The B Side

by Ben Yagoda

  It distributed that money to songwriters by means of a complicated classification system. An internal committee placed every member into one of thirteen separate classes, from AAA to 4, based on achievement over the course of a career: number of songs written, sales, and hits. An individual writer’s classification determined both voting power within the organization and the share of ASCAP-collected money he received. For example, in 1929, when there were still only four classifications, the quarterly payments were as follows: Class A, $2,000; Class B, $1,000; Class C, $500; Class D, $250. The system was not only undemocratic but also unfair and would eventually be scrapped in 1952.* Yet at the outset it helped solidify the idea that popular songwriting wasn’t a monolith but a skilled endeavor with practitioners operating at many different levels.

  ASCAP was also important for lyricists, giving them, for the first time, a chance to receive recognition, respect, and a decent paycheck. In the original Tin Pan Alley model, a lyricist got a flat fee (for many years the going rate was five dollars) for a song, covering all rights for the rest of time. ASCAP’s decision early on to award “authors” equal royalties to “composers” not only represented recognition of the importance of lyrics but also served as an enticement for talented young scribblers to enter the field.

  The steady growth in record sales was accompanied by a sharp decline in sheet music sales. As life become busier and less rural, and mechanical devices like the radio and the record player started to beckon, fewer families had the time or inclination to sit around the piano of an evening. As Isaac Goldberg put it in 1930, “People buy music because they desire to have it at hand when they feel like hearing and playing it. When a song is dinned into their ears around the face of the clock, they have no need of buying the printed form.” The change hurt publishers more than songwriters, who received significantly more favorable royalties on mechanical reproduction and public performance than they did on sheet music.

  There was a big difference between having family members pound out a song on the parlor piano and listening to professional renditions on the phonograph or radio, and the professionalization of music delivery had a big impact on the quality of songs. In the earlier model, publishers subsidized professionals to perform songs with the goal of selling sheet music to amateurs, who were seduced into thinking they could bring the piece off as well. Now writers and publishers were making their money through fees linked to professional performance and recording. Popular songs no longer had to be elementary enough for mother or sister to play them at the family spinet. Professionals could carry off complexity, and, in the case of jazz virtuosos, do it brilliantly. The widespread use of microphones was significant as well. In the early days, even the best singers had to be belters, which didn’t leave much room for subtlety or nuance. The personification of the change is the transition from Rudy Vallee to Bing Crosby and such subsequent masterful interpreters as Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, and Ella Fitzgerald.

  Institutional

  The Italian Renaissance was facilitated by enlightened patrons, gatekeepers, popes, and Medicis. American songwriters had no such benefactors in their own renaissance, with one notable exception, who deserves a bit of attention. That was Max Dreyfus, who was born in Kuppenheim, Germany, in 1874, the son of a cattle dealer, and came to America at the age of fourteen. After peddling picture frames through the South, he unsuccessfully tried to make it as a songwriter. Unlike most Alley denizens, he could read music, and after Witmark’s rejected some of his tunes in 1895, the house did accept him as a pianist and arranger. He moved on to T. B. Harms, where he started as staff arranger, advanced to professional manager and 25 percent partner, and in 1904 became full owner.

  Dreyfus turned the floundering firm around. Where it had previously been an Alley song mill like any other, it now became closely associated with the stage, underwriting Broadway shows both as investments in themselves and as a means of securing the publishing rights to the highest-quality songs. Dreyfus was unusual if not unique among publishers in recognizing that popular music could be art (though he probably wouldn’t have used that word), and his ear for talent was unequaled. In 1904, nineteen-year-old Jerome Kern walked into the office. “He said he wanted to imbibe the atmosphere of music,” Dreyfus recalled years later. “I decided to take him on and to start him off by giving him the toughest job I had—selling music.” That is, he hired Kern as a song plugger. For a salary of twelve dollars a week, the young man peddled song sheets up and down New York’s Hudson Valley and demonstrated Harms tunes at local department stores.

