For nearly a century, New York's famous "Tin Pan Alley" was the center of popular music publishing in this country. It was where songwriting became a profession, and songs were made-to-order for the biggest stars. Selling popular music to a mass audience from coast-to-coast involved the greatest entertainment media of the day, from minstrelsy to Broadway, to vaudeville, dance palaces, radio, and motion pictures. Successful songwriting became an art, with a host of men and women becoming famous by writing famous songs.
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.
This unique book tells the story of two stars. One is Sir Elton John and his career up to the breakthrough gigs at the LA Troubadour in 1970. The other is Tin Pan Alley itself.
The American Song Book, Volume I: The Tin Pan Alley Era is the first in a projected five-volume series of books that will reprint original sheet music, including covers, of songs that constitute the enduring standards of Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, the Gershwins, and other lyricists and composers of what has been called the "Golden Age" of American popular music. These songs have done what popular songs are not supposed to do-stayed popular. They have been reinterpreted year after year, generation after generation, by jazz artists such as Charlie Parker and Art Tatum, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. In the 1950s, Frank Sinatra began recording albums of these standards and was soon followed by such singers as Tony Bennet, Doris Day, Willie Nelson, and Linda Ronstadt. In more recent years, these songs have been reinterpreted by Rod Stewart, Harry Connick, Jr., Carly Simon, Lady GaGa, K.D. Laing, Paul McCartney, and, most recently, Bob Dylan. As such, these songs constitute the closest thing America has to a repertory of enduring classical music. In addition to reprinting the sheet music for these classic songs, authors Philip Furia and Laurie Patterson place these songs in historical context with essays about the sheet-music publishing industry known as Tin Pan Alley, the emergence of American musical comedy on Broadway, and the "talkie" revolution that made possible the Hollywood musical. The authors also provide biographical sketches of songwriters, performers, and impresarios such as Florenz Ziegfeld. In addition, they analyze the lyrical and musical artistry of each song and relate anecdotes, sometimes amusing, sometimes poignant, about how the songs were created. The American Songbook is a book that can be read for enjoyment on its own or be propped on the piano to be played and sung.
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.
In this innovative resource, Thomas P. Walsh has compiled a unique collection of some 1,400 published and unpublished American musical compositions related to the Philippines during the American colonial era from 1898 to 1946. The book reprints a number of hard-to-find song lyrics, making them available to readers for the first time in more than a century. It also provides copyright registration numbers and dates of registration for many published and unpublished songs. Finally, more than 700 notes on particular songs and numerous links provide direct access to bibliographic records or digital copies of sheet music in libraries and collections.
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.
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.
(Play Like). Study the trademark songs, licks, tones and techniques that made Stevie Ray Vaughan a legend. Each book comes with a unique code that will give you access to audio files of all the music in the book online. This pack looks at 15 of Vaughan's most influential songs including: Couldn't Stand the Weather * Honey Bee * Love Struck Baby * Pride and Joy * Scuttle Buttin' * Texas Flood * Tightrope * and more.
