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. On this season's "American Idol," for instance, contestants sang "Stormy Weather" (Arlen), "Cheek to Cheek" and "Steppin' Out With My Baby" (Berlin), "Don't Get Around Much Anymore" (Ellington), "I Got Rhythm" (Gershwin), "On a Clear Day" (Lane), "Night and Day" (Porter), and "My Funny Valentine" (Rodgers). The book's introductory chapters trace the evolution of the jazz song form with its "familiar thirty-two-bar" structure. A confluence of factors were involved, including massive immigration at the turn of the 20th century, World War I and Americans' mobility in its aftermath, and the development of radio, microphoned records, talking pictures, and Broadway. In the 40-year period Sheed writes about, these composers were responsible for "an astonishing achievement that would more than double or triple the world's supply of singable tunes." Subsequent chapters focus on individual fig ures, beginning with Berlin, whose "housebroken jazz" did more than anyone else's "to secure the beachheads of the dance floor and the music rack for his own kind of lightly syncopated, semi-black, and faintly Jewish melodies." These chapters incorporate biographical and character sketches, brief comments on songs and trends, and suggestions about musical legacy. Berlin, "our most gifted original musician," legitimized the music, giving "his whole life and whole gift entirely to popular songs." Gershwin is notable not only for his "musical genius" and number of enduring hits, but for "the extraordinary aura and the magnanimity that seemed almost to flow out of the music, in the direction of other songwriters." In writing "Stardust," Hoagy Carmichael, who sang his own songs, "became both our most and least commercial composer" by proving he "could actually make money being himself, keep his integrity, and eat his cake, too." Sheed, like the typical participant in a bull session, aims to score points with memorable, provocative, attention-grabbing statements. About Gershwin's lyricist-brother Ira, whose talents Sheed finds limited, he writes, "If there had been no George, the odds seem good that Ira would have become an English teacher with a sideline in light verse." That is surely an argument-starter. Of Arlen, Sheed says, "Whatever the essence of this music is, Harold Arlen had the most of it." A reader can just picture Sheed smiling after that one, anticipating a combative comeback. What about Cole Porter! The book, while great fun to read, has real weaknesses. Sheed's referential, knowing approach assumes a reader's familiarity with each composer and his work. Not all his phrase-making succeeds. He misuses Yiddish words, such as "schlamozzel," and occasionally strains for humor, as when he writes that Hollywood, "the home of divorce," is so contentious "even Siamese twins are likely to wind up just good friends." He also can sound pedantic, as in this comment about Porter: "By adding the mystery ingredients of jazzness and bluesness, he reached a new depth in himself that hadn't been previously accessible to the public." Opinionated, quirky, informative, this book will have most readers humming, singing, seeking out recordings of the standards, "the official sound of America right through World War II." It will also have readers arguing back. Whaddya mean "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" is Kern's "greatest song ever "? What about "The Way You Look Tonight "? Floyd Skloot received the 2004 PEN Center USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction for his memoir "In the Shadow of Memory." His 12th book, the novel "Patient 002," was published this spring. The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving Cole and a Crew of About Fifty by Wilfrid Sheed. (Swans - December 3, 2007) The reason that iPods, iPhones, and Walkmen are so popular throughout the world is that for most people the storage of music is as essential as food, oxygen, and sex. Everyone, no matter what their political persuasion, when pressures become unsustainable, seeks relief in music. That being the case, Wilfrid Sheed's The House That George Built is not only an engrossing history of 20th century popular music but also an anodyne against irritation and distress. A critic and award-nominated novelist, Sheed, using a jaunty, nimble, and colloquial style, has captured the sweep of American popular music from its golden age (the 1920s-50s) to what one might call its twilight years starting in the rock 'n roll era and ultimately petering out in the Age of Rap. He has achieved this by concentrating on the titans, viz. Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, and Richard Rodgers, making pleasurable stopovers with Frank Loesser, Harry Warren, Johnny Mercer, Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington, and a few other deserving composers who inhabit a somewhat lower realm of the constellation. The avatar of the entire study is, of course, George Gershwin, the "George" of the book's title in whose "house" virtually all of the aforementioned composers found accommodation of one sort or another. His talent towers over the book as he himself did over all of his contemporaries when he was alive and although good songwriters come and go, it is only right to recognize that Gershwin remains the reigning and unseatable Chairman of the Board. Using a vast storehouse of musical knowledge and apt quotations from the lyrics of his galaxy of composers, Sheed demonstrates that there are two debts that need to be acknowledged without which popular music might just never have happened. The first is the African-American influence, which created jazz and, in a sense, discovered the vein of gold that future practitioners subsequently mined. And the other was the ubiquitous Jewish heritage that produced composers such as Berlin, Kern, Arlen, Coleman, Gershwin, etc. Sheed aptly describes the east coast and west coast species of composers; that is, those nourished by Broadway musicals and those hatched through the Hollywood studio system that gave them both assignments and handsome financial rewards. But of course, many of the eastern composers went west and vice versa and so the geographical distinction is pretty much blurred. Magically, Sheed's prose engenders, what you might call a musical