Tin Pan Alley Research Articles

Alexander’s Real Slow Drag

Alexander’s Real Slow Drag* Tyehimba Jess (bio) Berlin v. Joplin Two years or so ago, I heard my kidnapped tune when Alexander’s Ragtime Band was ramblin’ drunk all through Tin Pan Alley. a big hit, Then, I heard someone started the report ‘bout the minstrel leer it wore among the publishers smeared with burnt cork. I know that I had paid ragtime’s cost—it’s a bright negro treasure . . . ten dollars ain’t no price for it I’d take . . . and then . . . I’d just published it under my own name. had the chance to name it: Real Slow Drag. When they told me about it, I ‘spected Berlin was the thief— I asked them to tell me —and was right: I knew whom from whom to blame. I had bought my other successes— Straight from my gut, I’d made other hits, twenty-five or thirty of them. but this one was my dusky gem. And I wanted to know, Why can’t some folk handle if a negro could write tunes as good as my own Alexander, —and not steal? Me? why couldn’t I? I refuse to thieve. Then I told them That thief thinks that if they could produce the negro music, it’s slick as Black gold. . . and he had another hit . . . from me. Wants my colored sound, like Alexander in his system, his soul corked charcoal, skin stayed white. I would choke it out of him If I could—I’d stain him brown, and give him naps on top, twenty-thousand dollars royalties damned to hell in the bargain. . . . then I’d ask him: If the other fellow deserves the credit, why doesn’t he just go get it? [End Page 541-542] Tyehimba Jess Tyehimba Jess, a Detroit native who is both a poet and fiction writer, is author of leadbelly, which won for him the 2004 National Poetry Series. He is an assistant professor of English at the College of Staten Island in New York. His poetry has appeared in such anthologies and periodicals as Angles of Ascent, Beyond the Frontier, Roll Call, Bum Rush the Page, Complex Slam, American Poetry Review, Mosaic, Indiana Review, Ploughshares, and Callaloo. He has received a number of honors for his work—e. g., a Winter Fellow (2004–2005) at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a 2006 Whiting Fellowship. A graduate of the University of Chicago, he received his MFA from New York University. Footnotes * Left side: Irving Berlin’s reply to rumors regarding theft of Scott Joplin’s Real Slow Drag from the ragtime opera Treemonisha, published in Green Book Magazine, April 1916. Right side: Joplin’s imagined response. Copyright © 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press

“The Hora Staccato in Swing!”: Jascha Heifetz's Musical Eclecticism and the Adaptation of Violin Miniatures

AbstractJascha Heifetz (1901–87) promoted a modern brand of musical eclecticism, recording, performing, and editing adaptations of folk and popular songs while remaining dedicated to the standard violin repertoire and the compositions of his contemporaries. This essay examines the complex influences of his displacement from Eastern Europe and assimilation to the culture of the United States on both the hybridity of his repertoire and the critical reception he received in his new home. It takes as its case study Heifetz's composition of the virtuosic showpiece “Hora Staccato,” based on a Romany violin performance he heard in Bucharest, and his later adaptation of the music into an American swing hit he titled “Hora Swing-cato.” Finally, the essay turns to the field of popular song to consider how two of the works Heifetz performed most frequently were adapted for New York Yiddish radio as Tin Pan Alley–style songs whose lyrics narrate the early twentieth-century immigrant experience. The performance and arrangement history of many of Heifetz's miniatures reveals the multivalent ways in which works in his repertoire, and for some listeners Heifetz himself, were reinterpreted, adapted, and assimilated into American culture.

Media Revolution on 14th Street: Immigration, Vaudeville and the Nascence of Electronic Media in New York City at the Turn of the 20th Century

O alicerce da indústria do entretenimento foi lançado pelo nascimento do vaudeville na Rua 14 na cidade de Nova York no início dos anos 1880. Criado, em grande medida, por imigrantes e seus filhos, o vaudeville dominou o show business nos Estados Unidos durante cinco décadas, dos anos 1880 aos anos 1930. Por meio
 da integração de artistas, empresários e formas culturais imigrantes, o vaudeville criou uma síntese que foi muito necessária em uma época de imigração em massa e caos cultural. Com a rápida evolução das mídias eletrônicas durante o século XX – publicação musical, gravação sonora, rádio, cinema e televisão – o vaudeville ampliou sua influência multicultural ao tornar-se o modelo dominante para uma indústria do entretenimento em expansão.
 
 Palavras-chave
 Vaudeville. Tin Pan Alley. Imigração.

