VAUDEVILLE, TIN PAN ALLEY, BROADWAY, HOLLYWOOD, RADIO, RECORDS AND THE GREAT AMERICAN SONGBOOK.
A Brief consolidated History
This article is partly, edited, re written, from various parts of the Internet and partly written by myself. I frankly do not know enough about all the aspects of this topic to write it completely myself, but I thought it quite important to bring all of these aspects together under one heading as they relate so very closely to each other. I am certain I would be found guilty of plagiarism in an academic environment, but as I plan to share this only with friends, I just might get away with it! Brian Lemin April 2013
It is far from brief, in fact quite long, it is repetitive as I have used material from other articles I have written, the article does not flow as I would like it to. It achieves only one purpose only, that of bringing together in one place all the complex happenings in history and in American music for the reader to consider, then to explore special areas of interest to themselves. I hope to develop links that will help the reader gain more or better information than I have collected together here.
Introduction.
The history of Tin Pan Alley, Vaudeville, Broadway Musicals, the Hollywood Musical film and the American Popular song are totally intertwined. The Broadway musical and its early variants were the source of the music that the public took home in various forms over the years and enjoyed the music in their homes. One must add to this other influencing factors on the popular song in America, that of the recording industry and Radio Broadcasting.
Trying to intertwine all these influences into one flowing story has been impossible; hence there are sections of this essay dealing briefly with each of these developments. I have included two extensive timelines in the Appendix which will be of interest to those wanting to see, in detail, the development of Popular Music.
Popular Music Pre Musicals.
Scholars seem to disagree as to what, if any, might have been the effect of opera on the development of Broadway musicals and thus the American popular song. It is clear that opera and operettas were indeed very popular in Europe at the time of some considerable immigration into America, and whilst opera has always been performed in America, it would be fair to say that its popularity has waned over the years. It would not be for me to say that the advent of the Broadways musical was the reason for this reduced popularity.
In the United Kingdom, there were two popular musical entertainment sources in the early and mid-1800s, that of the “Musical Hall” a place for popular variety acts that included a lot of music in popular entertainment terms. Then there was the Gilbert and Sullivan entertainment era that probably began with Thespis in 1871. This musical story could well be accepted as a precursor to the Broadway musical, but though they included many catchy and memorable tunes, they were not widely available for the audiences of the Music Hall to remember and sing as they worked, or played at home on the piano or perhaps the ukulele.
Before leaving the UK it is worth mentioning the tradition of Pub singing. It would appear that the songs from the music Hall were learned (by the men!) and sung in the public house as the effect of alcohol took over. It is an interesting aside, that even in my own life time, of how the drunken singers of my early years have been replaced with drunken brawls and injury, even death; but that is an old guy reminiscing!
Vaudeville.
We leave Europe now and we must now look to a more important origin of American popular music, Vaudeville. The truth be known, this is probably a very American term for what the Europeans referred to as “Music Hall”.
After the Civil War, entertainment in America developed in many different ways, but it was probably in the 1840's, minstrel shows, another type of variety performance, and "the first emanation of a pervasive and purely American mass culture," grew to enormous popularity and formed the heart of nineteenth-century show business." Probably the beginning of what became to be known as Vaudeville. It grew out of a collaboration of theatre, circus acts, medicine shows (yes Medicine shows as entertainment!) and burlesque acts from the saloons across the country. Vaudeville became a unique collaboration of all of these types of entertainment, striving to provide something for the entire family.
In the early days, Vaudeville was quite racy and raunchy. As it became clear the country wanted a family- friendly form of entertainment, Tony Pastor stepped out to eliminate the controversial acts and then opened the first Vaudeville theatre in New York City in the mid-1800s. By the turn of the century, vaudeville had become the most popular form of variety entertainment around, bringing in more than $30 million a year (1900s values). Stars came from every nationality and social class, with male and female stars alike. Vaudeville was a beloved form of entertainment that filled the bill of diversity.
By the mid-1920s, the height of Vaudeville, there were over 20,000 acts across the country. Each day, more than two million people enjoyed the entertainment provided by this phenomenon. The popularity continued to increase until about 1932, at which point many Vaudeville performers were transitioning to the burgeoning industry of radio. With the onset of the Great Depression, radio allowed people to continue to enjoy their favorite performers even though their finances would have prevented them from continuing to take in the great performances of vaudeville. As radio and talking movies increased in popularity, the lights faded on the vaudeville stage.
Early Years of Broadway
The Seven Sisters opened in 1860 and was the first ever musical performed on Broadway. The musical production ran for 253 performances. There are no known copies of the play or its score still in existence.
The Black Crook, which premiered in 1866, is thought by many to be the first real Broadway musical. It was a huge success, running for over a year. There were eight revivals of the show on Broadway. Initially, the show was a melodrama. A fire at a nearby theater displaced a ballet troupe and its orchestra, so the producers of The Black Crook decided to add the group to the show to create what they called "A Musical Spectacular."
A significant break with the formats of the vaudeville and the burlesque had been represented by the musical farce The Mulligan Guard Picnic (1878), scored by David Braham and starring comedians Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart, an evolution of the "Mulligan Shows" that Harrigan and Hart had performed around the country for years. Harrigan was the genius behind the storyline and the dialogues, which were taken mostly from everyday's life. This time the audience was laughing at itself, because Harrigan's focus was on ordinary lives. Both the vaudeville and the burlesque had required minimal linguistic skills in the audience, being mostly "physical" (singalong melodies, body movement, facial expressions, stereotyped characters, imitation and parody) while Harrigan's farces represented a significant step towards a more literate form. Ditto for the singers, who were sopranos (Edna May, Lillian Russell, Vivienne Segal) and contraltos (Fay Templeton), not prostitutes turned chanteuses.
Broadway's theater district (42nd Street) was one of the first areas in America to get electric light. By 1880, one mile of the street was lit electrically, earning the nickname, "The Great White Way."
