Stormy Relations: The Cotton Club, Broadway Spirituals, and Harlem Encounters in the Music of Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler

Abstract

If ever two white men lost themselves in the spiritual and musical vernacular of another race, those two are Composer Arlen and Lyricist Koehler! —R. A. Wachsman, foreword to Americanegro Suite (1941) The assimilation of jazz, ragtime, and blues into American popular song during the first decades of the twentieth century galvanized the massive economic success and cultural influence of the Tin Pan Alley song industry. The popularity of Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” (1911), for instance, “made the cultural break with the nineteenth century plainly audible” by placing “syncopated music based on African American rhythms, with all the attendant tensions and contradictions, squarely and permanently in the mainstream of American musical life.”1 Berlin’s appropriation fundamentally reshaped the sound and business of Tin Pan Alley, as the power of black music ushered popular song into the modern era. The fact that Berlin and so many of his modernizing peers in the Tin Pan Alley song industry were Jewish—Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, George and Ira Gershwin, among them—has occupied generations of scholars and critics who have sought to extract deeper meanings from this cross-racial encounter. Many have lauded Tin Pan Alley as a site of exceptional American accomplishment, wherein “song provided a haven for two marginalized ethnic groups before integration became the law of the land.”2 Amiri Baraka and others, by contrast, lambast the exploitative nature of Tin Pan Alley, whose star songwriters “could be named Great Composers and live sumptuously, while their [black] teachers always struggled for recognition, even survival!”3 Whether celebrated or derided, as Jeffrey Magee has stated, “the cultural problem that has plagued writings about this music [is] the notion of white appropriation, in particular Jewish-American appropriation, of black music.”4 Like so much Western culture in the first half of the twentieth century, the modernization of popular song in the hands of Jewish songwriters “manifested itself as a mirrored reflection of the mask of blackness.”5