Irving Berlin: Songs from the Melting Pot: The Formative Years, 1907-1914
Irving Berlin: Songs from the Melting Pot: The Formative Years, 1907-1914
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| ISBN-13: | 9780195361148 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Oxford University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/13/1997 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Lexile: | 1590L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 9 MB |
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Chapter One
Introduction
Irving Berlin and the Nature of Tin Pan Alley Song
Between 1907, when Irving Berlin wrote "Marie From Sunny Italy" in collaboration with Mike Nicholson, and December 1914, when his first full-length musical show, Watch Your Step, opened at New York's New Amsterdam Theatre, 190 songs for which he had written lyrics, music, or both were copyrighted and published. These are listed, alphabetically by title, in Appendix 1.
These were not the only songs he wrote during these seven years. One interviewer reported that "Berlin turns out an average of three songs a week," although "the majority of them never are heard by the general public. By a process of elimination about one in ten is finally published. It is upon the basis of that average that Berlin works.... He is willing to waste nine efforts for the sake of evolving one good tune." Berlin himself was quoted as saying, "I am merely a song-writer who has enjoyed a few successes and many failures.... Sometimes I turn out four or five songs a night, so you can imagine how many bad ones I write," and elsewhere, probably more accurately, "I average from four to five songs a week and, by elimination, but one out of ten reaches the public."
Virtually everyone who came in contact with Berlin remarked on his obsession with turning out songs. Frederick James Smith reported that "he works practically without pause.... If there is one thing about his unassuming and almost eagerly alert personality, it is [a] quality of indomitable will." Another writer noted that "the real basis of Berlin's success is industry—ceaseless, cruel, torturingindustry. There is scarcely a waking minute when he is not engaged either in teaching his songs to a vaudeville player, or composing new ones. His regular working hours are from noon until daybreak. All night long he usually keeps himself a prisoner in his apartment, bent on evolving a new melody which shall set the whole world to beating time." Berlin himself satirized this preoccupation in an unpublished lyric:
He wakes her up and cries I've written another song You've got to listen to it She rubs her eyes and answers I don't want to hear it I don't want to hear it He keeps it up all morning Until the day is dawning And when he sees her yawning He starts to holler louder—she takes a sleeping powder And then he wakes her up and cries I've written another song She has to listen to it She simply cannot keep him shut He's a nut—He's a nut—He's a nut— One night she went to her Mother's home. While she was sleeping there all alone He called her up on the telephone And cried I've written another song ...
Evidence supports these accounts of Berlin's high rate of productivity. Appendix 2 lists the titles of more than a hundred songs that he is known to have written in addition to the copyrighted and published pieces, brought together from various sources: handwritten or typed lyric sheets, ranging from fragmentary to complete, of otherwise unknown songs; lead sheets of unpublished songs; phonograph recordings of songs that were never copyrighted or published; reviews and programs identifying unpublished pieces sung in musical shows or in vaudeville; and several working lists compiled by Berlin of his own songs.
Creation, Collaboration and Originality
More than a third of Berlin's early songs were written in collaboration with one or more other songwriters, raising the question of whether these pieces should be included in the canon of his work. He was clear in his own mind on this: At one point he drew up several lists of his songs, which include not only those pieces for which he was sole author but also the ones written with other songwriters, and his personal six-volume set of early songs, bound in leather and stamped "My Songs," also contains collaborative efforts.
Writing a Tin Pan Alley song was a both a complex and a corporate process. As Berlin described his own working method, he would begin with an idea for "either a title or a phrase or a melody, and hum it out to something definite.... I am working on songs all of the time, at home and outside and in the office. I gather ideas, and then I usually work them out between eight o'clock at night and five in the morning." He would jot down lyrics as they came to him, on whatever material was at hand; some of his unpublished lyrics are written on scraps of paper or on hotel or business stationery, and others were typed out by a staff member of his publishing house.
In the next stage, words and music would be worked out more fully in collaboration with another songwriter and/or an arranger. Berlin's first biographer describes the genesis of Berlin's first song, "Marie From Sunny Italy":
It was agreed that [Berlin and Mike Nicholson] must publish a song. Nick, of course, would invent the tune and [Berlin] must write the words, for which, they said, he had a knack because he was already famous in Chinatown for the amusing if seldom printable travesties he improvised as the new songs found their way downtown....