  In 1912, Dreyfus—along with the publisher Gus Schirmer—commissioned Rudolf Friml, an immigrant from Prague, then a concert pianist and teacher who had composed no popular music, to write the score for an operetta, The Firefly, a gamble that paid off handsomely. Twenty-two-year-old Vincent Youmans had published but one tune when Dreyfus took him on as staff pianist and song plugger. When Cole Porter was struggling and unknown, Dreyfus sustained him with continual advances. A younger man, E. Y. “Yip” Harburg, the lyricist for “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” and “Over the Rainbow,” recalled: “Max signed me up when nobody else would. He didn’t give me much, but it was enough to keep me alive when I had nothing.”

  In the winter of 1918, George Gershwin appeared at T. B. Harms. He had already been a plugger, rehearsal pianist, arranger, and piano roll artist; as a composer he had published but a handful of songs. Gershwin played a couple of numbers, Dreyfus was impressed, and the upshot was described by Ira Gershwin in his diary: “George has been placed on the staff of T. B. Harms Co. He gets $35 a week for this connection, then $50 advance and a 3 cent royalty on each song they accept. This entails no other effort on his part than the composing, they not requiring any of his leisure for plugging nor for piano-playing. Some snap.”

  As Dreyfus put it at the time, “I feel that you have some good stuff in you. It’ll come out. It may take months, it may take a year, it may take five years, but I’m convinced that the stuff is there. You have no set duties. Just stop in every morning, so to speak, and say hello.” What’s more, he accepted two Gershwin–Irving Caesar collaborations on the spot—“I Was So Young (You Were So Beautiful)” and “There’s More to the Kiss Than the X-X-X.” Gershwin remained dedicated to the publisher for the rest of his life, and in 1931 dedicated his Second Rhapsody to Dreyfus.

  According to Irving Caesar, who was still regularly coming in to his Brill Building office when I interviewed him in 1982, “To get into the orbit of Harms was every composer’s dream.” Dreyfus managed to make the Harms offices on West Forty-fifth Street the Tin Pan Alley equivalent of the Algonquin Round Table that convened one block to the south. The music historian David Ewen described the “professional parlor” there this way:

  Important composers and lyricists of that day made it a habit to drop in at Harms during the noonday hours for some music, shoptalk, social palaver. George Gershwin could be found there several times a week. Harry Ruby, Bert Kalmar, Joe Meyer, Buddy DeSylva, Vincent Youmans, Irving Caesar, Paul Charig—later on, Arthur Schwartz, Vernon Duke and Harold Arlen—hovered around Gershwin like satellites. . . . Caesar was something of the court jester, delighting the group with impromptu parodies and improvised opera arias.

  Not coincidentally, Dreyfus was the most financially generous publisher. His habit was to pay more than the standard royalty, and “was considered radical for this abuse of custom.”

  The theatrical emphasis of Harms under Max Dreyfus was no coincidence, for the most significant broad-based institutional spur to first-rate songwriting in the 1920s was the stage itself. In the 1920s in particular, musical comedies were the rage in New York, with 432 of them mounted on Broadway over the course of the decade. Berlin and Gershwin in their early days were part of the Tin Pan Alley song factory, but both switched early to Broadway, where Kern, together with the librettists and lyric writers Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse, had changed the rules of the game, re
placing the antique Mittel-European operettas of Friml and Herbert, on the one hand, and the one-number-after-another revues and follies, on the other, with integrated, unmistakably American theater pieces in which character, dialogue, and songs were integrated. Rodgers and Porter presently joined in.

  It was understood that these musicals needed songs of a certain quality not only to fit into the libretto but because the audience expected them. Moreover, in contrast to Tin Pan Alley, where a song got little more than a surface polish before being handed off to a plugger, a show tune was shaped—“workshopped” in a later parlance—by directors, producers, librettists, and performers until it reached what they deemed to be its best form.

  As usual, there was also an economic impetus. On Broadway, songwriters worked for a share of box-office receipts and thus, in author Gary Rosen’s words, “were no longer subsistence piece workers prized for their conformity to accepted norms, or for their ability to crank out knockoffs of the latest hit, or to cater to the latest dance craze.” They could make quite a bit of change: Sigmund Romberg grossed more than $1.5 million for three musicals: Blossom Time (1921), The Student Prince (1924), and The Desert Song (1926).