Chaucerian Obscenity in the Court of Public Opinion

Chaucerian Obscenity in the Court of Public Opinion

Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture Anthony J. Stanonis (bio) Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture. By Karen L. Cox. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Pp. xii, 210. $34.95 cloth) The popular image of the American South between the 1890s and 1950s receives insightful and entertaining treatment by Karen Cox. With chapters devoted to literature, advertising, popular song, radio, film, and tourism, Cox offers a pioneering critique of how northern businessmen and consumers constructed an idyllic image of Dixie. In their hands, the South became a “mythological region” (p. 33). Dixie emerged as a romantic, leisurely, agrarian paradise that served as an antithesis to the rushed, urban, and industrial North. Cox’s study perceptively demonstrates how different media based in the North popularized particular dreams of Dixie, allowing consumers to “psychologically escape” modern society (p. 9). Each reinforced stereotypes about the plantation past of the region, agricultural fecundity, and tranquil race relations—ignoring the growing cities, expanding textile mills, and lynching. Novels allowed readers to fantasize about the region. Fictional accounts led visitors to seek the fabrications in the real world, from happy darkies working the fields to stately plantations reminiscent of Margaret Mitchell’s Tara. Music, often penned or performed by Jewish immigrants associated with Tin Pan Alley, celebrated the tranquility and friendliness of Dixie. Performers like Al Jolson reinvigorated minstrelsy for the vaudeville stage. Although radio broke the Tin Pan Alley monopoly over popular [End Page 123] music, the airwaves echoed already-established associations. Radio brought home the sounds of Dixie, complete with steamboat whistles, black dialect, and hillbilly chatter. Film (un)reconstructed the southern past as movies such as Birth of a Nation (1915) reinforced stereotypes of blacks as ignorant brutes, thereby justifying vigilante violence by whites immediately after the Civil War. Advertisers celebrated black servility and the agricultural richness of the South through the promotion of Aunt Jemima’s pancakes, Rastus’s cream of wheat, and Uncle Ben’s rice. All of this publicity spurred southern boosters to cater to the growing ranks of northern vacationers by promoting images of smiling black waiters and hoop-skirted belles. Cox uses an impressive range of primary sources. Analysis of ads, films, and other media presented to the public are balanced with the corporate records and memoirs of those involved with preparing these materials. Professional surveys undertaken by food companies and radio stations reveal valuable information about audiences. Cox offers a particularly striking argument when suggesting that the celebration of Dixie was as much about white Northerners’ anxiety over the great migration of African Americans into northern industrial centers as about sectional reconciliation. The message of black servility and white civility in Dixie mitigated white Northerners’ own racial anxieties about the demographic shift. Cox provides a launching point for further study of these tensions and their cultural manifestations. Yet more attention to the equally dramatic migration of white Southerners to northern industrial centers would also be valuable. Although Cox convincingly shows that Northerners rather than Southerners largely consumed the South packaged in branded food products and radio programs, certainly white Southerners in Chicago, Detroit, or other northern urban centers longed for reminders of home as well. Detailed attention to these arrivals and possible points of agreement or conflict with white Northerners’ expectations promises future scholarly dividends. According to Cox, the immediacy of television along with the brutal imagery of attacks on civil rights protesters in the 1950s and 1960s challenged the stereotypes promulgated about the South. The [End Page 124] days of black-face and dialect were numbered, though the promotion of plantations, hospitality, and black performance—whether of street music or tap dancing—remained strong through the twentieth century. Cox provides a vibrant, richly illustrated, and highly readable study of Dixie as a “cultural commodity” (p. 129). The rigorous research is complemented by an accessible style ideal for scholars and general readers alike. Anthony J. Stanonis Anthony J. Stanonis is a lecturer in modern American history at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom. He is author of Creating the Big Easy (2006) and is currently working on the...

Soundtracks of Empire: “The White Man’s Burden,” the War in the Philippines, the“Ideals of America,” and Tin Pan Alley

America’s War with Spain inspired Tin Pan Alley music publishers to generate popular songs to accompany America’s military victories and subsequent occupation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines. By expanding the genre of the so-called “coon song” to include the people of these islands, composers and publishers contributed to the domestication of empire in fin-de-siècle America.

Flying in the 1920s

Ninety years ago, America was a very different place, but still similar to the America of today in many ways. Immediately following World War I, a large number of veterans returned from overseas unable to find suitable work. A popular song of the time by Tin Pan Alley asked the question, "How Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm, After They've Seen Paree?" Indeed, many of the veterans did not return to their family farms, choosing instead to move to nearby smaller towns and cities. As President Woodrow Wilson's administration was winding down, many questioned the state of the economy and future of the nation. Shortly after the war, the country remained in a recession until 1921. As time passed, there was a move to entrepreneurism throughout many financial sectors. When Warren G. Harding assumed the office of the presidency on March 4, 1921, many in government advised him to raise taxes to help move the country out of the financial doldrums. Going against this advice, Harding lowered taxes. This allowed the new entrepreneurs to start new businesses, including many by the returning veterans. This took the country into one of the greatest chapters of prosperity in modern history. We now refer to this time as the Roaring Twenties. One group of entrepreneurs born of this time included the returning aviators. These were the first military pilots ever to return from a war. They recently learned how to fly, spent months flying in aerial combat, and they wanted to continue flying. Consequently, this group of men would go on to develop aviation in America. At the start of the third decade in the last century, pilots and airplanes were unlicensed and there was no requirement for maintaining a record of aircraft maintenance. When an airplane broke, the pilot fixed it with whatever resources were readily available, usually from the local hardware store. Pilots typically kept their airplanes tied down outside in fields, as airports and hangars were a long way in the future. These early aviators were not businessmen, never planned a day beyond tomorrow, and were happy to hop enough passengers to fill their tanks with fuel and to buy themselves a hamburger or two. In a phrase - if you were a pilot, this period of 1920 to 1929 was perhaps the very best time to fly in American history.