This masterpiece was wrought with great groaning and infinite travail of the spirit. Its rhymes, which filled the young lyricist with the warm glow of authorship, were achieved day by day and committed nervously to stray bits of paper. Much of it had to be doctored by Nick, with considerable experimenting at the piano and a consequent displeasure felt by the patrons at Nigger Mike's who would express their feelings by hurling the damp beer cloths at the singer's head. Truly it might be said that Berlin's first song was wrought while he dodged the clouts of his outraged neighbors.
Finally the thing was done and then the two stared blankly at the bleak fact that neither of them knew how to record their work. Nick could read sheet music after a fashion but he had no notion how to reverse the process.... [W]hen the song was finally transcribed, the work was done by a young violinist who shall remain unidentified in this narrative because he has since clothed himself in the grandeur of a Russian name and betaken himself to the concert platform with the air of a virtuoso just off the boat from Paris.
Next the masterpiece was borne with shaking knees to Tin Pan Alley, where it was promptly accepted by Joseph Stern for publication.
Some songwriters were primarily lyricists, writing texts to which more musically adept collaborators added music, and at the beginning of his career Berlin was considered to be one of these.
He was hired as staff lyricist for the Ted Snyder Company early in 1909, and as Table 1 shows, most of his songs for the next several years were written in collaboration with Snyder himself.
Most of the forty-two songs the two men wrote together have music attributed to Snyder and lyrics to Berlin, but this is probably more a function of the respective positions and statuses of the two men in the publishing house, and of royalty distribution, than of their respective contributions to the song in question. Berlin probably drafted the lyrics for most of these pieces and Snyder came up with the first musical ideas, but distinctions between composer and lyricist almost certainly broke down in the throes of creation, and both words and music of the completed songs must represent some degree of collaboration. Berlin was quite capable of writing music for his lyrics by this time, and had in fact published several successful songs for which he had written music as well as words. Occasional disagreements between the attributions on the first page of a song and those on its cover, or between either of these and the information submitted for copyright entries, support the notion that the division of labor in writing a song was not strictly maintained. The title page of "I Just Came Back To Say Goodbye," for instance, attributes the words to Berlin and the music to Snyder, while the cover reads, "Words and Music by Irving Berlin"; similarly, the cover of " 'Thank You, Kind Sir!' Said She" attributes the piece to "Berlin and Snyder" while the title page reads "Words by Irving Berlin/Music by Ted Snyder."
There is little beyond anecdote, such as the description quoted earlier of how "Marie From Sunny Italy" was created, to document how two or more Tin Pan Alley songwriters worked together on a piece. Typical is an account of the genesis of one of Berlin's most successful early songs:
Henry Waterson, head of a music firm, tells a funny story about Berlin's second [sic] song, "Sadie Salome, Go Home." For two weeks previous to submitting the song Berlin, with a pianist [Edgar Leslie], occupied a room adjoining Waterson's, and [they] played and sang until Waterson said he dreamed of "Sadie Salome." At the expiration of two weeks Berlin called him into the piano room to hear the song; but at the conclusion of the introduction, and before he heard a word of it, Waterson said he'd take it. "Play it a tone lower, and I'll sing it for you," he said to the surprised writers, which he did, much to their embarrassment.
And Rennold Wolf gives an account of how he, Berlin, Vincent Bryan, and Channing Pollock worked together on a show song in Atlantic City:
We assembled in Mr. Berlin's imposing suite of parlors, where there was a piano.... Seated at the instrument, he was not long in conceiving a melody, which immediately he began to pound out. All night, until dawn was breaking, he sat on the stool, playing that same melody over and over and over again, while two fagged and dejected lyric writers struggled and heaved to fit it with words.... One cigarette replaced another as he pegged away; a pitcher of beer, stationed at one end of the keyboard, was replenished frequently; and there he sat, trying patiently to suggest, to two minds that were completely worn out by long rehearsals and over-work, a lyric that would fit his melody. Mr. Pollock and I paced the floor; we sat, in turn, in every chair and on every divan in the rooms; we tore at our hair; we fumed, we spluttered, and probably we cursed.
