Tin Pan Alley (1910-13: The Impact of the Blues) | The Chronicle of Jazz

By Mervyn Cooke • 325 illustrations,
82 in full color • 256 pages • 8-1/2 x 8-1/2"
Cloth • ISBN 0-7892-0399-5 • U.S. $45.00


	Front cover of Irving Berlin's hit song "Alexander's Ragtime Band," published in 1911. [ view larger image ] (Reproduced from the collections of the Library of Congress, Washington)


	Tin Pan Alley By the last decade of the nineteenth century, New York had become the powerful center of the music-publishing industry in the United States. The publishers, whose premises were largely concentrated on "Tin Pan Alley" (28th Street), were quick to capitalize on the growing popularity of vaudeville. They employed song pluggers to promote their recent merchandise, and from the 1920s onward they fostered the fashion for musical comedies on Broadway. Both George Gershwin and Irving Berlin started their careers as humble song pluggers before going on to establish themselves as two of the finest popular songwriters of their era, alongside Jerome Kern and Cole Porter. All four composers contributed innumerable standards to the jazz repertoire. Relations between jazz musicians and the publishers of Tin Pan Alley were not always cordial, however. Berlin's hit song "Alexander's Ragtime Band" (• p. 26) was disliked by ragtime composers, in spite (or perhaps because) of its popularity; and Kern heartily detested attempts to "jazz up" his songs (• p. 55), commenting that "no author would permit pirated editions of his work in which his phraseology and punctuation were changed." For impoverished jazz musicians, Tin Pan Alley often provided a welcome source of immediate income: it was by no means uncommon for musicians to compose a song or two in a taxi en route to a publisher's, the manuscript ready on arrival for an instant sale.