Charles Hoyt's A Trip To Chinatown (1891), that included the tune After the Ball, and Whoop-Dee-Doo (1904), the vehicle for comedians Joe Weber and Lew Fields (still in the style of the burlesque), were some of the musical farces that were able to compete against Gilbert and Sullivan's operettas, the real hits of the 1890s, imitated in New York by productions such as Reginald DeKoven's Robin Hood (1891), John Philip Sousa's El Capitan (1896), Leslie Stuart's Florodora (1900), whose six female stars (the "Florodora girls") became instant celebrities, Howard Talbot's A Chinese Honeymoon (1901).
Bob Cole's A Trip to Coontown (1898) was the first musical comedy entirely produced and performed by blacks in a Broadway theater (largely inspired to the routines of the minstrel show), followed by Will-Marion Cook's ragtime-tinged Clorindy the Origin of the Cakewalk (1898), staged at the "Casino Theatre", and the highly successful In Dahomey (1902), that turned Antigua-born comedian Bert "Mr Nobody" Williams and minstrel George Walker into influential models for all black entertainers.
The European operetta was transplanted to New York by works such as Reginald DeKoven's Robin Hood (1890), Victor Herbert's Babes in Toyland (1903) and Naughty Marietta (1910), with Sweet Mysterty of Life, Rudolf Friml's The Firefly (1912), mostly composed by immigrants.
The first complete artist of the musical comedy was George Cohan, a veteran vaudeville performer and successful songwriter (I Guess I'll Have To Telegraph My Baby, 1898), who composed the lavishly-choreographed musical melodrama Little Johnny Jones (1904), that, like its predecessor The Governor's Son (1901), shunned the random, implausible plots of the musical comedies for a coherent and cohesive storyline. It included the classics Yankee Doodle Dandy and Give My Regards to Broadway, and was blessed with unprecedented success, repeated by 45 Minutes From Broadway (1906), with Mary's a Grand Old Name, George Washington Jr (1906), with You're a Grand Old Flag, and several more. He also wrote That Haunting Melody for Vera Violetta (1911).
Cohan's equivalent in Britain was Lionel Monckton, who created the first British musical in which the songs "were" the plot (rather than the musical being a mere parade of mostly unrelated songs): The Arcadians (1909).
Early 20th Century In 1907, a new Broadway genre was born. Originally called “Follies 1907”, Flo Ziegfeld's lavish production,
would become a Broadway staple for many years to come. New productions were mounted each year until 1925, with additional productions produced in 1927, 1931, 1934, 1936 and 1943. A final Ziegfeld Follies show was produced in 1957, but was a failure.
When Showboat opened in December 1927, it was unlike anything The Great White Way had ever seen. The early part of the 1920s had been filled with lighthearted comedies, such as No No, Nanette and Funny
Face. Showboat featured dramatic themes and the first-ever completely integrated story and score. The term for the story in a Broadway production is the “book”.
Around this time the dance form in the shows moved from “tap” dancing to a form of dancing which was called “ballet”. Not the classical ballet as we now know it but a free flowing choreographed dance sequence. To some historians this too was a decisive moment in the development of Broadway. So the late 20s saw the two changes; from a show that featured individuals and possibly acts, including tap dancing, to shows that had a story line (book) integrated music, the songs of which added too or led the audience into the next part of the story; and choreographed dance sequences appropriate to the story line.
In 1935, the Gershwin brothers and DuBose Heyward debuted Porgy and Bess. It featured an all-African- American cast, which was quite controversial at the time. While considered a masterpiece by many, it has also been criticized for its racist portrayal of African-Americans.
Some of the Major Contributors to Broadway.
Russian-born Irving Berlin (Israel Baline), a former singing waiter, fused the worlds of Stephen Foster, Tin Pan Alley and Broadway in his simple, unpretentious hit songs: Alexander's Ragtime Band (1911), that sounded more like a military march than a ragtime, Everybody's Doing It (1911) for Eddie Cantor, Play a Simple Melody and Syncopated Walk, off his first musical, Watch Your Step (1914), influenced by ragtime, composed for dancers Vernon and Irene Castle, God Bless America (1917) and Oh How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning (1918), off the musical Yip Yip Yaphank (1918), A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody (1919), the signature song of the Ziegfeld follies. Their exuberance became the soundtrack of the Broadway musical in its infancy, merging syncopation (the craze of Tin Pan Alley) and melodrama. Later, Berlin continued to compose songs that defined their era: Mandy (1919), All Alone (1924), Blue Skies (1927), Marie (1929), Easter Parade (1933), White Christmas (1942). His best musical was perhaps Annie Get Your Gun (1946), that contained There's No Business Like Show Business and Anything you Can Do.
Jerome Kern's melodies highlighted musicals, staged in humble venues, such as Sally (1920) that were relatively humble and ordinary compared with the opulence of the extravaganzas that were being staged by the larger theaters. Jerome Kern had re-invented the "musical" by integrating music and story in everyday settings (not the fantasy lands of the operettas), thus wedding Sullivan's aesthetics and Cohan's aesthetics. He then began a collaboration with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II that peaked with Show Boat (1927), his masterpiece, based on the novel by Edna Ferber, a realistic saga produced by Ziegfeld that included several moments of high pathos (the spiritual Ol' Man River, Make Believe, You Are Love, the cakewalk Can't Help Lovin' That Man and Bill, the latter two the songs that turned Helen Morgan into a star). Kern then scored Roberta (1933), with Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, and Yesterdays, Mark Sandrich's film Top Hat (1935), with The Piccolino, Isn't This A Lovely Day, Cheek to Cheek and Top Hat White Tie and Tails, Swing Time (1936), with The Way You Look Tonight, the ambitious and experimental High Wide And Handsome (1937), with The Folks Who Live On The Hill, Lady Be Good (1941), with The Last Time I Saw Paris, etc.