Before Seattle Rocked: A City and its Music by Kurt E. Armbruster

 OHQ vol. 113, no. 4 Atkinson made eight trips to New England to gain support for churches and schools, to recruit teachers and missionaries, and to promote Oregon.Sevetson might have mentioned thatAtkinson’s first trip had much in common with those made by Rev. Jason Lee and Dr. MarcusWhitman for similar purposes.Eastern church organizations who sent both Whitman and Atkinson as missionaries also expressed concern about the excesses of missionary Rev. Henry Spalding. Atkinson failed to raise the money he sought,but he recruited Sydney Harper Marsh for Tualatin Academy. As the first president of Pacific University,Marsh became an important regional educator. On his return to Oregon, Atkinson served as superintendent of Clackamas County Schools and attempted to finance a girls’ seminary in Oregon City. Atkinson faced other difficulties during his time in Oregon, including quarrels over theology and personal issues by fellow clergymen, the death of two children, and the devastating Willamette River flood of 1861.In 1863, he took up permanent residence in Portland,becoming pastorof itsCongregationalChurchandSuperintendent of Multnomah County Schools, a position that the author stresses. Some issues Atkinson addressed seem modern, including minority education, funding, family support, and orderly school grounds. Sevetson summarizes Atkinson’s difficulties with Marsh over church and school issues and his noted debate with Oregonian editor Harvey Scott over the value of public schools. He helped establish seminaries in Oregon and Washington, and played a critical role in launching Whitman College as a Congregational institution. Involved in various public affairs, he frequently presented his views in the Oregonian. He visited many state prisons seeking details that would help the state legislature establish a humane institution,and he faulted the nation’s Indian policy and the use of the term“squaw.” Atkinson won public support for advocating for the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad, whose service, he insisted, would strengthen the region’s economy. A standard Pacific Northwest history,Dorothy O. Johansen’s Empire of the Columbia, provides little detail about Atkinson or his more famous AHMS colleague, Thomas Condon. Robert Clark’s The Odyssey of Thomas Condon summarizesAtkinson’s career.Although Sevetson ’s much shorter biography is more modestly published, it fills a long-standing need and is an important addition to the growing emphasis on Oregon’s cultural history. While the biography has a few organizational problems and many lengthy quotations that will bother some readers, everyone will appreciate the author’s solid research and useful coverage of Oregon’s history, especially the state’s educational developments, during the last half of the nineteenth century. G. Thomas Edwards Whitman College Before Seattle Rocked: A City and Its Music by Kurt E. Armbruster University of Washington Press, Seattle and London, 2011. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. 384 pages. $26.95 paper. Before Seattle Rocked documents the role of music in the transformation of Seattle’s social and cultural life, beginning with the establishment of the first non-Native cultures on the shores of Puget Sound. The first brief chapter, “Song of the Duwamish,”outlines Native music traditions, tracing the forced eradication of the culture from the city limits in the late nineteenth century. Subsequent chapters pick up around 1890 and tell the colorful stories of music performers and performance contexts — from saloons to concert halls — from a city that has endured many cycles of boom and  Reviews bust, tracing the diverse popular genres of the early days (Tin Pan Alley,workers’songs,brass bands, classical music) through the growth of jazz and big band styles dominant through the midtwentieth century. Armbruster draws portraits of music performance contexts,and as often as possible,lets the voices of their original players speak,paying particularly good attention to the perspectives of women in the generally male-dominated field. Archival photos enhance the text. The survey stops in 1979, and as the title suggests, does not cover rock genres except as they are peripherally connected to rhythm and blues and the lives of working musicians during the 1960s and 1970s. Although connecting rock cultures to traditional players and scenes in the city would have been useful and made the book more appealing to younger readers, the history of rock in Seattle does not...

The Making of Yosemite: James Mason Hutchings and the Origin of America's Most Popular National Park by Jen A. Huntley

 Reviews bust, tracing the diverse popular genres of the early days (Tin Pan Alley,workers’songs,brass bands, classical music) through the growth of jazz and big band styles dominant through the midtwentieth century. Armbruster draws portraits of music performance contexts,and as often as possible,lets the voices of their original players speak,paying particularly good attention to the perspectives of women in the generally male-dominated field. Archival photos enhance the text. The survey stops in 1979, and as the title suggests, does not cover rock genres except as they are peripherally connected to rhythm and blues and the lives of working musicians during the 1960s and 1970s. Although connecting rock cultures to traditional players and scenes in the city would have been useful and made the book more appealing to younger readers, the history of rock in Seattle does not readily fit Armbruster’s effort to trace the life-long careers and stalwart institutions that provided the live soundtrack for the growth of the city. A primary strength of this book is its description of the development of the Musicians Association of Seattle Local 76 and 76-493 (the result of the merging of the black and white unions).Additionally, the history of the Seattle Symphony under the direction of Milton Katims is particularly vivid.Sections of this book would make good ancillary reading for college courses in the history of the Pacific Northwest because they provide excellent descriptions of the role of music in the development of cultural institutions as varied as worker saloons,the coffee-shop folk scene (and its attending progressive politics), the symphony , and the opera. Particularly fascinating is the description of the growth experienced by “high”forms of musical culture in a consumer environment dominated by music for dancing. Ambruster examines the connections between the city’s power brokers and their ideas about music and morality, paying close attention to the changes in laws governing alcohol sales and dancing venues.At the same time,he describes the challenges classical music fans and players faced in developing and sustaining their institutions in a place that for many years remained a cultural and geographic backwater (if not in reality, certainly in self-image). This book is an excellent contribution to the history of music cultures in the Pacific Northwest and is a laudable example of a civic history based on a cultural form that impacts daily life but often remains invisible. Sarah Dougher Portland State University The Making of Yosemite: James Mason Hutchings and the Origin of America’s Most Popular National Park by Jen A. Huntley University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 2011. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 248 pages. $34.95 cloth. James Hutchings won a certain fame as the publicist who revealed the glories of Yosemite Valley to Californians and the American people. An immigrant from England, Hutchings first entered Yosemite Valley in 1855, a scant four years after Anglo-Americans first stumbled upon the valley. He entered the publishing business and soon won attention promoting the incomparable Yosemite Valley with Hutchings’ Illustrated California Magazine and Scenes of Wonder and Curiosity. Huntley devotes close to half her book to Hutchings’s early career as a printer and a creative lithographer. His business career, however, is not the main thrust of the book. Huntley wishes to restore Hutchings’s rather unsavory reputation regarding his activities inYosemiteValley.Historians have maintained that while he promoted the valley, he also promoted himself. He has also been attacked for his obsession with owning land in fee simple (without condition) in the heart of the valley.  OHQ vol. 113, no. 4 Privateownershipwasnotthe intentof the 1864 Yosemite Act, which granted the valley to the State of California with the condition that the “premises shall be held for public use . . . and shall be inalienable for all time” (p. 107). In the meantime, Hutchings had purchased“two sections of land”(p.120).Presumably he never receivedadeedinfee simple.TheYosemite Park Commission refused to recognize Hutchings’s land claims — even though he pared it down to 160 acres — and offered him $24,000 to dismiss them.He refused the payment,trusting his case to the courts.In 1873,the Supreme Count ruled against...

