Tin Pan Alley OTHER BOOKS by the AUTHOR
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Tin Pan Alley OTHER BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR By DAVID A.JASEN Recorded Ragtime 1897–1958 A Century of American Popular Music By DAVID A.JASEN and GENE JONES Spreadin’ Rhythm Around That American Rag! Black Bottom Stomp By DAVID A.JASEN and TREBOR J.TICHENOR Rags and Ragtime Tin Pan Alley AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GOLDEN AGE OF AMERICAN SONG David A.Jasen Routledge New York and London Published in 2003 by Routledge 29-West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 www.routledge-ny.com Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE www.routledge.uk.co Copyright © 2003 by David A.Jasen All illustrations are from the collection of David A.Jasen. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor and Francis Books, Inc. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk”. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jasen, David A. Tin Pan Alley : an encyclopedia of the golden age of American song / David A.Jasen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-415-93877-5 (hardback : acid-free paper) 1. Popular music—United States—Encyclopedia. I. Title. ML102.P66J37 2003 782.42164′0973-dc21 2003002699 ISBN 0-203-50246-9 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-57592-X (Adobe e-Reader Format) ISBN 0-415-93877-5 (Print Edition) To Richard Carlin A Most Creative and Dedicated Editor You write in the morning, you write at night. You write in a taxi, in the bathtub, or in an elevator. And, after the song is all finished it may turn out to be very bad, but you sharpen your pencil and try again. A professional songwriter has his mind on his job all the time. —Irving Berlin Contents Introduction ix 1 A-Z Bibliography 429 General Index 436 Index of Songs 455 The Tin Pan Alley home of Jerome H.Remick Publishers, 45 W. 28th Street, c. 1905. Introduction The history of Tin Pan Alley is the history of the United States as seen by its tunesmiths. Songs seem to have mirrored every aspect of American life from the 1890s to the digital technology of the 2000s. We can chronicle the changing musical tastes of Americans, along with our social, economic, and political concerns, by the kinds of popular music we bought, played, and listened to: from the tearjerker to the latest rock song. Just what is Tin Pan Alley, and where is it located? In the era before Elvis Presley made a song’s performance more important than its publication, when a song’s popularity was determined not by the number of records it sold but by the number of copies of sheet music it sold, Tin Pan Alley was the name given to the branch of the music publishing business that hired composers and lyricists on a permanent basis to create popular songs. Publishers marketed songs in sheet music form by means of extensive promotional campaigns. Originally, Tin Pan Alley was a nickname given to West Twenty-eighth Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, where many of the fledgling popular music publishers had offices. In time, it became the generic term for all publishers of popular American sheet music, regardless of their geographic location. How Tin Pan Alley Got Its Name According to legend, the naming of Tin Pan Alley came at the turn of the twentieth century, when Monroe Rosenfeld, a prolific composer-lyricist, wrote a series of articles for the New York Herald on the new and energetic popular-music publishing business. For research, he visited the office of Harry Von Tilzer, located at 42 West Twenty-eighth Street, between Broadway and Sixth Avenue. Many other fledgling publishers were located on this street of reconstructed brownstone flats. Their “offices” usually consisted of a broken-down, out-of-tune piano, a secondhand desk and chair, file cabinets, and wooden racks holding the stock of sheet music. Rosenfeld heard a din of competing pianists as he left Von Tilzer’s office, and he recorded that this street, with dozens of demonstrators working at the same time, sounded like a bunch of tin pans clanging. He characterized the street where all of this activity was taking place as “Tin Pan Alley.” The Heydey of the Alley: 1880–1950 Pop music today means music videos, cassettes, compact discs, and flat disc recordings. Popular music itself is called rock, and it is produced by high-powered electronic machines that create a multitude of layered sounds. But today’s approach to pop music is a far cry from its beginnings. Throughout the Alley’s seventy years, popular music emerged in a variety of forms—love ballads, syncopated tunes, Latin American music, nonsense songs, show tunes—all marketed for adults. The music was presented and promoted in sheet music for voice and piano. The public was induced to purchase the music sheets when they saw and heard their favorite performers incorporate the songs in their acts, first in the theater and in vaudeville, then through recordings (first on cylinders, then on flat discs that turned at 78 revolutions per minute), and later on radio, then in films, and finally on television. Through most of the years of Tin Pan Alley, sheet music publishers dominated the music business. What was this “popular” American business, and how did it differ from the development and selling of martial music, children’s music, folk music, religious music, and classical music? Surely, each of these kinds of music has representative pieces, vocal and instrumental, that were and are truly popular. Before the 1890s, the occupations of composers, lyricists, and even publishers of popular music did not exist. This is not to say that popular songs were not written and published, but that nobody was hired expressly to compose and write them on demand. That demand came later, after the Alley was firmly established. Stars wanted songs suited to their personalities, and publishers demanded songs of a type that a rival publisher had and that the public was currently buying. Pre-1890s music publishers were either classical publishers, music store owners, or local printers who, along with such commodities as stationery, books, broadsides, magazines, advertisements, and posters, printed sheet music. Music from these printing houses and stationers was sold in their own stores, with larger firms getting salesmen of other goods to handle this product as a sideline. Because these early printers could not afford their own full-time sales forces, they hired salesmen of clothing, notions, and supplies to carry sample cases of music with them when they made the rounds of their territories. (Meredith Willson’s Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man was a humorous caricature of these early music salesmen.) These multi-product peddlers got commissions on orders sent in by local music store owners. Before long, these salesmen not only knew the likely customers for music among these local store owners, but they also knew which songs were selling best in which areas. Some of them began to think that they could write better songs than those they were selling on commission. For less than a $1,000 worth of credit, a salesman could write, publish, and go on the road to sell his own songs. From such roots, Tin Pan Alley was born. The first of these “salesman-composer-publisher” firms were Charles K.Harris in Milwaukee, Will Rossiter and Victor Kremer in Chicago, Jerome Remick in Detroit, John Stark in St. Louis, Vandersloot in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, Walter Jacobs in Boston, and the Witmarks, Joseph Stern, Maurice Shapiro, F.A.Mills, Harry Von Tilzer, T.B.Harms, Leo Feist, and Howley, Haviland and Company in New York City. Many famous publishing names got into the business as an afterthought. Full-line music stores like Sherman, Clay and Company of San Francisco, Lyon and Healy of Chicago, Oliver Ditson of Boston, Grinnell Bros. of Detroit, and Carl Hoffman and J.W.Jenkins’ Sons of Kansas City began their own publishing imprints, although music publishing was always incidental to their main store operations. Men like Edward P.Little and Elmer Grant Ege, who founded and ran Sherman, Clay and J.W.Jenkins’ Sons’ publishing departments, respectively, deserve the billing of publishers as much as Jerome H.Remick, Leo Feist, and Edward B.Marks do, because they initiated and developed their businesses with the same care as did those who had their names on the doors. However, it took Little and Ege a long time to be made directors of their firms. These young, dynamic publishers had a common goal: to get enough potential sheet- music customers to hear the music and then buy it. The new wrinkle for this new business was song promotion. Anywhere and everywhere people congregated was fair game: vaudeville, bars, lobster palaces, beer gardens, theaters, brothels, nickelodeons. In the beginning, the publisher himself made the rounds of the entertainment centers, some publishers visiting as many as sixty places a week. These publishers also printed what they called “professional copies”—cheap newsprint song editions without fancy illustrated covers—to give to orchestra leaders and singers to induce them to perform their numbers, often sealing the deal with free drinks.