  From the 1910s through the 1930s, Broadway musicals mainly served as settings for the song and dance numbers and had inane stories and dialogue. The eventual standards in the Gershwins’ Lady, Be Good!, produced in 1924 and starring Fred and Adele Astaire, included the title song, “Fascinating Rhythm,” and “The Girl I Love.” (The last was dropped from the score before its opening and became a classic under a new title: “The Man I Love.”) The plot, typically, was less timeless: “Angry because Dick Trevor has not returned her affections, property owner Josephine Vanderwater evicts Dick and his sister Susie from her apartment building and they take residence on the sidewalk until the crafty lawyer ‘Watty’ Watkins comes up with a plan. He has Susie disguise herself as a Mexican wife so that Watty can collect his fee from a divorce case. The ruse causes complications when . . .” Slowly, the stories of American musicals became more mature, complex, and worthy of the songs in them, key points along the way being Show Boat (1927), Porgy and Bess (1935), Pal Joey (1940), and Oklahoma! (1943).

  The lyrics matured more quickly than the scripts; indeed, writing for Broadway elevated the work of lyricists as much as if not more than that of composers as the operetta style was replaced by more down-to-earth fare. The plots may not have been Shakespeare, but they were complemented by songs in chest-voice vernacular, in contrast to the high-pitched heavy vibrato of yore. That vernacular touch meshed well with the wordplay, unexpected metaphors, and intricate rhyme schemes (“I’m sure that if I took even one sniff / It would bore me terrif-ically, too”) with which the best lyricists began to do great things. That inventive language itself was characteristic of the era, now long gone, when young wordsmiths vied to publish their light verse in The New Yorker and Franklin P. Adams’s column in the New York World.

  Hollywood, in its way, also advanced the craft of songwriting. At the very beginning of talking films in the late twenties, music publishers reaped a windfall as producers bid against each other for the rights to existing songs. Eventually, the movie studios realized that it was better to own songs than to rent them. Starting in 1928 the studios began buying almost all the important publishing firms, including Harms, which Warner Bros. snapped up in 1929 for an estimated $8 to $10 million. (The studio retained Max Dreyfus as a consultant, but as he said later: “This was all hooey. Picture people don’t take advice. They give orders.”) They quickly exhausted the existing catalogs and began bringing composers and lyricists out to Hollywood as staff songwriters. By 1929, some 320 composers and lyricists were working for the studios, some at impressive salaries. Whereas a staff writer for a Tin Pan Alley firm could expect to make a maximum of $200 a week (in the rare case of a hit, their royalties could exceed that), Warner Bros. paid the team of Harry Warren and Al Dubin $3,000 a week each and a younger duo, Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg, $2,500 a week each. Irving Berlin got $75,000 for a film score, plus a percentage of receipts. The sun-drenched security brought on creative paralysis in some writers, but for others, such as Warren and later Jule Styne, Johnny Mercer, and Jimmy Van Heusen, the orange groves and the ocean seemed to be a powerful muse.

  Cultural

  One of the many new ideas of the American 1920s, as seen in the work of such critics as Edmund Wilson, Constance Rourke, Vachel Lindsay, H. L. Mencken, and especially Gilbert Seldes (author of the 1924 book The 7 Lively Arts), was that popular culture was in fact culture, that a “low” art could still be an art. The vitality and occasional vulgarity of movies or popular music, far from disqualifying them, were admirable attributes. This idea was felt and expressed most intensely in New York City—also, of course, the location of Tin Pan Alley, to which it gave an energetic burst of legitimacy.

  In a 1925 diary entry, Wilson traced the “progress” of a prototypical popular song “from fall in New York to summer throughout the country.” It reads like a movie montage, with soundtrack, and gives a vivid, Gatsbyesque feel of the various channels of dissemination and the way a song could take hold of the popular consciousness and imagination:

  Harlem cabarets, other cabarets, Reisenfeld’s classical jazz, the Rascoe’s private orchestra, the hand organs, the phonographs, the radio, the Webster Hall balls, other balls (college proms), men going home late at night whistling it on the street, picked out on Greenwich Village ukuleles, sung in late motor rides by boys and girls, in restaurants, Paul Whiteman and Lopez, vaudeville, played Sundays by girls at pianos from sheet music with photographs on the cover, of both the composer and the person who first sang it—first sung in a popular musical comedy (introduced several times—at the end of the second act pathetically—and played as the audience are leaving the theater)—pervading the country through the movie pianists, danced to in private houses to the music of a phonograph—the Elks fair—thrown on a screen between the acts at the National Winter Garden Burlesque and sung by the male audience.