George Gershwin's songs, versified mostly by his brother Ira Gershwin, represented a step forward in rhythm and sophistication, because Gershwin was fluent in both pop, jazz and classical music, a fact best represented by the jazz opera Blue Monday Blues (1922), the main attraction of George White's "Scandals" in 1922, the symphonic Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and the folk opera Porgy and Bess (1935), containing Summertime. After writing an Al Jolson hit, Swanee (1919), Gershwin entered the arena of Broadway musicals with Lady Be Good (1924), that launched the career of dancer Fred Astaire and established the trend of having the title-song as one of the main hits. Other musicals included Someone To Watch Over Me (1926), S'Wonderful (1927), the ballet An American in Paris (1929), I've Got a Crush on You (1930), I Got Rhythm (1930), that launched the careet of Ethel Merman (the band included Benny Goodman, Jimmy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Jack Teargarden, Gene Krupa), and a political satire, Of Thee I Sing (1931) that became the biggest hit of the decade. His Cuban Overture (1932) was one of the first Latin pieces to become popular in the USA.
Richard Rodgers was the next giant of American pop music after Irving Berlin. With lyricist Lorenz Hart he composed a number of Broadway hits that already included some of Rodgers' memorable melodies: Manhattan (1925), My Heart Stood Still (1927), With A Song In My Heart (1929), Blue Moon (1934), The Most Beautiful Girl in the World (1935). This phase peaked with Babes In Arms (1937), the musical with My Funny Valentine, Johnny One Note and The Lady is a Tramp, and Pal Joey (1940), one of his most innovative works (considered the first musical about an anti-hero). Having refined the craft, Rodgers proceeded to revolutionize it after he partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II with Oklahoma (1944), a daring work that did not rely on gags or girls or catchy melodies but on a "dramatic" story and "dramatic" characters (the songs were monologues and dialogues, not just lyrics), a musical that employed avantgarde dancers (choreographed by Agnes DeMille) instead of chorus girls (and whose dancing numbers were about the story and not mere stage effects). It was also the first musical ever recorded in its entirety on an LP. Rodgers' most experimental work was Allegro (1947), a melodic fantasia rather than a simple sequence of songs. Along the way they charmed the audience with immensely popular tunes such as You'll Never Walk Alone (1945), The Gentleman Is A Dope (1947), Some Enchanted Evening (1949), South Pacific (1949), Whistle a Happy Tune (1951). The album of The Sound of Music (1959) charted for seven years. Rodgers' and Hammerstein's musicals crystallized an American view of the world, that relied on traditional moral values and faith in the USA as a paradise on Earth.
However, the real genius of the decade was Cole Porter, the first New York songwriter who was not afraid to talk about sex, as he proved in Paris (1928), Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929) and The Gay Divorcee (1932), as well as in tunes such as I'm In Love Again (1924), What Is This Thing Called Love? (1929) and Love for Sale (1930). His melodic craft reached its zenith with Anything Goes (1934), followed by several other top-notch musicals and by tunes such as I've Got You Under My Skin (1936), In The Still of the Night (1937), My Heart Belongs to Daddy (1938), etc. His greatest triumph came with the "backstage" musical Kiss Me Kate (1948), based on William Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, followed by Can-Can (1953) and the jazzy soundtrack for Charles Walters' film High Society (1956), featuring Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby.
Some Landmarks and Developing Trends Shuffle Along (1921) was entirely produced and performed by blacks (including the still unknown Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson). The music, including the hits Love Will Find a Way and I'm Just Wild About Harry, was scored by a veteran of the vaudeville and the minstrel-shows, Eubie Blake, who had already scored several ragtime hits. But, more importantly, it introduced white audiences to a wealth of negro dance styles, from tap dancing to jazz dancing, that had been developing in the clubs of Harlem. The success of that musical allowed Blake to score The Chocolate Dandies (1924), another showcase for negro dances that turned Josephine Baker into a star. Blake also crafted hits such as You Were Meant For Me (1923), Dixie Moon (1924) and "Memories of You" (1930). In the meantime another black composer, jazz pianist James Price Johnson, had scored Runnin' Wild (1923), whose main hit, Charleston, launched the biggest dance craze of the decade.
Ray Henderson, one of the most successful Tin Pan Alley composers, as proven by Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody (1918), Georgette (1922), That Old Gang Of Mine (1923), It All Depends on You (1924), Bye Bye Blackbird (1925), Alabama Bound (1925), I'm Sitting on Top of the World (1925), The Thrill Is Gone (1931), Life Is Just A Bowl Of Cherries (1931), teamed up with lyricists Lew Brown and Buddy George DeSylva, a trio that became a legend. They wrote Birth of the Blues and Black Bottom for George White's Scandals of 1925. Their youthful, exuberant Good News (1927) started the trend of satires of college life and incorporated most dancing styles of the time, such as the Charleston (The Varsity Drag), besides their hit The Best Things in Life Are Free. Their musicals were not particularly original but always contained a hit song or two: You're The Cream in my Coffee in Hold Everything (1928), Button Up Your Overcoat and You Are My Lucky Star in Follow Through (1929). They also composed Sonny Boy for Lloyd Bacon's film The Singing Fool (1928) and Keep Your Sunny Side Up and If I Had A Talking Picture of You for their own film Sunnyside Up (1929), one of the most innovative of the early musicals, as well as music for their sci-fi fantasy film Just Imagine (1930).
In the years after World War I, the musical became New York's premier form of entertainment. Harry Tierney's Irene (1919) and Vincent Youmans' No No Nanette (1925), the epitome of the "Roaring Twenties", with Tea For Two and I Want To Be Happy, were the most influential Broadway musicals, while Youmans' Wildflower (1923), with Bambolina, Czech-born Rudolf Friml's Rose Marie (1924) and The Vagabond King (1925), with Only a Rose, and Hungarian-born Sigmund Romberg's Student Prince (1924), with Gaudeamus Igitur and The Drinking Song, The Desert Song (1926) and The New Moon (1928), with Lover Come Back to Me, were still in the old format of the operetta. Will Ortman's Holka-Polka (1925) is only important because it marked Busby Berkeley's debut and his first experiment with eccentric choreography.
Bert Kalamar and Harry Rubenstein, that had already composed Who's Sorry Now (1923) and I Wanna Be Loved By You (1928), scored the Marx Brothers' Animal Crackers (1928), Horse Feathers (1932) and Duck Soup (1933).
