Tin Pan Alley
Tin Pan Alley

Author: John Shepherd

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-14

Total Pages: 126

ISBN-13: 1317227522

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In Tin Pan Alley we see the beginnings of the pop world as we now know it: commercial, constantly capturing, exploiting or even occasionally creating a public mood. The Alleymen were workers as much as artists. This book, first published in 1982, explores how the change occurred, the ways in which songwriters organised themselves to get greater control over their products, the social circumstances that influenced their choice of subject-matter, the new forms, such as the integrated musical, developed for maximum appeal, the vast publicity structure built to market the merchandise, and, of course, the many stars who came to fame by taking a walk down the Alley.

The B Side
The B Side

Author: Ben Yagoda

Publisher: Riverhead Books

Published: 2015-12

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1594634092

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An acclaimed cultural historian--drawing on previously untapped archival sources and interviews with such voices as Randy Newman, Jimmy Webb, Linda Ronstadt, and Herb Alpert--presents a social history of the great American songwriting era.

American Popular Music: The nineteenth century and Tin Pan Alley
American Popular Music: The nineteenth century and Tin Pan Alley

Author: Timothy E. Scheurer

Publisher: Popular Press

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 9780879724665

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Beginning with the emergence of commercial American music in the nineteenth century, Volume 1 includes essays on the major performers, composers, media, and movements that shaped our musical culture before rock and roll. Articles explore the theoretical dimensions of popular music studies; the music of the nineteenth century; and the role of black Americans in the evolution of popular music. Also included--the music of Tin Pan Alley, ragtime, swing, the blues, the influences of W. S. Gilbert and Rodgers and Hammerstein, and changes in lyric writing styles from the nineteenth century to the rock era.

The Poets of Tin Pan Alley
The Poets of Tin Pan Alley

Author: Philip Furia

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 737

ISBN-13: 0190906464

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"Mrs. Oscar Hammerstein, so the story goes, once overheard someone praise "Ol' Man River" as a "great Kern song." "I beg your pardon," she said, "But Jerome Kern did not write 'Ol' Man River.' Mr. Kern wrote dum dum dum da; my husband wrote ol' man river." It's easy to understand her frustration. While the years between World Wars I and II have long been hailed as the "golden age" of American popular song, it is the composers, not the lyricists, who always usually get top billing. "I love a Gershwin tune" too often means just that-the tune-even though George Gershwin wrote many unlovable tunes before he began working with his brother Ira in 1924. Few people realize that their favorite "Arlen" songs each had a different lyricist-Ted Koehler for "Stormy Weather," Yip Harburg for "Over the Rainbow," Johnny Mercer for "That Old Black Magic." Only Broadway or Hollywood buffs know which "Kern" songs get their wry touch from Dorothy Fields, who would flippantly rhyme "fellow" with "Jello," and which of Kern's sonorous melodies got even lusher from Otto Harbach, who preferred solemn rhymes like "truth" and "forsooth." Jazz critics sometimes pride themselves on ignoring the lyrics to Waller and Ellington "instrumentals," blithely consigning Andy Razaf or Don George to oblivion"--

Evil Necessity: Slavery and Political Culture in Antebellum Kentucky
Evil Necessity: Slavery and Political Culture in Antebellum Kentucky

Author: Harold D. Tallant

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published:

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 9780813129365

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John Fox Jr. published this great romantic novel of the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky and Virginia in 1908, and the book quickly became one of AmericaÕs favorites. It has all the elements of a good romanceÑa superior but natural heroine, a hero who is an agent of progress and enlightenment, a group of supposedly benighted mountaineers to be drawn into the flow of mainstream American culture, a generous dose of social and class struggle, and a setting among the misty coves and cliffs of the blue Cumberlands. Reprinted with a foreword by John Ed Pearce, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine has all the excitement and poignance that caught and held readersÕ interest when the book first appeared.

The Tin Pan Alley Song Encyclopedia
The Tin Pan Alley Song Encyclopedia

Author: Thomas S. Hischak

Publisher: Greenwood

Published: 2002-09-30

Total Pages: 566

ISBN-13:

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Offers background information and commentary on 1,200 popular songs from a variety of styles and genres written between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century.

God Bless America
God Bless America

Author: Kathleen E.R. Smith

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-10-21

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 0813185386

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After Pearl Harbor, Tin Pan Alley songwriters rushed to write the Great American War Song—an "Over There" for World War II. The most popular songs, however, continued to be romantic ballads, escapist tunes, or novelty songs. To remedy the situation, the federal government created the National Wartime Music Committee, an advisory group of the Office of War Information (OWI), which outlined "proper" war songs, along with tips on how and what to write. The music business also formed its own Music War Committee to promote war songs. Neither group succeeded. The OWI hoped that Tin Pan Alley could be converted from manufacturing love songs to manufacturing war songs just as automobile plants had retooled to assemble planes and tanks. But the OWI failed to comprehend the large extent by which the war effort would be defined by advertisers and merchandisers. Selling merchandise was the first priority of Tin Pan Alley, and the OWI never swayed them from this course. Kathleen E.R. Smith concludes the government's fears of faltering morale did not materialize. Americans did not need such war songs as "Goodbye, Mama, I'm Off To Yokohama", "There Are No Wings On a Foxhole", or even "The Sun Will Soon Be Setting On The Land Of The Rising Sun" to convince them to support the war. The crusade for a "proper" war song was misguided from the beginning, and the music business, then and now, continues to make huge profits selling love—not war—songs.