In some cases, Berlin's contribution to a song seems to have been more in the nature of tinkering with an already written song than of contributing to the piece in its early stages. W. Raymond Walker tells how Berlin was called in to revise "Oh, What I Know About You" after Walker had written the song in collaboration with Joseph H. McKeon and Harry M. Piano, but even though Walker says that the published song was "a great deal different" from the first version, Berlin's name doesn't appear on the published song. "Virginia Lou" was originally copyrighted and published as a song by Eddie Leonard and Earl Taylor, then withdrawn and republished with a new lyric by Berlin. The sheet music for "There's A Girl In Havana" credits the piece to E. Ray Goetz and A. Baldwin Sloane, but the copyright deposit card in the Library of Congress adds Berlin's name as coauthor, and several other songs attributed to the team of Goetz and Sloane—"Lonely Moon," "My Heather Bell," and "Take Me Back To The Garden Of Love"—were included in a catalogue of Berlin's songs brought out in 1948 by the Irving Berlin Music Corporation. It seems that Berlin may have "doctored" these songs, then decided to withdraw mention of his input.
Despite such collaborations and team efforts, Berlin wrote both words and music for almost two thirds of his early songs, and in later years it became the exception for him to collaborate with another songwriter. He described the advantages of being both lyricist and composer this way:
Nearly all other writers work in teams, one writing the music and the other the words. They either are forced to fit some one's words to their music or some one's music to their words. Latitude—which begets novelty—is denied them, and in consequence both lyrics and melody suffer. Writing both words and music I can compose them together and make them fit. I sacrifice one for the other. If I have a melody I want to use, I plug away at the lyrics until I make them fit the best parts of my music and vice versa.
Even when Berlin was writing both words and music for a song, he was still engaged in collaboration. Like other songwriters of the day, he depended on someone else to take down his tunes in musical notation and to work out details of the piano accompaniment; as he put it, "when I have completed a song and memorized it, I dictate it to an arranger." Though he has often been criticized for this, it was in fact standard procedure for Tin Pan Alley songwriters, even those fluent in musical notation, from Charles K. Harris on.
After depending on one or another of the staff musicians at the Snyder Music Company for this sort of help for several years, Berlin hired his own "musical secretary" in early 1913. According to one account:
At the time "In My Harem" was written, Mr. [Cliff] Hess was working in the Chicago office of the Waterson, Berlin and Snyder Company. Berlin went to Chicago on the 20th Century Limited and worked out this tune in his head while on the train. When in Chicago he played it over (all on the black keys, as he always does) and Mr. Hess sat by him and wrote it down on paper as he played it. This struck the composer as a great time-saving device, for Mr. Hess afterwards transposed it into a simpler key, and arranged it in its less complicated commercial form.
Berlin hired Hess on the spot and brought him back to New York.
Hess resides with Berlin at the latter's apartment in Seventy-first Street; he attends to the details of the young song-writers's business affairs, transcribes the melodies which Berlin conceives and plays them over and over again while the latter is setting the lyrics. When Berlin goes abroad Hess accompanies him. Hess' position is not so easy as it might at first appear, for Berlin's working hours are, to say the least, unconventional. Much of the night Hess sits by his side, ready to put on record a tune once his chief has hit upon it. His regular hour for retiring is five o'clock in the morning. He arises for breakfast at exactly noon. In the afternoon he goes to the offices of Watterson [sic], Berlin and Snyder and demonstrates his songs.
After Berlin gave a public demonstration of his songwriting technique in London, a journalist described the two men working together:
A musician sat at the piano. Mr. Berlin began to hum and to sway in the motion of ragtime. Round and round the room he went while the pianist jotted down the notes. Mr. Berlin stopped occasionally: "That's wrong, we will begin again." A marvelous ear, a more marvelous memory, he detects anything amiss in the harmony and he can remember the construction of his song from the beginning after humming it over once. The actual melody took him an hour. Then he began on the words. While he swayed with the pianist playing the humming gave way to a jumble of words sung softly. And out of the jumble came the final composition above. This is how most of his ragtime melodies have been evolved. For one melody he must cover several miles of carpet.
It would be impossible to document precisely what Hess contributed to the final versions of Berlin's songs. The piano accompaniments were, in all likelihood, mostly his work. Lyrics and tunes were Berlin's inventions, and various accounts agree that he knew what harmony he wanted as well; one of his later musical secretaries reported, "I'd play [the song] back for him to hear what he'd dictated, and he'd say, 'You got one chord wrong in there.' And he'd be right." But Hess was much more than an accomplished pianist with a good ear; in later years he published songs under his own name, and it's difficult to imagine that he didn't have some input into the shaping and polishing of tune, rhythm, and harmony that took place as he and Berlin worked together to transform the latter's fragments of lyrics and music into finished songs.
