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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The House That George Built With a Little Help from Irving Cole and a Crew of About Fifty by Wilfrid Sheed Reveals The Soul Behind The Great American Songbook. “What comes first, the words or the music?” Songwriters used to get asked this so often, apparently, that the question was once a cliché. Most dreaded it—but not Sammy Cahn. He prepared an answer that he rattled off “Time After Time,” to borrow the title of one of his greatest songs: What came first was neither the melody nor the lyrics but the phone call, usually from a producer needing a title song for a film. If Sammy could have somehow paid himself a royalty on that one-liner, he could have died an even richer man. Perhaps in response to the hardscrabble life of their immigrant parents, the songwriters of Cahn’s generation wanted to present themselves not as artists but as hardworking professionals. How could they have known that the music-makers of a later generation would hold it against them? Singer-songwriters of the 60’s were expected to express what they were feeling, not just hack out what some check-signing mega-mogul paid them to say in song. (Still, when Bob Dylan remarked that the composers of Tin Pan Alley had songwriting “down to a science,” he meant no disrespect.) We can thank Wilfred Sheed’s The House That George Built for showing us that the writers of the Great American Songbook were not merely the musical equivalent of tailors—following the dollar signs and composing accordingly—but wrote from what was in their souls, perhaps even more than the writers of other American songbooks such as the blues, country music and rock ’n’ roll. Mr. Sheed is writing primarily about composers (only one lyricist, the incomparable Johnny Mercer, rates his own chapter), yet he steers clear of technical terminology. He includes a fair amount of background, but this is hardly a biographical reference source. The service that Mr. Sheed provides could best be described as “interpretation”—he takes the contextual information and the songs themselves and shows how they relate to each other, stressing the factoids that he finds useful and ignoring those he does not, the same way a great jazz soloist will elaborate on his favorite parts of a tune. He shows us how every note ever lovingly mass-produced by these celebrated songwriters was a reflection on who they were and where they came from, from the Lower East Side of Irving Berlin and George Gershwin to the Hoosier harmonies of Cole Porter and Hoagy Carmichael. Even in the transition into more “sophisticated” theatrical productions in the postwar era, when songs were expected to further a coherent narrative, composers like Richard Rodgers were writing tunes and telling stories as different from each other as they were from those of Mr. Dylan. A brilliant writer, Mr. Sheed is a storyteller, not a scholar, and it’s clear that some of his more colorful statements are to be taken for their entertainment value—these are not academic observations to be footnoted and cross-referenced. The occasional goof—as when Mr. Sheed confuses “You Ought to Be in Pictures” with “If I Had a Talking Picture of You,” or Wingy Manone with Ziggy Elman—should trouble no one. I do wish that he hadn’t brought up the old saw that Jimmy McHugh bought (meaning “stole”) the melody to “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” from Fats Waller, especially since Mr. Sheed tells us that he doesn’t believe it himself; I know of only one documented case of theft involving Mr. McHugh and a black songwriter, and that’s when the composers of “For Sentimental Reasons” lifted wholesale the bridge to Mr. McHugh’s “A Lovely Way to Spend an Evening.” Also, I don’t think many Duke Ellington fans would agree with Mr. Sheed’s characterization of manager- publisher Irving Mills as an “unsung songwriters’ helper.” Mills is certainly unsung, but only because (as his employee Mitchell Parish told me) he never wrote a single note of music or word of lyric. Overall, The House That George Built more than succeeds in its goal to be both as lively and as substantial as the songs Mr. Sheed describes. He’s particularly strong when talking of his own experience, like sitting in a men’s room in an adjacent stall to a chap “who whistled while he whatever,” or describing Los Angeles as late as 1950 as “a cow town,” or recounting what it was like to go to the movies in the Depression, as musical followed cartoon followed newsreel. Mr. Sheed has given those of us who love this music an incomparable gift, a gift he bestows on the departed songwriters themselves: He has given them back their souls. Will Friedwald is the jazz and cabaret critic for The New York Sun . Wilfrid Sheed. Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. Wilfrid Sheed , in full Wilfrid John Joseph Sheed , (born December 27, 1930, London, England—died January 19, 2011, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, U.S.), American author of essays, biographies, and other nonfiction works and of satirical fiction that contrasts transient modern values with steadfast traditional values. Sheed’s parents, authors themselves, founded Sheed & Ward, a leading Roman Catholic publishing firm. The family immigrated to the United States in 1940, and Sheed returned to England to study at the University of Oxford (B.A., 1954; M.A., 1957). In 1959 he began writing film, drama, and book criticism for magazines and newspapers in New York City. The lives of individuals working in mass media are the subjects of most of Sheed’s comic novels. Journalists battle over the editorial pecking order in Office Politics (1966), whereas compulsive analysis and perfectionism destroy the life of a critic in Max Jamison (1970). A reporter views the moral hypocrisy of a candidate in People Will Always Be Kind (1973). Sheed’s other novels include The Hack (1963), Transatlantic Blues (1978), and The Boys of Winter (1987). Among his nonfiction books are Frank and Maisie: A Memoir with Parents (1985), the biographies Muhammad Ali (1975) and Clare Boothe Luce (1982), the essay collections The Good Word & Other Words (1978) and Essays in Disguise (1990), and Baseball and Lesser Sports (1991). In 1995 Sheed published In Love with Daylight: A Memoir of Recovery, about his battle with alcoholism and cancer of the tongue and his disappointment with the professionals who treated him. His last work, the best-selling The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving Cole and a Crew of About Fifty (2007), chronicled the history of American popular music. Cookie Consent and Choices. NPR’s sites use cookies, similar tracking and storage technologies, and information about the device you use to access our sites (together, “cookies”) to enhance your viewing, listening and user experience, personalize content, personalize messages from NPR’s sponsors, provide social media features, and analyze NPR’s traffic. This information is shared with social media, sponsorship, analytics, and other vendors or service providers. See details. You may click on “ Your Choices ” below to learn about and use cookie management tools to limit use of cookies when you visit NPR’s sites. You can adjust your cookie choices in those tools at any time. If you click “ Agree and Continue ” below, you acknowledge that your cookie choices in those tools will be respected and that you otherwise agree to the use of cookies on NPR’s sites. Making a note of the songs in his heart. Now 76, Wilfrid Sheed has had a long and varied literary career, publishing eight novels, including two National Book Award finalists, and a dozen works of nonfiction focused on his personal passions: sports (particularly baseball), the arts (particularly literature), and family (particularly his own). Sheed's approach is that of a devoted, learned fan, critical but also seeking the miraculous heart of difficult human achievement. He writes as a compiler of small observations rather than a teller of long, intricate narratives, relying on witty, erudite prose to knot up his findings. In "The House That George Built," his first book in a dozen years, Sheed gathers his views on the music of the great American songbook. Since childhood, he has been listening to and loving the jazz songs of George Gershwin (the "George" of this book's title), Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, Jerome Kern, Burton Lane, Johnny Mercer, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and some 50 other composers of the 1920s through 1950s. Finally, at an editor's behest, he decided to write about them. Sheed tells readers at the outset that his book "is a labor of love, not a work of scholarship," something he has "been researching for most of my life without knowing it." He likens the book to a "bull session, with its overtones of the tall story and the overconfident assertion," and it does have an intimacy and charm rare in writing about the arts. Rather than a technical study, or an attempt to define thematic connections or chains of influence among composers, it is a collection of informal disquisitions. Each composer included wrote more than 50 standards, "tunes that are still popular enough over fifty years later for most cocktail lounge pianists to have a rough idea of them, and for their copyrights still to be worth fighting for." While the songwriters' names may no longer be as familiar as they were to Sheed's contemporaries, their songs probably are.

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