London's main novelty at the time was Noel Coward, the new talent that made a splash with his first musicals: This Year of Grace (1928), that included A Room With a View and Dance Little Lady, and Bitter Sweet (1929), including I'll See You Again and If Love Were All, The Third Little Show (1931), with Mad Dogs and Englishmen, plus the revue Cavalcade (1931), with Twentieth Century Blues.
His competitors in Britain were Noel Gay (Richard Armitage), whose fortune peaked with Me And My Girl (1937), that included The Lambeth Walk, and Ivor Novello (David Davies), whose main musicals were Crest Of A Wave (1937), with Rose Of England, and Perchance To Dream (1945), with We'll Gather Lilacs
The Great Depression and the talking movie were supposed to bury the Broadway musical, but, instead, the 1930s turned out to be its golden age. In a sense, the Broadway musical cannibalized both its enemies: it turned the Great Depression and its mood into an epic theme, and it turned the talking movie into a vehicle to perpetuate the musical itself. The big losers were the erotic revues (Ziegfeld's "Follies", White's "Scandals" and Carroll's "Vanities") that looked antiquated and definitely out of touch with the zeitgeist of the Great Depression.
Arthur Schwartz's Three's A Crowd (1930) and especially The Band Wagon (1931), the ultimate "backstage" musical, scripted by playwright George Kaufman and containing Dancing In The Dark, and Harold Rome's Pins and Needles (1937) were musicals that reflected their times. So was Vernon Duke's all-black allegory Cabin In The Sky (1940), that made vocalist Lena Horne's fortune (but, despite the cast of black stars, it contained no black music but melodic ditties such as Takin' A Chance on Love). Russian-born Vernon Duke (Vladimir Dukelsky) also composed April In Paris (1932), Autumn in New York (1934) and I Can't Get Started Without You (1936) for other revues. Expelled from Germany, Kurt Weill also analyzed American society in Knickerbocker Holiday (1938), the psychoanalytical thriller Lady in the Dark (1941) and Lost in the Stars (1949), scripted by Maxwell Anderson. Not so in London, where the hits were Ivor Novello's The Dancing Years (1939) and Noel Gay's Me and My Girl (1937), two rather shallow works.
The Golden Age
In 1943, Rodgers and Hammerstein's first show, Oklahoma, was produced. The duo would go on to write some
of the most beloved Broadway Musicals in history, including Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I and The Sound of Music.
When Brigadoon premiered in 1947, this show marked the first major success of one of Broadway's other power duos, Lerner and Loewe. They had been collaborating for about five years when Brigadoon premiered, and they would continue to work together for many years, creating such memorable shows as My Fair Lady in 1958 and Camelot in 1960.
The above is a very brief history of Broadway and does not do justice to the many shows that produced, hit after hit for the American public to enjoy, play and to remember.
Tin Pan Alley
It is not possible to write this type of article with a strict timeline approach, and with this next heading we have to go back to around the late 1800s.
Tin Pan Alley is the nickname given to the cluster of songwriters and sheet music publishers who set up shop in New York City in the late 1890s and became the center of America's burgeoning pop music scene for half a decade, before being supplanted by the phonograph and radio.
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Origins The groundwork for Tin Pan Alley was laid in the late 1800s, after the Civil
War, when piano and sheet music sales began to escalate. At the same time, copyright control on songs and melodies became regulated. By 1887, more than 500,000 American youths were studying the piano, according to the Parlor Songs website. This led to a boom in sheet music sales, and a growing number of publishers set up shop in New York City, the center of American culture and the arts
A Name Is Born
The section of 28th Street where these music publishers congregated soon became known as Tin Pan Alley. According to Parlor Songs, "the name is attributed to a newspaper writer named Monroe Rosenfeld who while staying in New York coined the term to symbolize the cacophony of the many pianos being pounded in publisher's demo rooms, which he characterized as sounding as though hundreds of people were pounding on tin pans!
Tin Pan Alley also saw songwriters and publishers organize for more rights, chiefly in the area of copyright protection. The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) was founded in 1914 and continues to represent those groups to this day. Tin Pan Alley's success was not to last. The advent of both radio and the phonograph (Record Players) put a damper on sheet music sales, and the publishers of Tin Pan Alley soon took a backseat to the record companies that were selling recorded music, first 78s and then 45s and LPs, now to the digital age.
Music publishers still played an important role in the popular music industry, but the money they generated came more and more from royalties and less and less from sheet music. Tin Pan Alley's legacy lives on today through the rich body of work the songwriters and music publishers produced throughout the late 1890s and early 1900s.
Tin Pan Alley classics include "Shine On Harvest Moon," by Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth, 1908; also 1908; Irving Berlin's "Alexander's Ragtime Band," 1911; "Way Down Yonder In New Orleans," by Creamer and Turner Layton, 1922; "Yes, We Have No Bananas," by Frank Silver and Irving Cohn, 1923; "Ain't She Sweet," by Jack Yellen and Milton Ager,1927; and "Happy Days Are Here Again," also by Yellen and Ager, 1930.
From the “Alley” to the songs.
“Pop” or popular songs were part of the American culture long before Tin Pan Alley emerged as the “Financial” driver of Pop music. Below is a synopsis about songs that are candidates for being the first American Pop
Song.
"Home, Sweet Home" (1823)
This coincides with the invention of the gramophone. When gramophone records were invented, short songs were slow to catch on "“which is surprising, because they were ideal: early discs could hold only a few minutes of music. Yet even as late as 1910, over three-quarters of records sold were classical pieces. Still, recorded music allowed a greater audience for music than ever before, no longer limited to households with a piano or a sight-reading singer.
Written by John Howard Payne, the simple lyrics and hummable melody made this opera song a hit with the masses.
But what really might give it the "first pop song title is that, some 80 years later, it was one of the first songs to win major success on the gramophone, famously performed by at least three of the earliest recording stars: Australian diva Dame Nellie Melba, Italian "Queen of Song" Adelina Patti, and the "Swedish Nightingale", Jenny Lind.
"O, Susanna!" (1848)
A big hit (but we're not sure exactly how big).