The point of this discussion of the Tin Pan Alley mode of song production is not merely to justify the inclusion in the Berlin canon of pieces written by him in collaboration with others but, more important, to underline that the creation of a popular song is a vastly different process from the composition of a classical piece. And the difference between popular and classical music extends far beyond the mechanical details of how a new piece within each genre comes into being to such issues as the concept of "originality" and the relationship of music and its composers to the community for which it is created.
This era in classical music, falling at the tag end of the Romantic era, was marked by the exaltation of the individual genius/composer to the position of a visionary capable of creating objects of art unimaginable to anyone else. As a result of this focus on radical individuality, a composer's music was expected to differ stylistically from the music of all earlier composers and also from that of other contemporaneous writers, and it was judged in large part by the extent to which it moved forward, breaking new stylistic ground.
The suggestion that a new classical piece sounded like the music of another composer could be meant (and taken) as negative criticism. Audiences were often resistant to new pieces written in more complex styles than they were accustomed to, but some composers and critics viewed audience rejection as an inevitable reaction to the stylistic progressiveness of the piece in question.
In contrast, a popular song was judged by its conformity to the taste and standards of the community in and for which it was created and by its reception within this community.
For songwriters such as Berlin, widespread approval by performers and audiences was the distinguishing mark of a good song, and a poor song was one no one wanted to hear again. Since mass audiences were unlikely to respond favorably to a song that sounded too different from those they already knew, writing a good popular song required, first of all, the use of musical and textual materials already familiar to audiences. Popular songwriters weren't concerned with turning out products that moved beyond the style of their peers, but in working with them in a common idiom and establishing common ground with their audiences. Thus one cannot judge their songs according to whether or not they broke new harmonic, melodic, or structural ground, and audience rejection signalled failure, not success.
In order to achieve this instant familiarity, as it might be called, writers of popular songs not only conformed stylistically to the music best known to their audiences but often quoted and parodied familiar melodic material, as well.
Like his Tin Pan Alley peers, Berlin "knew all the music his audiences knew, and his songs make use of the common melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic patterns of this music and frequently offer direct quotations from one familiar piece or another"; as a result, his songs were "almost—but not quite—already known to his listeners when heard for the first time." As Berlin himself once put it, "we depend largely on tricks, we writers of songs. There has been a standing offer in Vienna, holding a large prize, to anyone who can write eight bars of original music.... Thousands of compositions have been submitted, but all of them have been traced back to some other melody." He concludes that "our work is to connect the old phrases in a new way, so that they will sound like a new tune."
Writing elsewhere, Berlin insisted that he "[knew] the danger of writing melodies that are too original" because "it must be remembered that the public is the final and supreme judge of song merit." He was confident that audiences are "getting wiser every day regarding the caliber of songs [they] desire" and predicted that "the time will come when this indirect censorship will produce song[s] that will express real human emotion in the way such emotion should be expressed." The best songs are original in some way, he observed, but the "the real originality in song writing consists in the construction of the song rather than in the actual melodic base."
Berlin's songs of 1913 and 1914 are considerably different in melody, rhythm, harmony, subject matter, and expression from those of five years or so earlier, and new subgenres emerged between 1907 and 1914. Popular song, like classical music, does change; new stylistic and formal ground is broken; and I will make the case later that Berlin was one of the most "important" songwriters of the period precisely because he was one of the chief instigators of several new developments. But there's a critical distinction between stylistic and expressive "progress" in popular and classical music, a distinction that speaks to the most elemental differences between the two genres.
The aesthetic of popular music insists that there is a social contract among members of its community that demands that a piece be acceptable to all members of the group. Stylistic changes in Tin Pan Alley song in the early twentieth century took place in the context of interaction and collaboration among songwriters, between songwriters and staff pianists and arrangers, between songwriters and performers, and, most critical of all, between songwriters and audiences. The aesthetic of classical music, at least at this time, insisted that stylistic change was the prerogative of the composer alone, a choice made in artistic isolation.
