A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songbook, 1910-1965 uses text and imagery from Broadway musicals, classic films, posters and personal collections to tell the stories of great composers and lyricists. The featured artists include Harold Arlen ("Over the Rainbow," "Stormy Weather"), Irving Berlin ("God Bless America," "White Christmas"), George Gershwin ("Rhapsody in Blue," An American in Paris), Jerome Kern (Showboat, "All the Things You Are"), and the stage musical team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein (The Sound of Music, South Pacific, Oklahoma!).
All came from families that immigrated to America in the 1800s or fled persecution in Europe at the turn of the 20th century. Their popularity was fueled by the advent of the radio receiver, the broadcasting microphone, the talking movie, the long-playing record and other inventions that brought music to mass audiences.
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In the era preceding the radio’s centrality in every household’s living room, home entertainment consisted of a piano and voices, and the music industry revolved around the sale of sheet music. Music publishers had set up shop on an undistinguished street in Manhattan’s Flatiron district—Twenty-eighth Street between Broadway and Fifth Avenue—that came to be known as Tin Pan Alley.
Tin Pan Alley had produced such durable hits as “In the Good Old Summertime” (1902), “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” (1908), and “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” (1910). Then came “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” by Irving Berlin in 1911. Technically a march, not a rag, incorporating elements as unusual as a bugle call and a quotation from Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks At Home” (‘Swanee River,’ 1851), Berlin’s vivacious hybrid sold a million copies and made ragtime the rage. “Alexander” also launched a craze for social dancing, since you could dance more easily to ragtime than to the vaudeville ditties or sentimental ballads it displaced. Thus began the American songbook. Kern and Gershwin added to it before the decade ended, the latter [lleft] with "Swanee," sung by Al Jolson.. Then came the 1920s and an astonishing proliferation of brilliant songs.
The songwriters didn’t set out to create a new art form in the thirty-two-bar song. But that is what they accomplished. The basic structure consists of a verse, or lead-in, followed by two eight-measure statements of the melodic theme; a bridge (or “release”) of the same length; and then eight final bars returning to the refrain and sometimes varying it. The form is nothing if not elastic. In “That Old Black Magic,” for example, Harold Arlen introduces leaps and drops that extend the melody to seventy-two bars.
During their effervescent heyday—a roughly fifty-five-year period between 1911 and 1965—popular songs fed a nexus of other arts and pastimes. The Broadway musical and its Hollywood counterpart in their prime; the jazz of Swing Street in midtown Manhattan and the Cotton Club in Harlem; the Big Bands of Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller; vocalists on the order of Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, Judy Garland and Ella Fitzgerald: all depended on the songwriters for their material.
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