Poetry in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Marjorie Perloff's <em>Unoriginal Genius</em>, and Charles Bernstein's <em>Attack of the Difficult Poems</em>

For more than three decades, Marjorie Perloff and Charles Bernstein have been our foremost champions of poetic invention. This review looks at their new books: Unoriginal Genius and Attack of the Difficult Poems, asking the question, how can poetry be original in the twenty-first century? Basing her investigation in the established modernisms of Eliot, Pound and Benjamin, Marjorie Perloff suggests answers through a series of close readings of texts by poets including Yoko Tawada, Caroline Bergvall, Susan Howe and Kenneth Goldsmith. These writers, claims Perloff, represent a contemporary shift from poetries of confession or creation to poetries of reinvention, citation and translation. While addressing the same shift, Charles Bernstein’s collection of “essays and inventions,” takes a less traditional critical approach. His speeches, reviews, satirical prose-poems and essays range in subject from Tin-Pan Alley and PennSound to the Yasusada hoax and Yiddish shtick. At times comic, at times earnest and always highly idiosyncratic, Bernstein’s Attack of the Difficult Poems has something for everyone. Together, these two books blaze a trail into a new century of poetry, boldly going where, it seems, we have gone before.

Dueling Cultures: Ireland and Irish America at the Chicago World's Fairs of 1933 and 1934

Dueling Cultures:Ireland and Irish America at the Chicago World's Fairs of 1933 and 1934 Charles Fanning More than a hundred world's fairs were held between 1880 and 1910; after the hiatus forced by World War I. The events continued on into the years of worldwide depression, a period when they were meant to serve as engines of job creation and heightened morale. The International Colonial Exposition in Paris in 1931 started the fairs held in the decade of the 1930s and it was followed by "Centennial" American fairs in San Diego (1935-36), Dallas (1936), Cleveland (1937), San Francisco (1939-40), and New York (1939-40). 1 Chicago's offering, "A Century of Progress," opened on the lakefront just east and south of Soldier Field on May 27, 1933. Attendance at the Chicago fair was impressive. In 1933, 22.3 million people paid fifty cents each to get in. This was enough of a response for the directors to extend the event for a second year, which drew 15.7 million more. All told, these visitors spent more than $61 million and the fair, against the odds, broke even. In 1934, the fair itself employed 6,500 and the independent concessions and exhibits on the grounds employed 27,000 more. 2 As with all such ventures, Chicago's fair provides freeze-frame images of the self-definition and outside perceptions of the countries and cultures that chose to participate. The chair of the exposition's Committee on Coordination of Nationalities organized representatives from two dozen Chicago ethnic groups and exhorted them through his newsletter, Progress, toward participation, declaring "an opportunity for Chicagoans to show that each racial group was a true integral part of the 'Melting Pot' of the Middle West." 3 For Ireland and Irish America, the [End Page 94] occasion was especially timely. Here was the first focused public opportunity to define and display, on American soil, what "Irishness" had come to mean since the Irish Revolution of 1916-1921 and the formation of the Irish Free State. By the early 1930s, three bones of contention had become established be tween the Irish on opposite sides of the Atlantic. In the first place, post-revolutionary Ireland and Irish America were often embarrassed by one another. Many citizens of Ireland's increasingly puritanical Catholic state had been scandalized by the Roaring Twenties, and, in turn, Irish Americans were profoundly disillusioned by the home country revolution's aftermath—Partition and the resulting civil war. Second, there was antagonism between two faces of Irish America: a free-wheeling, entrepreneurial Irishness in the arts and popular culture and the stolid conservatism of a recently established and insecure Irish-American middle class. The latter-day Stage Irishry of vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley and a battering array of ersatz Irish artifacts—greeting cards, clothing, novelties, the celebration of St. Patrick's Day—had flooded the American market since the turn of the twentieth century. Concurrently, Irish Americans were seeing their hard-won economic and social respectability threatened by the Great Depression, and this precarious position made them extremely sensitive to the trivializing green wave of schlock. 4 On a third front, mainstream Anglo-Protestant America remained no more likely to understand or credit Old World cultures than it had in the 1920s, when its legislative gifts to minorities had been Prohibition and immigration restriction. The ethnic Irish were certainly a favored target of WASP condescension and contempt well into the 1930s—and beyond. All of these cultural conflicts flared up at the Century of Progress in Chicago: Ireland versus Irish America, Irish-American popular culture versus the lace-curtain bourgeoisie, and Irish ethnicity versus the American establishment. Further complicating the public face of Irishness at the Century of Progress was the fact that the Irish had two different and uncooperative exhibition sites. The first, aiming to improve international trade and to demonstrate "high culture," was an exhibition of business, science, and the arts officially sponsored by the Irish Free State. The second, aiming above all to make money for its investors, was an "Irish Village," a commercial venture rooted in popular culture, and entirely American in conception and follow-through...

Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow

Rarely does a book offer a clear paradigm shift in thinking about a historical topic as successfully as does Segregating Sound by Karl Hagstrom Miller. Rather than follow the standard folklore paradigm typical of such studies, Miller turned to the musicians themselves and, by exploring the historical contexts of their repertoires, enabled these black and white southerners to climb out of the boxes into which they had been so neatly packaged by professionals over the past century. Miller's “imaginative leap” (p. 280) results in a completely new way of conceptualizing folk, blues, hillbilly, and even jazz and popular musics that brings into question decades of scholarship. Miller is emphatic: southern culture has always embraced American popular music. Black and white musicians in the region made good livings playing not only the indigenous sounds created by both races within the community but also externally produced mass-marketed songs. The formation of the American Folklore Society by anthropologists who fixated on an exceptional South as a way to understand a white supremacist civilization and the simultaneous exploitation by record companies of an “exotic” region filled with potential consumers promoted a racialization of music. Miller asserts that two false assumptions about southern culture developed: First, as a distinct region, that the South enjoyed an essentialist “folk” music separate from the “foreign” popular music coming out of Tin Pan Alley; and second, that “racialized music” correlated with “racialized bodies” so that only black people performed the blues while only white people made hillbilly music. Against the backdrop of a changing South where politicians passed segregation laws to separate the races, folklorists and recording executives worked in tandem to erect a musical color line where previously none had existed.

Sounding Out Pop: Analytical Essays in Popular Music (review)

Reviewed by: Sounding Out Pop: Analytical Essays in Popular Music Brad Osborn Sounding Out Pop: Analytical Essays in Popular Music. Edited by Mark Spicer and John Covach. (Tracking Pop.) Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. [xiv, 265 p. ISBN 9780472115051 (hardcover), $75; ISBN 9780472034000 (paperback), $28.95.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, discography, index. Although the subtitle of Sounding Out Pop belies an analytical approach to popular music, the nine essays “range from historical to music-analytic, aesthetic to ethnographic, with several drawing liberally from ideas in other disciplines” (p. vii). Though most of the contributors, including both editors, are trained as music theorists, their approaches are as varied as their repertoires. Patient readers will find this diversity both enriching and stimulating, and those expecting only traditional music-theoretical approaches may be surprised. When specialized analytical techniques are introduced, whether standard in the musictheoretical literature (e.g., Kevin Holm-Hudson’s neo-Riemannian transformations), borrowed from other disciplines (e.g., Lori Burns’s narrative theories), or idiosyncratic to the author (e.g., John Covach’s formal typologies), the authors are careful to introduce the methodology thoroughly enough for a non-specialist audience. Essays by James Grier and Andrew Flory both address autobiographical connections to analysis. In “Marvin Gaye as Vocal Composer,” Flory defines a style of composition that emerges around Gaye’s increased studio production prowess in the 1970s. As a “vocal composer,” Gaye records improvisations over finished rhythm section tracks, patching together the final product from many disparate takes, often in a manner not reproducible live. In connecting Gaye’s composition with his role in the studio, Flory effectively shortens the distance between performer and producer, composer and improviser. Flory links this practice to black musical traditions, though it has become commonplace among musicians as home studio technology becomes increasingly affordable. Grier’s essay “Ego and Alter Ego” explores the multivalent connections between Bob Dylan and Roger McGuinn of The Byrds. Arguably, McGuinn’s musical pedigree is primarily as an interpreter of Dylan’s songs, and Grier’s analyses illuminate some very interesting differences between his covers and Dylan’s originals. For example, McGuinn alters nearly every Dylan tune to a more rock-friendly . Comparing the vocal melodies (p. 50) does much to illustrate these differences, but transcriptions and analyses of the rhythm section parts might help to clarify how other musicians, studios, and producers interface with these covers. In “Leiber and Stoller, the Coasters, and the ‘Dramatic AABA’ Form,” Covach argues that to understand The Coasters’ “playlet” songs (written by Leiber and Stoller) we must examine their peculiar formal and narrative structure, which he calls the “Dramatic AABA” form. Through numerous examples, Covach demonstrates that the B section presents “the focus of the song—the point to which everything leads dramatically” (p. 9). If Covach’s aim is to illuminate new possibilities for the AABA structure outside of its Tin Pan Alley archetype, one may wonder why he depends on the same prescriptive formal categories he has employed since his 2006 essay on rock formal structures (“From Craft to Art: Formal Structure in the Music of the Beatles,” in Reading the Beatles: Cultural Studies, Literary Criticism, and the Fab Four, [End Page 100] ed. Ken Womack and Todd F. Davis [Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006], 37–53). Christopher Endrinal’s recent work on the “interverse” (the climactic B section in a compound AABA form) in U2’s music is particularly relevant here, yet goes without citation (Christopher Endrinal, “Form and Style in the Music of U2” [Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 2008]). Holm-Hudson’s essay “A Study of Maximally Smooth Voice Leading in the Mid-1970s Music of Genesis” theorizes Tony Banks’s unique keyboard voicings and their impact on the band’s stylistic development. Among other parsimonious voice-leading techniques, Holm-Hudson relies on neo-Riemannian theory to describe common-tone harmonies usually related by third. These techniques, largely foreign to the guitar, are a natural result of composing at the keyboard. This links Banks’s compositional style to Holm-Hudson’s analytical method, since the music of nineteenth-century piano composers such as Lizst, Schumann, and Schubert has been modeled using...