accompaniment as one finds oneself sub-textually being serenaded by the actual melodies that comprise the American Song Book. This adds a dimension to a book about music that should not be underestimated. But apart from evoking musical memories, what makes the book even more pleasing is that the author tells us how many of these songs came about; how they were rejected then resurrected, originated, and obscured. (Irving Berlin's "Smile And Show Your Dimple," for instance, began life in 1914 but was discarded because of the poor lyric. It made a jubilant return in 1948 as "Easter Parade.") One of the book's most enthralling chapters deals with Harry Warren, whom the author knew personally and to whom the book is dedicated. The profile is entitled "The King of the Unknowns" and, truth to tell, Warren lacks the prominence of other composers from the same era such as Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers -- in spite of the fact that he provided the score for the groundbreaking early talkie, "42nd Street" and all "The Gold Diggers" series of the 1930s that followed. He produced a positive flood of hit songs such as "Shuffle Off to Buffalo," "Jeepers Creepers," "We're In The Money," "I Only Have Eyes for You," "I Found a Million Dollar Baby," "Lullaby of Broadway," "Serenade In Blue," et al. Sheed's portrait of the man reveals a resourceful and highly prolific composer who was often blindsided by being too closely associated with the early 1930s -- despite the fact that he wrote memorable scores for later musicals such as "The Barkleys of Broadway," "The Harvey Girls," and "Summer Stock." At the end of his chapter, Sheed comforts himself by writing: "If Harry Warren miraculously lost his anonymity he'd also lose his chief claim to fame," which is a quaint conceit but not really accurate. One cannot really compare Warren to his "Forgotten Man" ballad, as anyone vaguely connected with the music business is aware of his accomplishment over three fruitful decades. (Not too long ago in Los Angeles, there was a show called "Lullaby of Broadway" celebrating the lyrics of Al Dubin who was Warren's major collaborator.) But Sheed's attempt to increase the value of his stock is heartfelt and rather touching. Of all the American composers he examines, Richard Rodgers seems to be the only one he appears genuinely to dislike. He gives high marks to the Rodgers and Hart collaboration -- rightly so, in my opinion -- and somewhat scants Rodgers and Hammerstein. "After Hart's death," Sheed writes, "Dick never got close to anyone else again. the Family Rodgers he returned to at night was a perfect period piece; happy on the outside, rotten on the inside. Its tasteful suburban façade proved to be an arena in which the latest ailments and prescription drugs slugged it out in human disguise while the children, who assume that the whole thing is really about them, can start work on their own 'Mommie Dearests.' In one corner we find Dorothy Rodgers (anorexic, constipated), who turns into a raging, capricious monster -- who wouldn't? And in the other, her husband (boozed, tranquillized) who seems permanently depressed and half-stoned. He comes to life one show at a time -- just long enough to romance a new heroine, alienate the writer and the director forever and kiss the whole chorus line goodbye before returning home to keep up appearances for the neighbors, as his father had once kept them up for his patients." And a few sentences later Sheed declares ". the tragedy, if that's the right word, is that in the end Rodger's lifelong attempt to merge music, words, dance and even scenery, into something like great art would be deemed kitsch and hardly art at all. His climactic masterpiece, 'The Sound of Music,' has survived into this century as a festival of high camp." On a personal level, all of this is probably true, but one wonders what it has to do with the lyrical ambrosia that wafts out of Rodgers and Hammerstein's best numbers ("Many A New Day," "I'm Just A Girl Who Can't Say 'No'," "You'll Never Walk Alone," "If I Loved You") in "Oklahoma" and "Carousel" respectively. One feels that Sheed's personal dislike of Rodgers somehow colors his opinion about the music -- like art critics finding it hard to objectively evaluate the watercolors of Adolf Hitler. In a book of such scope and outreach, one will inevitably have some cavils. For instance: Although Vincent Youmans is just barely wedged into a final chapter along with Arthur Schwartz and Walter Donaldson, his bubbly musical "No No Nanette" and its hit song "Tea For Two" would, in Sheed's words "end up expressing the 1920s -- 1925 to be exact." But there is no mention in the book of the other composer who dominated the twenties Hit Parade and that was Albert Von Tilzer, who apart from writing baseball's national anthem "Take Me Out To The Ballgame" and the sentimental evergreen "Put Your Arms Around Me Honey" also knocked out staples of the Twenties such as "Oh, By Jingo," "Dapper Dan," "Honey Boy," and that epitome of flapper masterworks, "My Cutie's Due at Two to Two." Maybe Albert Von Tilzer is a little early to qualify for the pop section of the American Songbook but he was as dominant a figure in the Twenties as Vincent Youmans and, in many ways, more characteristic of the goofiness of the era. Music is inescapably a matter of individual taste and those people that get off on Hank Williams or Eminem are never going to swoon over Jerome Kern's Brahmsian musical construction or Gershwin's syncopated rhythms. But tossing objectivity out the window, I would argue that the popular music written between the early 1920s and the mid '50s contains some of the most exquisite art ever created in America -- albeit in categories such as jazz songs, blues, ballads, theatre music, film scores, etc. The House That George Built is an affectionate monument to a truly glittering golden age of America song, which, many ages hence, will be remembered along with imperishable artifacts such as the Silents of Chaplin and Keaton, the novels of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, the Charleston and the Lindy Hop, the recordings of Billie Holiday and Jo Stafford, MGM musicals and other, even more arcane artifacts which are virtually invisible to the creatures that inhabit this troubled, fickle, and over-satiated age.