured in the United States, together valued at $100 million.
The Alley had to make one compositional accommodation to the 78. Disks ran four minutes or less, so the old-fashioned song with endless verses and choruses was now out of the question. The slimming down was salutary. The jazz bandleader Paul Whiteman observed in 1926, “Previous to 1897 every song had to have six or seven verses and each verse had six or seven lines. Now there are two verses of a scant four lines each, and even at that, the second verse counts scarcely at all. The whole story must be told in the very first verse and chorus and usually there is very little to it anyway, the music being what matters.”
Presently the verse itself disappeared, or at most retained a vestigial presence, often skipped in recordings or performance. The meat of a typical standard song, it became understood, was four sections of eight bars each, most commonly in AABA form, with the B section, known as the bridge or release, sometimes modulating to another key. As Charles Hamm observed, “The skill and genius of Tin Pan Alley composers (and lyricists) was revealed by what could be done within a tightly constricted formal structure, rather than by flights of fancy soaring to new and complex designs. One is reminded of similar restrictions embraced by writers of sonnets, by the Japanese poets of haiku verse, and by the great American bluesmen.”
A characteristic example is Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick out of You,” from the 1934 show Anything Goes, which is simple in structure yet, in its way, perfect.
Verse:
My story is much too sad to be told,
But practically everything leaves me totally cold.
The only exception I know is the case
When I’m out on a quiet spree,
Fighting vainly the old ennui,
And I suddenly turn and see your fabulous face.
Chorus (A):
I get no kick from champagne.
Mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all.
So tell me why should it be true
That I get a kick out of you?
A:
Some, they may go for cocaine.
I’m sure that if I took even one sniff
It would bore me terrifically, too.
Yet I get a kick out of you.
Bridge (B):
I get a kick every time I see
You standing there before me.
I get a kick though it’s clear to see
You obviously do not adore me.
A:
I get no kick in a plane.
Flying too high with some guy in the sky
Is my idea of nothing to do.
Yet I get a kick out of you.
At the upper end of royalties, songwriters got two cents per piece of sheet music sold (three for Broadway show writers) and up to one-third of the publisher’s cut of a recording. By the end of the decade, a hit could earn writers $5,000 to $10,000. But only the most consistently successful of them, such as Berlin (who was savvy enough to start his own publishing house), Walter Donaldson, and Gus Kahn, could expect to earn as much as $150,000 in a very good year. Even so, the music industry continued to foster the idea that “popular songwriting is the most highly overpaid form of writing in the world,” in the words of Abel Green, then music editor of Variety.
The Copyright Act of 1909 set the term for copyright of a musical composition to twenty-eight years, renewable for an additional twenty-eight, and
for the first time included under copyright “public performance for profit.” That is, anyone playing or singing a copyrighted song had to pay for the right to do so. “Had to” but often didn’t: many bandleaders—and the restaurants and nightclubs that employed them—resisted paying anything to copyright holders, sometimes offering the justification that public performances stimulated sheet music sales. In 1913, a group of songwriters and publishers met in Lüchow’s restaurant in New York to talk about how to collect; out of that dinner came the founding, the following year, of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. ASCAP actively attempted to collect money from restaurants and hotels that offered live music. Some of the proprietors refused, and the matter went to the courts. In 1917 the Supreme Court ruled in ASCAP’s favor and thus established the foundation for the organization’s future existence, its subsequent power and influence, and, in some measure, a new respect for songs as individual artistic creations. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. ruled that establishments, notably restaurants, had to pay for music even if they did not charge an entry fee: “It is true that music is not the sole object, but neither is the food, which probably could be got cheaper elsewhere. . . . If music did not pay, it would be given up. If it pays, it pays out of the public’s pocket. Whether it pays or not, the purpose of employing it is profit, and that is enough.”
Radio began commercial operation in 1920, three years after the court’s ruling, and soon established itself as an important cultural and commercial institution. About 190,000 radio units were produced in 1923; by 1929 the number was almost 5 million. Radio was free of charge to listeners, of course, but when radio stations sent copyrighted music over the airwaves, the same pay-to-play principle would seem to apply. The stations, predictably, balked, sometimes claiming that all they were doing was broadcasting “ether.” ASCAP responded with a series of (ultimately victorious) lawsuits against the radio interests. With the rulings in hand, ASCAP undertook to monitor the musical offerings of all the stations in the country. By the mid-1930s, ASCAP was annually collecting some $10 million.