Bob Dylan in America

Sean Wilentz is the celebrated author of numerous books on the nineteenth century, including The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2006), although he also published The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (2008). In his other academic life he has explored popular music, including co-editing The Rose and the Briar: Death, Love, and Liberty in the American Ballad (2004) and receiving a Grammy Award nomination for the liner notes for the album The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964, Concert at Philharmonic Hall (2004). In Bob Dylan in America he has drawn together seemingly all of his interests and knowledge to explore the life and meaning of one of the most influential musicians over the last half-century. Wilentz contributes significantly to an understanding of his life and music, particularly since the 1960s, and is particularly fascinating with his eclectic reach and knowledge, while adding his own personal memories and anecdotes. As he concludes, Dylan took traditional folk music, the blues, rock and roll, country and western, black gospel, Tin Pan Alley, Tex-Mex borderlands music, Irish outlaw ballads, and more and bent them to his own poetic muse… . His imagination and his voice blasted open by Beat aesthetics, Dylan then pushed his own reinventions of folk music into realms that were every bit as mysterious and mythic as the old traditional music, but in a pop sensibility of his own time that shocked the folk purists. (p. 334).

Swing Along: The Musical Life of Will Marion Cook (review)

Reviewed by: Swing Along: The Musical Life of Will Marion Cook David Krasner Marva Griffin Carter. Swing Along: The Musical Life of Will Marion Cook. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. 184 pp. $27.95. Will Marion Cook (née William Mercer, 1869–1944) was a musician and composer best known for his work in black musicals. A student of the violin at the Oberlin Conservatory, tutored by Heinrich Jocobson at the Berlin Hochschule for Musik, and a protégé of Antonin Dvořák and John White at the National Conservatory of Music, Cook was eminently prepared for a career as a concert performer and opera composer. Because he was African American, however, the scant opportunities available at the time were in musical theatre. His talents were hardly wasted, though, as he composed some of the most enduring songs and lyrics for black and white musicals. Writing music with the great poet Paul Laurence Dunbar as lyricist, and teaming up with the superb musical performers Ernest Hogan, Bob Cole, George Walker, and Bert Williams, Cook arranged orchestration and wrote lyrics and songs for the best musicals of his generation. Influenced by Tin Pan Alley songs and show tunes, Cook made an essential contribution to popular music in American consciousness. Marva Griffin Carter’s book shines a long overdue light on the career of this great composer. Cook worked in several media: art songs, love songs, and spirituals, and as Carter notes, his musical styles included “a diverse range of pseudo-Africanisms, a nostalgic plantation song, tender ballads, waltzes, recitatives and operatic ensembles” (67). He was also masterful at writing the popular “coon song,” the derogatory tunes by white writers that were turned into generally positive representations once written by African Americans. Cook’s most famous song, “Swing Along,” written for Williams and Walker, is a powerful work reflecting the conditions of African Americans moving (“swinging along”) amidst a thicket of racism. During his most productive decade, 1898–1908, he composed outstanding music for shows such as Clorindy, the Origin of the Cakewalk (1898), In Dahomey (1903), and The Southerner (1904). In his later years Cook produced choral works, especially his Southern Syncopated Orchestra. Cook’s genius was owing to what Carter calls “his use of highly syncopated, chromatic melodies and extended song forms” (118). Despite his talent, he was a recalcitrant figure in show business. Carter notes that George Walker once said of him: “If Will Marion Cook was a white man I reckon he would pass as eccentric, [End Page 285] but, being as he’s a negro, he’s sure enough plum crazy” (91). Carter quotes Cook admitting that his failure to acquire success “was not because of color; rather, because of uncontrolled passions, too violent a resentment against real of fancied wrongs; too large and too visible a chip on each shoulder and to be sure I missed nothing, another chip on my woolly head” (110). Nevertheless, Cook had numerous admirers. His wife Abbie Mitchell, despite divorcing him, remained supportive of his musical career. He also had a tremendous influence on many important African American musicians, mentoring Eubie Blake, James Reese Europe, and Duke Ellington, among others. The book is essentially an unreconstructed reprint of the author’s 1988 dissertation and the shortcoming of such republication is glaring. There are little to no references to the dozens of works on African American musical theatre that have emerged during the past two decades. The author seems unaware, for example, of several new biographies of Cook’s collaborator, Bert Williams, only referencing the outdated biographies by Mabel Rowland (1923) and Ann Charters (1970). Additionally, many accounts of Cook’s experiences noted in this book are stated with insufficient examination. The author says, for instance, that Cook “could not have chosen a more gifted mentor than Bob Cole to teach him the tricks of the theatrical trade” (37), then says that there was “discord between Cole and Cook” (57) that ended their relationship. But no explanation as to the substance of the discord is provided. The author says that “Cook was widely known as an advocate of Republican principles and an outspoken anti-New Dealer” (109), but then says that Cook...