If you thought that pop music was an American invention"¦ you may be right. Pennsylvania-born Stephen Collins Foster's songs were inspired by (and often mistaken for) Negro spirituals, with their smoother and more accessible melodies than the intricate, opera-inspired tunes of the time. Exactly how successful this song was is difficult to say, because song piracy was an issue even in the mid-19th century. Over 20 editions of the sheet music, mostly illegal, had spread all over the U.S. within three years. But despite the piracy, the publisher still made $10,000. (As a mere writer, Foster himself was given $100 for his troubles.)
"Old Folks at Home" (1851)
In 1852, "Old Folks at Home" had unprecedented sales of 130,000 (in legal copies); back when 10,000 was considered a good sale and 50,000 a major hit. Like "Home Sweet Home," "Old Folks at Home" was a sentimental ballad of homesickness. During the Civil War, it was sung by soldiers on both sides. Foster still didn't become wealthy from his success. Before the war was over, he had died in New York at age 38, reportedly suicide.
"After the Ball" (1892)
This was the first million-seller—and this was before records!
The success of "After the Ball" was truly amazing. Before it was published, million-selling songs were unheard of. "After the Ball" sold five million copies within a year—as sheet music. The secret: a new(ish) concept called PR. Charles K Harris, one of America's first songwriter-publishers, cannily promoted his song. In the U.S., baritone J. Aldrich Libbey performed it at beer halls and theaters, in return for a share in the royalties. In
Britain, it was a music-hall favorite. The mournful ballad also established Tin Pan Alley (a group of music publishers clustered around New York's Broadway) as the Mecca of popular song. Despite the detailed story
told by the lyrics, the tune itself was simple enough. Harris couldn't even read music. "After the Ball" is his only song that anyone remembers, but that was enough for him to retire.
"I'll Never Smile Again" (1940)
This was the first #1 song on the Billboard charts—and it introduced the first pop star who drove his fans wild; Frank Sinatra.
Irving Berlin once suggested that it's the audience, rather than the melody, that makes the pop song. Even though a lot of early recording stars had their fans, none of them really inspired the idolatry and mass hysteria
equated with a true pop star—until Frank Sinatra. "Ol' blue eyes"� (as he'd later be known) hit the big time as a
vocalist with bandleader Tommy Dorsey on "I'll Never Smile Again," composed by Ruth Lowe. Sinatra was not credited on this song, but in college surveys, he still displaced his own hero, Bing Crosby, as the most popular male vocalist.
"I'll Never Smile Again" has another claim: it was the first number one song in Billboard magazine's "Music Popularity Chart," the model for the countless pop sales charts that have ruled the music industry ever since.
Hollywood musicals and their Influence.
Music had been part of cinema since its inception, but the musical score was neither controlled by the film producer nor the same for each projection: it was up to the theater to decide which musicians to hire (usually only one per projection, an organist) and it was largely up to the musician to write or improvise the music for the film. Rudolph Valentino popularized the tango in Rex Ingram's The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), but it was the dance, not the music, that caught the imagination of world audiences. Many of Valentino's fans had no idea what a tango sounded like.
Occasionally the studio would provide the theaters with "suggestions" on what kind of music to play. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) first came with an orchestral "soundtrack" prepared by Joseph-Carl Briel that featured music by Liszt, Verdi, Beethoven, Wagner and Tchaikovsky, then came with an original score composed by Victor Herbert. Classical composers were frequently asked to work on such film scores. In France, Arthur Honegger composed the music for Abel Gance's La Roue (1923) and Napoleon (1927), while Erik Satie composed music for Rene' Clair's Entr'acte (1924). In Russia, Edmund Meisel composed the music for Sergei Eisenstein's masterpiece Potemkin (1926), an even more sensational and organic piece of music. Several more classical composers scored the music for important silent films. For the theaters that could not afford an orchestra, the American Photoplayer Company introduced a seven-meter long player-piano, the "Fotoplayer Style", that could play orchestral music as well as sound effects, so that each theater could customize its own sountrack (about 10,000 were built between 1910 and 1928). And it was for a film, Alan Crosland's Don Juan (1926), that 16-inch 33 1/3 RPM records were introduced (a size and a speed determined by the size and speed of a reel of film).
What studios did provide was "theme" songs, that usually accompanied the movie: Charmaine, composed by Erno Rapee for Raoul Walsh's What Price Glory (1926), based on a Hungarian waltz from 1913, Diane, composed again by Erno Rapee for Frank Borzage's Seventh Heaven (1927), Ramona, another waltz, composed by Mabel Wayne for Edwin Carewe's Ramona (1928), etc
In 1926 Alan Crosland's Don Juan was released with a musical soundtrack prepared by the studio. The evening opened with a short musical film in which movement and sound were synchronized, the first public demonstration of Lee Forest's "Vitaphone". Another short musical film was made in 1927 of Xavier Cugart's tango orchestra.
The "talking" movies were officially born with Alan Crosland's The Jazz Singer (1927), a musical adaptation of Samson Raphaelson's The Day of Atonement (1926), already staged on Broadway, but turned by the Warner studios into a suite of melodies from disparate sources (Tchaikowsky, Hebrew folk music, Irving Berlin's Blue Skies) and a vehicle for pop star Al Jolson. This film was, actually, mostly silent. Lloyd Bacon's The Singing Fool (1928) was more of the same, but Ray Henderson's Sonny Boy became a nation-wide hit (the soundtrack included several older Henderson-Brown-DaSylva songs), and caused an avalanche: the Hollywood studios started hiring Broadway stars (Fanny Brice, Sophie Tucker, Marilyn Miller) as well as foreign stars (Maurice Chevalier) and providing them with vehicles for their debut on the big screen. Charles Reisner directed the Hollywood Revue (1929), which was really a Broadway revue starring Marie Dressler next to Hollywood comedians such as Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, and that included Nacio Herb Brown's Singin' in The Rain and You Were Meant for Me. The "Ziegfeld Follies" were immortalized in Thornton Freeland's musical film Whoopee (1930), that included Walter Donaldson's Making Whoopee and My Baby Just Cares for Me, was choreographed by Busby Berkeley, and turned Eddie Cantor into a star. The studios also began transposing Broadway hits to the big screen, and one of them, Roy Del Ruth's 1929 version of Sigmund Romberg's The Desert Song (1926), is credited with being the first fully musical operetta of cinema, followed by an adaptation of Irving Berlin's The Cocoanuts (1925) for the Marx Brothers, and by Harry Pollard's version of Jerome Kern's Show Boat (1927), all of them in 1929.
