Tin Pan Alley Featuring Johnny Mercer (Will Robinson) Tin Pan Alley As
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Tin Pan Alley featuring Johnny Mercer (Will Robinson) Tin Pan Alley as most of you probably know is a term associated with what is considered the golden age of American popular song. It began around 1885 going all the way through to the 1950s, which is around the time when early rock n roll, i.e. Elvis, started to appear and make the Tin Pan style of song outdated. Tin Pan Alley refers to a physical area in Manhattan, on West 28th between 5th and 6th streets, where the publishing companies set up shop, hired songwriters, and produced popular music. And even though Stephen Foster predated the Tin Pan Alley years, I want to mention him because he was really a pioneer for the era to come and for the main subject of my talk. Foster was the first of many subsequent songwriters whose fathers told him that songwriting was a low life waste of time and there was no money in it. Foster proved his father half right, because Foster made a huge name for himself but unfortunately no money..that went to his publishers, who were literally the publishers of the sheet music. In the very earlier days of Tin Pan Alley it was all about printed sheet music. Back then the local commercial printing centers were in cities like Chicago, Boston, St Louis, and my hometown New Orleans.. and as songs would become popular locally, the New York music publishers would buy the rights to them. Eventually they started creating the atmosphere to produce and market songs themselves, hence the genesis of Tin Pan Alley. These NY publishing companies would send out “song pluggers”, which is still the term used by present day music publishers , although today they function in a different way. Back then song pluggers were piano players or singers who would travel around to live venues, primarily minstrel shows at first, then vaudeville acts, fairs, cycle races, horse races, just about anywhere there was a large gathering of people. And the song pluggers would perform and promote the songs, in turn fueling sheet music sales, which had the potential to make good money. It was not unheard of for a popular song to sell a million plus copies of sheet music Another reason for Tin Pan Alley’s emergence was the fact that in the late 1800s and early 1900s musical tastes started shifting away from classical music and hymns, over to short songs with melodies and lyrics that could be performed locally. The theory as to why they actually called it “Tin Pan” Alley comes from the fact that these publishers, probably starting in the early 1900s, had rooms set up in their offices designated for writers, as you still have here on Music Row. And almost all these writers back then were piano players who had lyricists working with them. In the early days many of these pianos were doctored a bit by adding pieces of cloth to the piano strings to make them sound more percussive and tinny, so it was said they if you walked through publishers’ offices by the writing rooms it sounded like tin pans banging..so basically a derogatory term that came to be romanticized. And just an aside, if you’re wondering why they wanted the pianos more percussive sounding I think it was because the earlier Tin Pan songs were bouncier, more novelty kind of songs, and they could get a more rhythmic effect that worked well with these songs. Tin Pan songwriters were mostly Eastern European Immigrants or children of immigrants who grew up in New York City in the early 20th century, and predominantly were Jewish.. names like Irving Berlin who was born Isidore Baline, or George Gershwin, the original Russian name being Gershowitz, and there’s also Fred Astaire ,who wasn’t a songwriter but someone who sang and danced to many Tin Pan Alley songs, was once Frederich Austerlitz. Not all the Tin Pan Alley guys were immigrants or Jewish however, as there were some exceptions, one of the most famous being Cole Porter who was from Indiana and Episcopalian. But there was also another notable songwriter who happens to be a favorite of mine, and that is a man named Johnny Mercer. He was quite the anomaly because he was neither of Eastern European immigrant origin, nor from the northeast or midwest, nor Jewish, but rather an Episcopal choir boy from the deep south, the city of Savannah. And though he was predominantly a lyricist, he was also very musical and occasionally wrote music for his own lyrics even though he couldn’t play an instrument. Alex Wilder, who was a well known Tin Pan songwriter himself, and author who wrote books about Tin Pan Alley, once said “all roads lead through John” (as in Mercer) meaning a huge amount of successful writers were associated with Johnny in some way. It’s said that Johnny was able to bridge the past and the future, the north and south, the urban style of songwriting and the countryside using his folksy style of lyrics and made up jargon. He could write both slangy and classy lyrics at the same time. One historian put it this way, that almost all the writers of that era were “indoor” writers but Mercer was an “outdoor” writer, whose lyrics drew the imagery from the world of nature and the American landscape. As the author Wilfred Sheed said, he widened the vocabulary and subject matter of the New York based standards to embrace a new generation of audiences from all over. And his timing was very good for what he brought to the table. First during the 1930s and 40s when he had become the hot writer, it was the hey day of the Tin Pan Alley years, and a time when there was a wave of primness that swept in as Prohibition went away and that favored country values over city ones. So as the music became more sophisticated, influenced by Jazz , the lyrics also had a new feel to them and the kind of lyrics Johnny wrote came in very handy. Another reason for Johnny’s good timing that’s important to mention has to do with technology and the invention of the microphone for recording in 1925. Before then a group of musicians and the singer would all crowd around a large conical horn, play and sing as loudly as they could and record straight to wax cylinders then later on a polyvinyl flat disc. But with the introduction of the microphone and the era of “electric recording” a vocalist could be featured much more easily and he wouldn’t have to project so loudly. So on records you could hear the words better, and the singers could sing softer , more soulfully and emotionally , which is how the crooners came about. Mercer was actually considered a crooner himself with his smooth laid back style.. The band leader Paul Whiteman once said of Johnny’s singing “it sounded like he was singing in his sleep”. And these recording improvements really helped radio take off which led to a larger amount of songs and singers being able to reach a wide span of people. It also helped the movie industry immensely. By the 1930s the business had all changed to talkie movies (as they were called) and this caused a shift from NY to LA enticing old vaudeville acts like Bob Hope as well as songwriters to head for Hollywood where the films were being made. The need and demand for good clever lyrics was growing, which again played into Mercer’s strength. Lastly, something else that really set Mercer apart from other songwriters was that he was a singer and a performer which was rare at that time. Typically the songwriters were songwriters and the performers were performers. But Mercer made a name for himself because he could do both. (Hoagy Carmichael was another example of that, and later Mel Torme) . “Singer songwriters”, as they’ve come to be known, really didn’t start appearing until Bob Dylan , Paul Simon, Beatles, etc came onto the scene in the 60s. Will Friedwald , an author and music critic, said in his book, JAZZ SINGING, that Mercer was “one of the greatest rhythm singers of all time , the only songwriter of his time who could have made it had he never written a single song, so catchy was his southern accent and so sure was his command of the beat” So here you have this Southern boy, gap toothed with a Huck Finn face and a natural charm , who also possessed a sweet easy going style of singing. It’s no wonder that he was a popular guest on the big radio shows thereby self perpetuating his fame like almost no other songwriter at the time could do. He was the only lyricist that later on had records made with only his songs, an example being Ella Fitzgerald’s record The Johnny Mercer Songbook, and another one that I own recorded by the late great Dr John called Mercernary. If a record was going to be made to honor a songwriter it was always the music composer (Duke Ellington, Harold Arlen, Mancini) but never the lyricist. The way it tended to work in the Tin Pan Alley era was the songwriter was either a music composer or a lyricist, but very few songwriters did both. The biggest and best example of an all encompassing songwriter was Irving Berlin. But most of the others were teams , and they stuck to what they did best.