During the second week of July 1911, Berlin appeared at the Hippodrome in London in the revue Hullo, Ragtime!, singing a selection of his own songs. The Encore of London reported on 10 July that "he met with a most enthusiastic reception," and The Times, uncharacteristically reviewing a show for the popular musical stage, admitted on 8 July that "[he] sings his rag-time songs with diffidence, skill and charm" and that they "sound, indeed, quite new, and innocently, almost childishly, pleasing." In curious coincidence, Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps was given its London concert premier the same week; The Times, on 11 July, complained that "harmonically it is extraordinarily rough and strident.... There is much that is hideously and cruelly harsh, even to ears accustomed to modern music, and much, too, that is exceedingly monotonous."
Berlin's songs and Stravinsky's ballet suite were both perceived as original works, by both audiences and critics. Berlin's originality was accepted and appreciated immediately by his audience; Stravinsky's was not.
The Material Form of Tin Pan Alley Songs
Tin Pan Alley songs were disseminated primarily in the material form of published sheet music. Production of such a piece began with its collaborative oral creation and its subsequent capture in musical notation, as described earlier, after which the song was sent off to be engraved. A small run of first-proof sheets from punch plates was sent back to the publisher for correction and also for prepublication distribution as professional copies to singers who might be persuaded to perform the piece. An artist was commissioned to design and execute a front cover, which might take the form of: 1. a pictorial representation of one or more of the song's protagonists; 2. a portrait of the singer who had agreed to perform the piece; or, less often, 3. an "art" cover of floral or geometric design. Illustrations of each type will be found in the following chapters. A back cover intended to advertise one or more other songs in the publisher's catalogue was then designed; sometimes the first several staves of the chorus of a single song would be given, sometimes the opening measures of several songs, sometimes a list of the titles of songs recently added to that publisher's catalogue.
Unlike the later practice of depositing handwritten lead sheets to obtain copyright protection before a song had been engraved or even completely finished, two copies of the engraved song, with or without covers, were sent to Washington, D.C., for copyright. Two more went to Ottawa for Canadian copyright and two to London for Commonwealth copyright. Copyright and publication took place simultaneously, in effect.
The finished product, in large (ca. 14" x 11") format, was attractive and functional. Covers were often stylish and colorful examples of one of the "minor" art forms of the day, serving to attract the eye of potential buyers. The paper and ink were of excellent quality, as proved by the excellent condition of many remaining copies after three quarters of a century, and the sheet music sat well on the piano stand. The music itself was engraved in large notes, with generous space between staves and in the margins; many of the craftsmen did beautiful work, comparing favorably in artistry with published music of any period. Any mistakes made in the process of engraving remained uncorrected in subsequent runs, since the same plates continued to be used without alteration. A new cover might be designed to replace the original one if a song sold well enough to warrant further printings, however, particularly if the piece had been taken up by a popular performer or interpolated into a show.
This sheet music was available for purchase at the offices of publishing companies, where prospective buyers, in addition to browsing through the stock, could also have songs played and sung by staff musicians. Distribution also took place at retail outlets, some specializing in music and others offering sheet music as part of a larger stock. Dissemination also took place to a lesser extent through other media. In the early years of the century, newspapers such as the Boston Sunday American and the New York American and Journal included a piece of sheet music in each week's Sunday supplement, and the lyrics of popular songs were still circulated in text-only songsters. Installments of Delaney's Song Book, containing the lyrics of new songs brought out by the major Tin Pan Alley publishing houses, appeared from 1892 into the 1920s; most of Berlin's early songs appeared in this popular series. In addition, publishers themselves sometimes distributed the texts of their new songs on single sheets, as broadsides.
In their material form as published sheet music, Berlin's early songs appear to exhibit a high degree of uniformity, among themselves and also in relation to pieces by other songwriters. Structurally, virtually every one of them is made up of the same component parts:
1. a brief piano introduction, drawn usually from the final bars of the chorus or the beginning of the verse
2. a two- or four-bar vamp, with melodic and rhythmic material drawn from and leading into the verse
3. two (or sometimes more) verses, usually sixteen or thirty-two bars in length, depending on the meter of the song
4. a chorus, usually equal in length to the verse, with first and second endings. The first ending indicates a repeat of the chorus; the second gives instructions for either a da capo return to the introduction or a dal segno return to the vamp
The songs also appear to be quite uniform in melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic style. Texts are set in a predominantly syllabic fashion, to mostly diatonic tunes confined to a vocal range of an octave or less, with an occasional chromatic passing note. Harmonies are tonal and triadic, shaped into two- or four-bar phrases, with secondary dominants and other chromatic chords sometimes lending variety. Modulation may lead to another key for a phrase or two, and from early on Berlin had a mannerism of abruptly shifting a phrase to a key a third away from the tonic, without modulation.