Blacks and Irish on the Riverine Frontiers: The Roots of American Popular Music

Blacks and Irish on the Riverine FrontiersThe Roots of American Popular Music Christopher J. Smith (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Riverine environments became spaces in which behaviors adopted from more racially fluid milieus could meet and spread. A Savannah minstrel, ca. 1905 courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress [End Page 75] Environments—geographical, demographic, historical, and contextual—have played a key role in American popular music, particularly in the case of minstrelsy, the nineteenth-century black/white synthesis that lies at the root of vaudeville, tap-dance, Tin Pan Alley, and musical comedy. Scholars have identified the role played by shifting antebellum conceptions of class, race, and politics in the creation of blackface minstrelsy, and the way the idiom ritualized or contested these conceptions, but, with a few brief exceptions, they have neglected the physical environments—the contested public spaces—in which the blackface synthesis first occurred. Place—particularly the boundary spaces of maritime and riverine environments on the southern and western frontiers of antebellum North America—was a key element in shaping the Anglo-Irish/African American cultural collaboration that made blackface minstrelsy possible. Received musicological history has depicted blackface as a phenomenon of northern urban environments, but this is to neglect the frontier contexts that both enabled black-white-creole cultural contact and provided inspiration for the first generation of blackface practitioners. As in the urban North (on the wharves of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, and the rivers and new canals of the North-east and the "Old Frontier"), so on the landings and in the markets of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, and harbor towns like Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans: slaves, free blacks, and poor whites came together in a mutable, fluid, working-class environment in which tunes and dances, gestural and verbal languages could be—and were—borrowed, stolen, and combined.1 Blackface minstrelsy, as pioneered in the 1830s and codified in the early 1840s, represents the earliest comparatively accurate description and imitation—specifically by Anglo-Irish observers—of African American performance. These early blackface minstrel performers were involved in what would later be called participant-observation ethnomusicology: they went out to the wharves, docks, canals, and frontier towns; they watched, learned from, and imitated black players; and they brought those observations back for an urban working-class audience. While imitations of Africans had been a staple of Anglo-American popular theater since the mid-eighteenth century, these early caricatures seem to have been based verbally and visually upon loose evocations of those colonial Africans—from Jamaica, Barbados, and Haiti—most familiar to British audiences. Changes in early nineteenth-century characterizations reveal a shift of sources: it is evident that, by the time New Yorker Micah Hawkins performed "Backside Albany" in the 1815 production of The Siege of Plattsburgh (set in upstate New York), the African American sources being imitated had shifted to North America. Dialect, names, costume, and body language all reflected a new, black-white-creole mixture emerging in North American urban and frontier contexts.2 The rightful condemnation of blackface's racist caricature sometimes has neglected [End Page 76] the enormous innovative impact of the black-white musical exchange which minstrelsy stylized upon the stage: One of the realities of American life is that certain features of African American performance style will remain strange and alluring to those outside the culture. Not least among such features is the making of hard social commentary on recurring problems of life, often through cutting and breaking techniques—contentious interactions continually calling for a change of direction, with alterations expressed in rhythmic, tonal, textural, and other kinds of figures … The motives of the Southern white dancers who engaged in the black jig at the end of their formal dances are not that removed from those of the white bluesman, rapper, or break dancer.3 There is good evidence that some of the most crucial informants for early blackface practitioners, like Daniel Decatur Emmett, George Washington Dixon, Thomas Dartmouth ("Daddy") Rice, and Joel Walker Sweeney, were themselves culture-crossing individuals. It is no coincidence that all of the early exemplars of the blackface minstrelsy synthesis—that first two generations...

O Cant: Singing the Race Music of Jean Toomer's Cane

Graham considers Jean Toomer's Cane from a musicological perspective and discusses the novel's musical poetics with an ear toward 1920s discussions of African American folk culture, preservationism, and the mediation of song. At the time of Cane's publication, Toomer's poems—modeled on African American spirituals—could be appreciated and sung by readers of various ethnic backgrounds. This essay argues that their musicality and performability were ultimately intended to promote interracial empathy and to elide racial difference. Other topics of the essay include turn-of-the-century American theater, Tin Pan Alley and the music industry, anthropology and ethnography in the southern United States, and Toomer's debts or relations to other writers of the Harlem Renaissance, among them James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, and Langston Hughes.