After these tentative marriages of picture and sound came the first serious talking movies: King Vidor's Halleluja (1929) was the first musical drama, dedicated to negro music (mostly spirituals plus Irving Berlin's Waiting At The End Of The Road), Ernst Lubitsch's The Love Parade (1929) was the first musical comedy (protagonist Maurice Chevalier), scored by Victor Schertzinger (Dream Lover, March of the Grenadiers), Rouben Mamoulian's Applause (1929) was the first "backstage" musical, starring Helen Morgan and including Jay Gorney's What I Wouldn't Do For That Man?. But perhaps the first real musical should be considered The Broadway Melody (1929), scored by Nacio Herb Brown and directed by Harry Beaumont, the composer being much more important than the director (Wedding of the Painted Doll, You Were Meant for Me).
Nacio Herb Brown was a towering figure of the era, crafting (besides those 1929 hits): the instrumental Doll Dance (1921), Singin' in The Rain (1929), Pagan Love Song (1929), The Broadway Melody (1930), Paradise (1932), Eadie Was A Lady (1932), Beautiful Girl (1933), Temptation (1933), All I Do Is Dream of You (1934), You Are My Lucky Star (1936), I've Got a Feelin' You're Foolin' (1936), Good Morning (1939), I'm Feelin' Like a Million (1938), Alone (1940), Make 'Em Laugh (1952), all them created for movie soundtracks.
After one year, the novelty was already old news, and the cinematic musical seemed dead. Instead, along came choreographer Busby Berkeley and composer Harry Warren (real name Salvatore Guaragna), already the author of Rose Of The Rio Grande (1922), I Found a Million-Dollar Baby (1930) and You're My Everything (1931), a couple that crafted Lloyd Bacon's 42nd Street (1933), with Lullaby of Broadway, Shuffle Off to Buffalo, You're Getting To Be A Habit With Me and 42nd Street, Mervin LeRoy's Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), with High Life, I've Got To Sing A Torch Song, Pettin' In The Park, Remember My Forgotten Man, Shadow Waltz, especially The Gold Diggers' Song/ We're In The Money, and Lloyd Bacon's Footlight Parade (1933), with Honeymoon Hotel and Shanghai Lil. Berkeley redefined the musical as a visual and dynamic show in which the opulence is not due to the stage effects but to the colorful and geometric patterns created by the dancers. Thus 1933 became a watershed year. The golden age of the Hollywood musical had just begun.
Warren's later hits (written for a variety of films) included: I Found a Million Dollar Baby (1931), You're My Everything (1931), I Only Have Eyes For You (1934), The Girl At The Ironing Board (1934), The Boulevard of Broken Dreams (1934), Lulu's Back In Town (1935), September In The Rain (1937), You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby (1938), Daydreaming (1938), Jeepers Creepers (1938), Chattanooga Choo Choo (1940), There Will Never Be Another You (1942), You'll Never Know (1943), On the Atchison Topeka and the Santa Fe (1945), The More I See You (1945). He wrote more than 900 songs. The soundtracks and the songs make Warren one of the most influential composers of both Hollywood and Broadway of all times.
Broadway veteran Vincent Youmans scored the hits (Carioca, Flying Down To Rio) of Thornton Freeland's Flying Down To Rio (1933), another important step in the development of the cinematic musical because it inaugurated the legendary dancing/singing couple of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. They were the stars of Mark Sandrich's 1934 version of Cole Porter's The Gay Divorcee, that included only one Porter original and a set of new songs (notably Con Conrad's The Continental and Needle in a Haystack), William Seiter's 1934 version of Kern's Roberta and, finally, their quintessential musical, Mark Sandrich's Top Hat (1935), scored by Irving Berlin.
Harold Arlen, the veteran of the "Cotton Club", was called in to score Victor Fleming's Wizard of Oz (1939), the musical that turned Judy Garland into a star, and Arlen delivered one of most famous ballads of all times, Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Arlen's other Hollywood hits were: Last Night When We Were Young (1935), Lydia the Tatoo'd Lady (1939), Blues in the Night (1941), perhaps his artistic peak, That Old Black Magic (1942), Happiness is a Thing Called Joe (1943), Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive (1944), Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home (1946). He wrote more than 400 songs.
Two important "musicals" of the age did not follow the Hollywood dogmas: Sergey Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (1938), scored by classical composer Sergey Prokofiev, and Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940), a cartoon that introduced stereo sound. Also notable was Michael Curtiz's Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), a musical biography of George Cohan.
Bing Crosby and Bob Hope starred in a series of musical comedies, starting with Victor Schertzinger's The Road To Singapore (1940) and ending 22 years later. Both became enormously popular. Bob Hope's signature song was Leo Robin's Thanks For The Memory (1938).
Hollywood: the Post-war Musical Films Hugh Martin scored Vincent Minnelli's nostalgic epic Meet Me In St Louis (1944), that included Kerry Mills' Meet Me In St Louis (1904) and Martin's The Boy Next Door, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, and The Trolley Song. The musical genre was declining in Hollywood, but Vincent Minnelli dominated whatever was left of it by employing Cole Porter for The Pirate (1948), George Gershwin for An American In Paris (1951), Frederick Loewe for Gigi (1958).
In the 1950s, Stanley Donen managed to compete against Minnelli with Singin' In The Rain (1952), starring Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse, for which Nacio Herb Brown assembled a sort of personal anthology of hits. Gene DePaul scored Donen's second classic, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954).
George Cukor's best musical were as light as his comedies: A Star Is Born (1954), scored by Ray Heindorf, and Les Girls (1957), scored by, scored by Cole Porter.
The best of the Doris Day musicals was probably David Butler's Calamity Jane (1953), scored by Sammy Fain.