  Wilson’s description gives a sense of the polyglot nature of the culture at the time. Linda Ronstadt started her career forty years after his journal entry and, until her retirement in 2012, sang virtually every style of music. She regards the standard song as “maybe the greatest gift of American culture to the world at large in the early twentieth century.” She sees it as a “sandwich” with ingredients from different cultures: “The first piece of the bread is New Orleans Creole culture—their knowledge of European instrumentation met West African rhythms—with the five-beat, the talking drums—and that’s when jazz was born at the end of the Civil War,” she said. “Layered over that were the Polish immigrants, Irish immigrants, Italian immigrants. A very sentimental working-class kind of song—longing for home, for love. Over the top, the last layer of bread is the Jewish migration, who were fleeing from the pogroms and had terrible sadness as well. They had great rhythms going on in central Europe, too—they had syncopation, they had gypsy rhythms—so the West African five-beat was easy to glom on to. Somebody like Benny Goodman sounds like klezmer music grafted onto an African rhythm.”

  By the 1890s, the African-American influence started to make its way into mainstream popular music as black musicians thrilled their audiences to ragtime and other kinds of syncopated rhythm: “displacement of beat, anticipations of rhythmic resolutions at the ends of phrases, and the use of triple figures in duple time,” in Charles Hamm’s words. White songwriters with good ears absorbed all of it, usually without acknowledging the source. Irving Berlin proclaimed, “Syncopation is the soul of every American; pure unadulterated ragtime is the best heart-raiser and worry-banisher that I know.” In many of Gershwin’s early songs—“I Got Rhythm,” “’S Wonderful,” “Fascinating Rhythm,” and “Somebody Loves Me,” for example—the melody seems to proceed from the rhythm rather than the other way around.

  The particular harmonies of blues and jazz, and the uncanny impro
visations of jazz instrumentalists, were important, too. The first blues song to reach a wide audience was Mamie Smith’s 1920 recording of “Crazy Blues,” which sold an estimated million copies. Other African-American singers, including Ethel Waters, Alberta Hunter, Ma Rainey, and Bessie Smith, had crossover success during the twenties. In 1921, two black songwriters, Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, had a smash Broadway revue, Shuffle Along. The effect on white songwriters and arrangers was evident to Gilbert Seldes, who concluded, “Our whole present music is derived from the negro.” Gershwin, especially, appreciated black musicians and throughout his career made a point of seeking them out. His disciple Harold Arlen carried on the tradition, writing for Harlem Cotton Club revues in the early 1930s, where his and Ted Koehler’s classic “Stormy Weather” was first performed by Ethel Waters. Gershwin’s “American folk opera” Porgy and Bess opened in 1935 with an entirely African-American cast and a score that probably represented the artistic zenith of this cross-cultural project.

  As first- or second-generation Jewish immigrants, Berlin, Gershwin, and Arlen were on the edges of mainstream American culture themselves, and thus inclined to be comfortable with such excursions. But the prominence of Jews among songwriters of the post-Berlin generation was a broader phenomenon than that, and lends itself to no single or simple explanation. The fact that the entertainment industry generally and Tin Pan Alley specifically didn’t discriminate on the basis of religion (the same could not be said of race) was surely relevant, as was the respect accorded to both words and music in Jewish and Yiddish culture. And so was the nature of the music in that tradition: soulful, rhythmic, often minor-key, and, as it turned out, well suited to the bluesy, jazzy harmonies that were beginning to take hold of Americans’ imaginations. Sometimes forgotten is the fact that Jews were well represented in every corner of Tin Pan Alley, not only as writers and publishers, but as pluggers and performers as well. Hazel Meyer observed, “In the search for song-pluggers so vital to the exploitation of their songs, Tin Pan Alley publishers shrewdly led frequent raids on the Lower East Side synagogues. . . . The boys who chanted the Hebrew refrains had what today’s musicians call a schmaltzy delivery, a style eminently suitable for the soddenly tearful songs of the early 1900s.” Many of the top singers of the first few decades of the century were Jewish, including Al Jolson (a cantor’s son), Fanny Brice, Libby Holman, and Sophie Tucker.