Most of what has been written about Berlin's early songs takes this sheet music as the primary (and often only) text, and most recent performances of these pieces are more or less literal readings from this text. But the songs were rarely performed just as they appear on the printed page. A literal reading from the sheet music results in a performance shaped as follows:
* piano introduction
* vamp
* first verse
* chorus with first ending
* repeat of chorus, with second ending
* vamp
* second verse
* chorus with first ending
* repeat of chorus, with second ending
But we know from period recordings and other evidence that this sequence was subject to change in performance. Only the first verse might be sung, or additional verses not found in the sheet music might be added. The chorus might be sung only once after each verse, "catch" lines of text might be interpolated into the second chorus, or there might be a completely different set of lyrics, not found in the sheet music, for the second chorus. The singer might alter notes in the melody or deliver the entire song in a semispoken way without precise pitches. The accompaniment might take over for a half or a full chorus without the singer(s), the instrumental introduction might be repeated after the last chorus, or the song might end with a coda not found in the sheet music.
Beyond that, when these songs were sung on the vaudeville or legitimate stage or in the recording studio, they were accompanied by an orchestra rather than a piano, and they were frequently sung by two or more voices despite having been published as vocal solos. A period recording of a "double" version of "Alexander's Ragtime Band" illustrates how a piece notated for one voice could be transformed into a double version in performance:
Oh my honey [Yes?], Oh my honey [Yes?], Better hurry and let's meander, Ain't ya goin' [Where ya goin'?], Ain't ya goin' [Where ya goin'?], To the leader man [Ragged meter man], Oh my honey [What?], Oh my honey [What?], Let me take you to Alexander's grand stand, brass band, Ain't ya comin' along? Come on and hear [I'd like to hear], Come on and hear [I'd like to hear], Alexander's ragtime band, Come on and hear [Oh yes my dear], Come on and hear [Oh yes my dear], It's the best band in the land, Can dey play a bugle call like I never heard before? Why, it's so natural that you want to go to war, That's just the bestest band what am, Honey lamb, Come on along [I'm goin' along]. Come on along [I'm goin' along]...
(brackets and italics indicate the second voice, bold type indicates both voices singing together)
The problem with taking the notated form of these songs as the primary text, then, is that, unlike compositions of the classical repertory, which throughout the modern era were assumed to be "ideal objects with an immutable and upshifting 'real' meaning," a popular song may be "rearticulated" in any given performance. In other words, "dissemination of [a popular song] as printed sheet music was only the beginning of its history; it then became fair game for performers, who according to the conventions of the genre were free to transform [it] in details of rhythm, harmony, melody, instrumentation, words, and even overall intent."
Throughout its history, popular music has been marked by the extraordinary flexibility with which its text has been treated by performers, and also by the variety of meanings that listeners have perceived in these songs. Stephen Foster's "Old Folks At Home" was sung by amateurs clustered around pianos in private parlors, performed on the minstrel stage in blackface, sung on the concert stage by famous performers of the classical repertory, interpolated into stage versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin, sung around campfires by groups of Civil War soldiers of both sides, reworked into elaborate display pieces for virtuoso pianists and trumpet players, paraphrased in classical compositions by Charles Ives and others, and quoted in Irving Berlin's "Alexander's Ragtime Band." In each instance, the overall shape, stylistic details, and the performance medium were different, as was the meaning of the song for its performers and listeners.
Today's literal, note-for-note performances of Berlin's early songs have their own validity and their own meaning, and recent analyses of the music and lyrics of these pieces using their notated form as the primary text can tell us useful things about their style and structure. But my concern is not with the performance and reception of these songs today but with their meaning for Berlin and his audiences at the time of their composition and their first performances.
To recover this meaning, one must look beyond their material form as sheet music.
Meaning in Berlin's Early Songs
Berlin's early song aren't as homogeneous a group as they appear to be in their notated form. The corpus in fact includes pieces of many different genres and subgenres, each with its own style, content, and meaning.
