Mathieu Full Dissertation 2014FINAL
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Copyright by Jane Katherine Mathieu 2014 The Dissertation Committee for Jane Katherine Mathieu Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Out of Many, One: Tin Pan Alley and American Popular Song, 1890- 1920 Committee: Charles Carson, Supervisor Karl Hagstrom Miller, Co-Supervisor James Buhler Andrew Dell’Antonio Caroline O’Meara Out of Many, One: Tin Pan Alley and American Popular Song, 1890- 1920 by Jane Katherine Mathieu, B.A.; MMusic Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2014 Dedication For Agnes, Al, Flo, and Julie. Acknowledgements This document would not have been possible without the support of many, many mentors, colleagues, institutions, archivists, friends, and family members. I am humbled by the generosity of so many brilliant, busy, good-humored individuals who helped this project and me over the past five years. I am especially appreciative for the aid that my former academic advisor, Caroline Polk O’Meara, provided at every stage of this project and for Charles Carson and Karl Hagstrom Miller’s enthusiasm and guidance to help me carry it over the finish line. With the remaining two members of the committee, Jim Buhler and Andrew Dell’Antonio, they each had a hand in helping me craft the story I wanted to tell through the research that I’ve loved. Many thanks to each of you. I have received much-needed financial assistance from a variety of sources during my candidacy. The College of Fine Arts and Graduate School’s Continuing Fellowship provided necessary financial support in this last year of writing; I thank Byron Almen, Director of Graduate Studies in Music and Glenn Richter, interim director of the University of Texas, Butler School of Music for their support. I have also received generous support from Association for Recorded Sound Collectors who provided a grant to complete necessary archival research at the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress. My research experiences have only reaffirmed my belief that archivists are the greatest people; I especially thank Bob Kosovsky at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, William C. Daw from the Hillman Library at The University of v Pittsburgh, and David Sager and the rest of the tremendous staff of the Recorded Sound Collection at the Library of Congress. Another big thank you to the staff in the InterLibrary Services at the University of Texas for accommodating a number of odd requests; I kept them busy and they kept me happily scanning roll after roll of microfilm. Another heartfelt thanks goes to Andrew Dell’Antonio for his mentorship and support for all things pedagogical, procedural, and logistical in the often tangled web that is a large institution like the University of Texas. I’m indebted to many friends and colleagues who also assisted in various ways. I’ve had the opportunity to learn with and from a truly impressive group of peers at The University of Texas at Austin. My work is stronger for the ideas shared from and with Andres Amado, Tania Camacho, Krista Kateneva, Ana Sanchez-Rojo, Christina Hough, Leo Cardoso, Ryan McCormack, and Ryan Kangas. Andres Amado and Sandra Olsen were particularly helpful writing partners over the past several years and I thank them for listening to many a cappuccino-fueled brainstorm. Bethany McLemore, Heather Buffington-Anderson, Alex Newton, Hannah Durham, and Lee Tyson all provided support, enthusiasm, and friendship during my candidacy. To four friends from outside the Butler School of Music who were also instrumental in helping me keep perspective on both the project and process, I thank Catherine Jaramillo Duarte, Carlos Duarte, José Arguello, and June Snowden. An extra thank you must be extended to Jennifer Chu and Alec MacIntyre for their unyielding support; I wouldn’t have made it through graduate school without either of them. vi Finally, this dissertation would not have been possible without my family. Their support remained steady and enthusiastic over the duration of my studies. The legendary pep-talks, care packages, and trips to and from Logan airport during my visits made me feel loved while I’ve lived so far from home. There are over fifty-thousand words in this document; none of them are sufficient to express my love and gratitude. Thank you. vii Out of Many, One: Tin Pan Alley and American Popular Song, 1890- 1920 Jane Katherine Mathieu, PhD The University of Texas at Austin, 2014 Supervisors: Charles Carson and Karl Hagstrom Miller In the many years since the label and the origin story first emerged, a variety of scholars have used Tin Pan Alley as a means to engage with constructions of national and personal identity. Discussions have primarily focused on sheet music and industry, often discussed as aesthetically vacant products of a hegemonic culture industry. As a result, these studies have generally focused on the ways the industry reaffirmed, rejected, or capitalized on constructions of identity within and through the songs as cultural products. This dissertation builds on this understanding to account for these cultural products as music by exploring the construction, dissemination and performance of song at the turn of the twentieth century. In doing so, I reorient Tin Pan Alley scholarship away from its current focus on commercial products, and instead towards the people and sounds who collaborated to create the industry and its songs. I argue that song was actively assembled out of diverse musical practices including but not limited to composing, collaborating, arranging, performing, recording, listening, and consuming music. As such, these practices helped to continually form, perform, and reform Tin Pan Alley, as well as the various sounds, objects, and spaces identified with American popular song. Balancing the viii diverse commercial practices of the publishing and entertainment industries with the creative processes employed to create, perform, and consume these songs in various media formats, spaces, arrangements, and locations, we add another layer to the discourse of Tin Pan Alley Ultimately, this dissertation is an intervention in the oneness of commercial popular song in the story of Tin Pan Alley, instead offering a broader, networked understanding of song that highlights the many avenues to and through song at the turn of the twentieth century. Refocusing on song rather than the discursive, product-oriented, and marginalized Alley allows a flexibility in both in scope and in view; we are able to, instead, see and hear song in moments of contact, creation, and performance. ix Table of Contents List of Tables ........................................................................................................ xii List of Figures ...................................................................................................... xiii Prologue: Excerpt from “My Brother Paul” by Theodore Dreiser ..........................1 Introduction: Alleys and Avenues: The Stories We Tell .........................................3 Creating Tin Pan Alley ...................................................................................6 Out of Many, One .........................................................................................17 Chapter One: Hearing Midtown, 1905 ..................................................................27 Noisy New York ...........................................................................................28 Midtown, the Apex .......................................................................................33 Locating Tin Pan Alley .................................................................................44 Hearing Midtown ..........................................................................................51 Greater Herald Square: 37th and Broadway ........................................53 “The Great White Way”: Listening to 28th Street ...............................60 The Old Time Throng: Union Square ..................................................64 “Times” Square: Taking 42nd Street ...................................................69 “Give My Regards...” ....................................................................................78 Chapter Two: “The Head and the Heels”: Song on Records, 1906-1910 ..............83 “The Injustice of the Thing” .........................................................................91 “Record Suggestions Gladly Received” .....................................................102 Singing on Records .....................................................................................116 “A Good Thing Outright” ...........................................................................126 Da Capo ......................................................................................................132 Chapter Three: “Let Us Be Americans, Nothing Else”: Nationalism and Song, 1916- 1917.............................................................................................................134 “It’s up to you! What will you do?” Uplift and the Consumption of American Identity ...............................................................................................136 “War is Talked of Everywhere:” Song Goes to War ..................................142 x “Then we’ll rally ‘round the flag, boys. We’ll rally once again”: Victor’s American Quartet