But rock'n'roll, launched by a soundtrack, Richard Brooks' The Blackboard Jungle (1955), was pervasive also in musical films, particularly Elvis Presley's numerous vehicles: Jailhouse Rock (1956), Girls Girls Girls (1962) and Viva Las Vegas (1964), all based on his hits.
Robert Stevenson's Mary Poppins (1964), scored by Richard Sherman Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, (Chim Chim Cher-Ee, Feed The Birds, A Spoonful of Sugar), signaled that the musical was transitioning from entertainment for adults to entertainment for children.
Martin Scorsese's New York New York (1977), scored by John Kander (notably the title-tune), and Blake Edwards' Victor/Victoria (1982), scored by Henry Mancini and Leslie Bricusse, were the only notable musicals for adults for a while, a sign of rapid decline.
It was, in fact, the Disney corporation that dominated musical films in the 1990s. Alan Menken scored several Walt Disney animated musical productions: The Little Mermaid (1989), Robert-Jess Roth Beauty and the Beast (1991), John Musker's and Ron Clements' Aladdin (1992), Mike Gabriel's and Eric Goldberg's Pocahontas (1995), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996). Elton John took over for The Lion King (1994).
Hollywood: Film Music Charlie Chaplin composed his own music for City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936) and Limelight (1952). That was the exception, and few film-makers would imitate him. He wasn't clear at all whose job was to score the soundtracks.
German cabaret pianist Friedrich Hollaender scored Josef von Sternberg's Der Blaue Engel/ The Blue Angel (1930), which included Marlene Dietrich's signature tune Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe Eingestellt/ Falling In Love Again. Von Sternberg kept changing musicians: Karl Hajos scored Morocco (1930) and Franke Harling Shangai Express (1932) and The Scarlet Empress (1934).
In the 1930s, after a few years of experimentation, scoring film soundtracks became an art in earnest thanks to a small group of foreign-born musicians, first and foremost two Austrian-born and classically-trained composers. Erich-Wolfgang Korngold's coined a lush, overwhelming, operatic style with Michael Curtiz's Captain Blood (1935) and especially The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and The Sea Hawk (1940), as well as Charles Gerhardt's Anthony Adverse (1936) and Sam Wood's Kings Row (1942).
Max Steiner explored many different moods, sensational in Ernest Schoedsack's King Kong (1933), one of the first soundtracks to rely heavily on sound effects, pathetic in Victor Fleming's Gone With The Wind (1939), including Tara and countless references to traditional songs, exotic in Michael Curtiz's Casablanca (1942), melodramatic in Irving Rapper's Now Voyager (1942), gloomy in John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), epic in John Ford's The Searchers (1956), romantic in Delmer Daves' A Summer Place (1959), whose instrumental theme was a massive hit for Percy Faith's orchestra, etc. He also scored Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep (1946), John Huston's Key Largo (1948), Raoul Walsh's White Heat (1949).
Roy Webb (the New Yorker among all these foreigners) invented the musical language for the light comedy with the soundtracks to George Cukor's Sylvia Scarlett (1935), Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby (1938) and Rene` Clair's I Married A Witch (1942). Then he turned to Jacques Tourneur's horror movies, such as Cat People (1942), I Walked With A Zombie (1943) and Out Of The Past (1947), and to psychological thrillers such as Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Robert Siodmak's Spiral Staircase (1946) and Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious (1946).
The master of horror was Austrian organist Hans Salter who developed a new language for trivial suspense vehicles such as Frank Skinner's The Son of Frankenstein (1939), Christy Cabanne's The Mummy's Hand (1940), George Waggner's The Wolf Man (1941). The soundtracks for Jack Arnold's The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) and The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) were more accomplished but simply recycled the vocabulary he had devised in the 1940s.
A master in the grand lush orchestral style, and a veteran vaudeville pianist and conductor of Broadway musicals, Alfred Newman scored jazz-tinged and classical-tinged soundtracks for King Vidor's Street Scene (1931) and William Wyler's Wuthering Heights (1939). His frequently colorful and exuberant scores taught a whole generation how to write music for films: John Cromwell's The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), William Dieterle's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), William Wyler's Wuthering Heights (1939). The success of his score for Henry King's The Song Of Bernadette (1943) convinced the record labels that soundtracks were a viable product (until then, very few scores had been released on record). He then scored some classics such as Joseph Mankiewicz's All About Eve (1950), Henry Koster's The Robe (1953), the first Cinemascope film, Jean Negulesco's How To Marry A Millionaire (1953), Billy Wilder's The Seven Year Itch (1955), and went on to compose Love Is a Many Splendored Thing (1955),
The western movie developed its own musical language, thanks to Ukrainian-born Dmitri Tiomkin. After working on magniloquent music for Frank Capra's Lost Horizon (1937), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Meet John Doe (1941) and It's A Wonderful Life (1946), as well as for Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt(1943) and Dial M For Murder (1954), Tiomkin focused on the western in a series of breathtaking scores: King Vidor's Duel in the Sun (1946), Howard Hawks' Red River (1948) and Big Sky (1952), Fred Zinnemann's High Noon (1952), the first movie to be promoted by its theme song (originally titled Do Not Forsake Me) rather than viceversa, and George Stevens' Giant (1956). Having become the darling of Hollywood producer, he applied his hit-oriented language to John Sturges' Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957) and Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo (1959), but also to the tv themes Rawhide (1959) and Gunslinger (1961), as well as to Alfred Hitchcock's I Confess (1953) and Dial M for murder (1954). Each of them contains at least a song that was meant to be just that, a song, and a catchy one, as opposed to music that underpins the story.
Hungarian-born Miklos Rozsa helped develop the musical language of the film noir with his ominous scores for Zoltan Korda's Jungle Book (1942), which was re-recorded with a symphonic orchestra and issued on a three-record album, Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944) and The Lost Weekend (1945), Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), Robert Siodmak's The Killers (1946), whose theme song became the theme for the tv series Dragnet, scores that sometimes utilized the theremin (for the first time in Lost Weekend, played by Sam Hoffman); Vincent Minnelli's Madame Bovary (1949), the first film soundtrack (other than cartoons and musicals) to be released in its original format on record; and the epics of Mervin LeRoy's Quo Vadis (1951) and William Wyler's Ben Hur (1959).