The issue of genre has been a favorite topic of literary critics throughout the twentieth century. Earlier, when most critics were under the spell of modernist modes of thought, the chief focus was on the construction of taxonomies based on close readings of the texts of novels, plays, poems, essays, and other literary forms, in relative isolation from the contexts in which these works were conceived, written, produced, disseminated, and received. More recently, the emphasis has switched to the flexibility and overlap of genres and to the necessity of taking factors other than the printed text into consideration.
Similarly, earlier musicological writing on genre was concerned largely with somewhat simplistic distinctions among various instrumental and vocal forms, while more recent scholars have argued that one must consider semiotic, behavioral, social, ideological, economic, and juridical dimensions as well. As Jim Samson puts it, discussions of genre should "extend beyond musical materials into the social domain so that a genre is dependent for its definition on context, function and community validation, and not simply on formal and technical regulations." Even more directly and radically, Robert Walser argues that "musical meanings are always grounded socially and historically, and they operate on an ideological field of conflicting interests, institutions, and memories," so much so that "the purpose of a genre is to organize the reproduction of a particular ideology."
The issue of genre is much more complex in popular songs than in literature, or for that matter even in instrumental music, and not only because both words and music must be considered, separately and together. As noted earlier, the printed texts of these songs were much more subject to change in performance than were those of so-called serious literature and music; when context as well as text is taken into consideration, it becomes apparent that popular songs were "consumed" in a far greater variety of situations than were poems and novels, or string quartets and symphonies.
Elsewhere, I've offered a comprehensive taxonomy of Berlin's early songs based chiefly on their printed texts. While I'm still convinced that there's some value in classifications of this sort, this book proposes that the contemporary perception of the genre of a song, and hence its meaning, was shaped most importantly by its performance and by the venue in which this performance took place. Conversely, stylistic differences written into these pieces were more a matter of the songwriter's sense of who would perform a given song and where than of any abstract ideas about genre. Accordingly, three chapters of this book are organized around the early twentieth century's most important performance venues for popular songs: the vaudeville house, the home circle, and the legitimate theater. The other two chapters discuss songs that make reference of one sort or another to African Americans and their culture, a critical component in the evolving style and content of American popular song that cut across performance venues.
In an attempt to understand how these songs were performed and received in their own day, I've made use of various materials in addition to printed music. First, and most important, I've listened to period recordings made on cylinders and discs by the performers who first sang these pieces and who were sometimes coached by Berlin himself. There are far more of these than I first thought; in fact, almost half of Berlin's early songs were recorded, some of them more than once. Appendix 3 is a list of period recordings, compiled by Paul Charosh. These recordings bring the songs to life and shed light on performance style and contemporary meaning, in ways to be discussed in the following chapters.
I've examined the sheet music covers of these songs for whatever clues they might contain about the intended meaning of the piece. Often the relationship between a song and its cover isn't clear. Sometimes the title of a song and the name(s) of its author(s) are given in precisely the same form on the cover as on the first page of the music; at other times there are differences in the details. Sometimes it's apparent that the cover artist must have known the identity of the characters in a given song and how they were portrayed in the lyrics and the music; in other cases there are apparent contradictions between the sense of a song and what appears on its cover. There's no hard evidence one way or the other as to whether songwriters had anything to do with the covers of their songs, but there is a clear pattern in Berlin's songs—the correspondence between the content of a song and its cover increases over the years. From what we know of his determination to control every aspect of his songs, from composition to production to performance to marketing, once he was in a position to do so, it seems likely that he was increasingly involved in decisions about the covers for his songs after early 1912, when he was made a partner in the publishing company that brought out his music.
Sadly, a vast store of other material that would have helped us understand how these songs were done in their own day apparently has been lost. Like other Tin Pan Alley publishing houses, the Ted Snyder Company—renamed Waterson, Berlin & Snyder in early 1912—made various materials, prepared by staff musicians, available to professional musicians who performed pieces from its catalogue. These included copies of songs transposed to fit the voice ranges of different singers; extra verses and choruses; "catch" lines to be inserted into second choruses; "double" versions to facilitate performance by two singers; quartet arrangement of song choruses; and orchestrations of songs for use when they were sung on stage or in the recording studio. None of this material has been recovered, with the exception of a few double versions of lyrics that remained in Berlin's possession, published orchestrations of "Alexander's Ragtime Band" and "Spanish Love," and a manuscript orchestration of "Opera Burlesque."
