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Q&A: Author Ben Yagoda on the Great American Songbook

You know a genre of music has become a deeply ingrained part of the culture when it becomes a featured night on American Idol.

Miles Davis photographed by William “PoPsie” Randolph, from Ben Yagoda’s “The B Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song”
Miles Davis photographed by William “PoPsie” Randolph, from Ben Yagoda’s “The B Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song”Read more

You know a genre of music has become a deeply ingrained part of the culture when it becomes a featured night on American Idol.

So it is with the American Songbook, a genre of music and a cultural movement that, beginning in the mid-1920s, defined American tastes in music, theater, movies, and even fashion for three decades.

Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and George Gershwin were its principal writers, and Ella Fitzgerald, Fred Astaire, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, and Louis Armstrong the musicians and singers who interpreted their work.

Tin Pan Alley's power in the industry and cultural influence dissipated after World War II, when show tunes and big-band songs were outperformed on the airwaves by soppy ballads and pseudo-country numbers. Eventually, rock-and-roll replaced the Songbook in popularity, power, and cultural influence.

This history is told with vivid biographical detail and passion by cultural critic and ardent fan Ben Yagoda in The B Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Songbook. It provides portraits of the songwriters and artists of the day and explores the cultural, social, and economic changes that led to the decline of the Songbook and the ascendancy of rock as the standard for the American pop song.

Yagoda will discuss the book at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 11 at the Free Library of Philadelphia's Central Library (information: www.freelibrary.org/authorevents).

Yagoda, 60, who has taught English and journalism at the University of Delaware for 23 years, began his career as a freelance journalist. He continues to write essays about culture and language for Slate.com and the New York Times. His books include About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made; Will Rogers: A Biography; and The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing.

He spoke about music, theater, the movies, and his love for music in a phone chat from his home near Swarthmore College, where his wife, Gigi Simeone, is an academic adviser.

You came of age during one of the most fecund periods of rock-and-roll, yet gravitated to Broadway songs.

I was a big Broadway fan as a kid. I grew up in New Rochelle, N.Y., and we used to go to Broadway shows. It was the last gasp of the traditional musical, and I caught Funny Girl, Fiddler on the Roof, Hello Dolly, and even a revival of Guys and Dolls with Jerry Orbach as Sky Masterson and Alan King as Nathan Detroit. That was a real game-changer for me.

Of course, when the Beatles came along, like everyone else, I got into them. It wasn't until college that I became reacquainted with Broadway when a lot of singers who were then popular began singing standards: Randy Newman, Ry Cooder, Leon Redbone.

The songs written for those Broadway shows and movie musicals - that's the Great American Songbook? It's a funny term. And why is it "great"? 

Yes, terminology is important. Sometimes, I just call it the American Songbook. That great almost makes it sound like a Disney theme park.

The first use of the term I was able to find was a live album by [legendary jazz singer] Carmen McRae from 1972. She called it the Great American Songbook. Or her record company did.

And it caught on. Not too dramatically, at first, but steadily.

But - and here I think many Americans have wondered this - what does it mean? What's the book?

It's a cultural term, a metaphorical songbook. For one person, the contents will be different than for others. But what the term signifies is a recognition that there is a body of songs, a genre, that has become well-established and will not go away. 

The songbook may be a metaphor, but Tin Pan Alley was a real place.

Yes. Beginning in the last decades of the 19th century, a whole series of music- publishing companies set up on West 28th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues [in Manhattan]. You had all these song-pluggers on the street and writers demonstrating how their songs sounded out the window, and it sounded like a bunch of tin pans clanging over each other.

When was this music deemed great?

Well, producers and artists like Sinatra and Tony Bennett began realizing at some point that this is a really important, a great body of work, and that we should treat it honorably.

The word rebirth in the title [of B Sides] is meant to show that it lives on today as a repertory that other artists continue to do, and do well. The idea in pop music is that the artist sings their own songs, but now we have top performers recording standards: Bennett, Annie Lennox, Pete Seeger's band the Weavers.

 Are you surprised that Bob Dylan has an album of standards due Monday? Called "Shadows in the Night," it's a collection of 10 standards that Sinatra once recorded.

Yes. There's an irony here. Dylan and the Beatles are the artists who did the most to change the way music was produced since Tin Pan Alley.

Can you add to the Great American Songbook? Or is it closed?

Well, Billy Joel tried to do one, "New York State of Mind," and was kind of successful. Probably because it's about New York.

I remember this interview Keith Jarrett did in 1989, where he said he had tried to write a standard. "It was really hard," he said, "and I'm never going to do it again."

Ben Yagoda's Very Own Great American Songbook

Author Ben Yagoda shares a few of his favorites. Hear them online at bit.ly/15RhViV.

Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, "I Won't Dance" (1957) Ella. Louis. Ira. George. Pure pleasure.

Lee Wiley and Fats Waller, "I've Got a Crush on You" (1939) Lee Wiley was the first singer to deliberately record standards. Here, she's accompanied by the great Fats Waller.

Billie Holiday and Lester Young, "All of Me" Billie Holiday could make the encyclopedia swing. She's joined on this 1941 chestnut by the inimitable Lester Young on saxophone.

Frank Sinatra, "I've Got You Under My Skin" (1956) Here's a Cole Porter standard arranged by Nelson Riddle.

Susannah McCorkle,

"I Thought About You"

A contemporary singer who died too soon, with her beautiful rendition of an uncharacteristically simple (but typically brilliant) Johnny Mercer lyric.

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, "Isn't This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)" From a scene in the 1935 film Top Hat. Fred Astaire was an underrated singer whom composers (here Irving Berlin) loved to write for.

He could dance a bit, too - as could Ginger Rogers.

The Miles Davis Quintet, "If I Were a Bell" Frank Loesser's Guys and Dolls score (1950) represented the apogee of the American Songbook period. Miles Davis shows how this tune can swing.

Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga, "The Lady Is a Tramp" (2013) Bennett and Gaga's joy in performing this Rodgers and Hart number is infectious and suggests that the Songbook will never die.

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