A Staggering Machine of Desire

A Staggering Machine of Desire Amy Henderson (bio) Marlis Schweitzer . When Broadway Was the Runway: Theater, Fashion, and American Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. 320 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $39.95. The rise of a culture of consumption in the early twentieth century catalyzed a sea change in the campaign for women's rights. The growth of urban centers, and particularly New York City, created an economy of abundance, desire, and choice: the modern idea of "fashion" emerged, and women learned that a desire for certain commodities could be transformative. Indeed, an unanticipated consequence of abundance was the "eureka" recognition that the right to choose particular products could change personal identity. In the years leading to the passage of woman's suffrage in 1919, the transformative power to "shop"—i.e., to choose—generated what one observer called "a staggering machine of desire." It also led to an epochal change in women's sense of control over their own lives. These cultural strands weave throughout Marlis Schweitzer's new study, When Broadway Was the Runway: Theater, Fashion, and American Culture. Because of centrifugal urban growth, large-scale immigration, and enormous technological change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, New York emerged as the hub of a new American identity. New York became the vital center of the corporate and advertising world, and—as symbolized by Broadway—the heart of show business. It was "the imaginary if not geographic heart of the United States, the epitome of all things American" in these years; New York was also the site of convergence where consumer culture flourished (p. 5). Schweitzer finds the linkage to women's self-perception an integral offshoot of consumer culture, both as a result of theater's penchant for spectacle and "stars" and because of the new vogue for shopping. She writes, "theater managers aggressively pursued . . . female theatergoers by transforming the stage into a glorious site of consumer spectacle." Nearby department stores absorbed this path to consumer success and became arenas for spectacle themselves, fusing "theatrical spectatorship and consumption" as they formed [End Page 709] a mass market for consumer goods and helped generate the rise of celebrity culture (p. 4). Broadway played a very special role, providing the words and music for the American Dream. From the 1890s to the 1920s, the Lower East Side witnessed the arrival of twenty-three million new immigrants. German beer gardens, Irish brass bands, and curbside minstrel shows created a commotion of cultures that resonated through the Bowery, lower Broadway, and Union Square in the 1880s—and then migrated north toward West 28th Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, where the din of tinny pianos clanging out new tunes led to the area's sobriquet as Tin Pan Alley in the early 1900s.1 The "genteel tradition" that had been central to America's mainstream culture dissolved in the new urban, industrial stew. Replacing it was a vernacular culture that rose from the streets and was captured best by vaudeville—the most successful entertainment of the time, and one that literally evoked the "voice of the city." Legendary performer and composer George M. Cohan brought a red-white-and-blue sensibility to Broadway musicals that were quintessential expressions of the American melting pot, including such notable songs as "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy" and "You're a Grand Old Flag." Schweitzer describes the theater—with its extensive ties to department stores and the emerging mass media—as "a central locus for producing modern consumers." The potential audience for both was vast: in the 1914-15 season, there were 133 productions on Broadway in forty-two theaters, with the names of such stars as W. C. Fields, Ed Wynn, Bert Williams, and Irene Castle illuminating marquees along the "Great White Way." The rise of these popular stage stars—as well as Maude Adams as Peter Pan and such other Ziegfeld Follies' headliners as Fannie Brice and Eddie Cantor—helped give birth to celebrity culture: star images and stories flooded newspapers and magazines to feed an insatiable public appetite that demanded to know more about their anointed favorites.2 To broaden theater's appeal, impresarios such as...

Segregating sound: inventing folk and pop music in the age of Jim Crow

In Segregating Sound , Karl Hagstrom Miller argues that the categories that we have inherited to think and talk about southern music bear little relation to the ways that southerners long played and heard music. Focusing on the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, Miller chronicles how southern music—a fluid complex of sounds and styles in practice—was reduced to a series of distinct genres linked to particular racial and ethnic identities. The blues were African American. Rural white southerners played country music. By the 1920s, these depictions were touted in folk song collections and the catalogs of “race” and “hillbilly” records produced by the phonograph industry. Such links among race, region, and music were new. Black and white artists alike had played not only blues, ballads, ragtime, and string band music, but also nationally popular sentimental ballads, minstrel songs, Tin Pan Alley tunes, and Broadway hits. In a cultural history filled with musicians, listeners, scholars, and business people, Miller describes how folklore studies and the music industry helped to create a “musical color line,” a cultural parallel to the physical color line that came to define the Jim Crow South. Segregated sound emerged slowly through the interactions of southern and northern musicians, record companies that sought to penetrate new markets across the South and the globe, and academic folklorists who attempted to tap southern music for evidence about the history of human civilization. Contending that people’s musical worlds were defined less by who they were than by the music that they heard, Miller challenges assumptions about the relation of race, music, and the market.

“Some of These Days” and the Study of the Great American Songbook

AbstractSupporting a new methodology for the study of classic American popular songs, this article offers a history of both the print editions and recorded versions of “Some of These Days” (1910) by Shelton Brooks. This saga commences with a hitherto unanalyzed precursor to Brooks's famous song that shares nearly the same opening words and melody, the 1905 “Some o' Dese Days” by Frank Williams. It continues through nine major print editions and numerous recorded performances, of which this study examines forty-six, including ten as the theme song for Sophie Tucker. Performers are clearly influenced by both performed and printed variations; more surprisingly, print editions are also influenced by performers. Thus, Tin Pan Alley songs are best viewed as products of collaboration within a community of songwriters, publishers, and performers. Brooks fills “Some of These Days” with compositional details that are conducive to effective performance variations. This elusive intrinsic adaptability represents, for 1910, a modern, innovative quality and is central to any understanding of this song genre. Oft-neglected, such early popular standards—poised at the juncture of musical cultures, oral and print, amateur and professional, live and mediatized—help the critical historian pinpoint aspects that make this repertoire valuable.