Even while locating and studying such materials, I've continued to examine the sheet music itself for additional clues to the meaning of these songs. In particular, I've pursued the notion that the lyrics of a popular song are always perceived as being in someone's voice, and the identity of this person can be a key factor in a listener's perceived meaning of the song:
* If a song lyric written in the first person is in the nature of a soliloquy ("I" speaking to himself), the voice will appear to be that of the songwriter, engaged in musing, reminiscing, meditating, philosophizing, or moralizing. If the piece is sung by the songwriter himself, this perception will be intensified, and the audience will be in the position of overhearing him as he speaks to himself. If it's sung by someone other than the songwriter, this performer may assume the role of a "reader," a passive intermediary conveying the voice of the author to the audience. However, if the singer convinces the audience that she has internalized the song's content and expression well enough, the voice may be heard as her own, in which case it's the singer whom the audience will overhear talking to herself. As Edward Cone puts it in a discussion of nineteenth-century art song, the persona of the composer of the song and the singer may seem to collapse into a unitary protagonist.
* If a first-person lyric is addressed to a second person ("I" speaking to "you"), the voice will again appear to be that of the songwriter, now addressing someone else. In performance, the singer (if someone other than the songwriter) may project this one-way dialogue so that the voice remains that of the songwriter, or she may preempt the voice herself, in which case the audience will find itself eavesdropping on her remarks to another party.
* If a first-person lyric is addressed to the second person plural ("I" speaking to "you all"), once again the implied voice will be that of the songwriter speaking to the collective "you," narrating an event or a story or engaged in lecturing or haranguing. In performance, the singer will address the audience directly, either as an intermediary conveying the voice of the author or making a public utterance herself.
* Although texts in first person plural ("we" speaking to "you" or "you all") are common in choral music, they are virtually unknown in Tin Pan Alley songs, at least in their published form for solo voice with piano accompaniment.
* If a first-person lyric is written in such a way that the person speaking is clearly not the songwriter but someone else ("he" or "she" speaking as "I"), then the voice will be perceived to be that of this other person. In performance, the singer's job will be to represent or impersonate this person who is neither the songwriter nor the singer. If she's successful enough in doing this, the audience may in fact take the voice of the song to be her own.
* By the very nature of language, a song cannot have a second-person protagonist ("you" or "you all" speaking to someone). Although lyrics are sometimes addressed to "you," the voice will be heard as that of the songwriter, the performer, or of a protagonist in the song, speaking these words to a second party or to the audience.
* Third-person lyrics function as narration (an implied "I" describing persons, objects, or events). By casting a lyric in the third person, the songwriter establishes an expressive distance between himself and the content of the song. That is, the emotions or attitudes expressed in the lyric are heard not as his own but as those of a character in the song. In performance, the singer will assume the role of narrator.
All of this changes if a song is part of a theatrical production. If performed by a singer in the role of a specific, named character involved in a dramatic scenario, a piece will be perceived as being in the voice of that person, rather than that of the songwriter or the performer, whether the lyric is in the first or the third person. Also, lyrics written in the first person plural addressed to the second person plural ("we" speaking to "you all") are common in songs for the stage, where they are heard as the voice of the ensemble (the collective cast) addressed to the audience.
These remarks in this introduction are offered as a conceptual framework, in preparation for the more detailed discussions of individual songs and their meanings that make up the bulk of the rest of this book.
Table of Contents
| PREFACE: Irving Berlin and the Crucible of God | v |
| INTRODUCTION: Irving Berlin and the Nature of Tin Pan Alley Song | 3 |
| 1. Berlin's Songs for the Vaudeville Stage | 22 |
| 2. Berlin and Blackface | 68 |
| 3. Alexander and His Band | 102 |
| 4. Berlin and the Ballad | 137 |
| 5. Berlin's Early Songs for the Musical Stage | 173 |
| EPILOGUE | 217 |
| APPENDIX 1. Published Songs of Irving Berlin, 1907-1914 | 225 |
| APPENDIX 2. Unpublished Songs by Irving Berlin, Before 1915 | 237 |
| APPENDIX 3 | Period Recordings of Early Songs by Irving Berlin, |
| Compiled by Paul Charosh | 241 |
| NOTES | 273 |
| INDEX | 287 |