Another poet of the film noir was German-born Franz Waxman, who scored Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940), Suspicion (1941) and Rear Window (1954), as well as Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) and George Cukor's The Philadelphia Story (1940).
Austrian cabaret composer Anton Karas (basically an amateur) ended up composing one of the most famous themes, the one for Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949), containing Harry Lime Theme.
Hugo Friedhofer, who had assisted Korngold and Steiner, applied their late-romantic lesson in his moving and nostalgic soundtrack for William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).
The prolific Adolph Deutsch scored several of cinema's masterpieces: Raoul Walsh's High Sierra (1941), John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Apartment (1960).
Joseph Kosma, who set Prevert (Les Feuilles Mortes, Barbara, En Sortant de l'Ecole, Les Enfants qui s'Aiment, La Peche A la Baleine, Inventaire, 1956) and other French poets to music, was the musical hero of French cinema before World War II: Jean Renoir's Le Crime de M Lange (1936), La Grande Illusion (1937), La Bete Humaine/ Human Beast (1938), La Regle du Jeu (1939), as well as Marcel Carne's Les Enfants du Paradis/ Children of Paradise (1945).
The most important, and most prolific, of the classical composers who wrote for the cinema was Dmitri Shostakovich, who scored 34 films. They are mostly bombastic and celebratory, for example: Grigori Kozintsev's and Leonid Trauberg's Novyj Vavilon/ The New Babylon (1929), Odna (1931), Maxim (1935), The Tale of the Priest and His Servant Balda (1936) and Vyborg District (1938), Sergei Yutkevich's Zlatyye Gory/ Golden Mountains (1931) and Vstrechnyj/ Counterplan (1932), Lev Arnstam's Zoya (1944), Aleksandr Dovzhenko's Michurin (1949), Mikhail Chiaureli's Fall of Berlin (1949), Alexander Faintsimmer's The Gadfly (1955), Grigorii Roshal's God Kak Zhizn/ A Year Is Like A Lifetime (1965). Shostakovich found a more personal cinematic language for Grigori Kozintsev's Hamlet/ Hamlet (1964) and Korol Lir/ King Lear (1969).
French composer Georges Auric employed classical melody in a slightly oneiric way for Jean Cocteau's cinematic poems Le Sang d'un Poète (1930) and La Belle et la Bète (1946), Henry Clouzot's Le Salaire De La Peur/ Wages of Fear (1953), Otto Preminger's Bonjour Tristesse (1957), Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961), and with a light touch for British comedies such as Henry Cornelius' Passport to Pimlico (1949) and Charles Crichton's The Lavender Hill Mob (1951).
British classical composer Arthur Bliss crafted one of the most original of the early soundtracks, for Alexander Korda's science-fiction movie Things to Come (1935).
The scores of Armenian classical composer Aram Khachaturian for Amo Bek-Nazarov's Pepo (1935) and Zanzegur (1936) were among the most celebrated of Soviet cinema.
Among the most popular scores of the 1930s were the soundtracks for Walt Disney's series of Silly Symphonies, shown between 1929 and 1939. These included Frank Churchill's Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?, off Three Little Pigs (1933), Lullaby Land of Nowhere (1933) and Somebody Rubbed Out My Robin (1935), as well as Leigh Harline's Help Me Plant My Corn (1934) and The Penguin Is a Very Funny Creature (1934). Walt Disney's Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs (1937), whose best numbers (I'm Wishing, Whistle While You Work, Heigh Ho, Some Day My Prince Will Come) were composed by Frank Churchill, was even more important, both because the songs were an organic whole and because, for the first time, a label (Victor) released original soundtrack music (not the same songs interpreted by other musicians) as a an "album" of three 78 RPM records (of which at least two, Whistle While you Work and Heigh Ho, became extremely popular). By the same token, Pinocchio (1939) featured one of the era's most famous songs, When You Wish Upon A Star, again by Leigh Harline. Walt Disney's films turned the animated cartoon into a musical. They also legitimized the soundtrack as a commercial product. In fact the expression "original sound track" was coined by the Disney studios for the release of music from Pinocchio as a three-record album in 1940.
But the first truly original composer of cartoon music was Carl Stalling, who, after scoring Walt Disney's The Skeleton Dance (1929), composed soundtracks for the cartoons of "Bugs Bunny", "Daffy Duck", "Tweety", "Sylvester" and many more from 1930 till 1958. He was given access to a vast library of recorded music and took fully advantage of it. He was, in fact, the first composer to rely on the recorded works of other composers. His scores were frenetic collages of jazz (especially Raymond Scott's instrumentals), folk, pop, classical music and commercial jingles, as well as his own music. They indulged in fractured rhythms, truncated melodies, dissonant orchestration, demented timbres, hysterical tempos and distorted instruments.
Harline's hit, outside the Disney cartoons, was Hal Walker's Road to Utopia (1945), a very popular musical comedy for Bob Hope and Bing Crosby.
In Italy, Alessandro Cicognini scored several classics of Neorealism, such as Alessandro Blasetti's Quattro Passi Fra le Nuvole (1942), Vittorio DeSica's masterpieces Sciuscia/ Shoeshine (1946), Il Ladri Biciclette/The Bicycle Thief (1947), Umberto D (1955) and Miracolo a Milano/ Miracle in Milan (1951), but also comedies such as Mario Camerini's Grandi Magazzini (1939) and Mario Monicelli's Guardie e Ladri/ Guards and Thieves (1951).
American composer Aaron Copland scored a few films in his typical orchestral style overflowing with references to the American tradition, notably Lewis Milestone's The Red Pony (1949) and William Wyler's The Heiress (1949).
Allan Gray (born Joseph Zmigrod in Poland) was one of the main British composers of soundtracks, and also scored John Huston's The African Queen (1951).
Alex North wrote some memorable melodies, such as Unchained Melody (1955), sung by gospel singer Roy Hamilton for Hall Bartlett's Unchained (1955), as well as disturbing "mood music", such as the soundtracks for Elia Kazan's cinematic adaptation of Tennesse Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), the first major score to be based on jazz, Kazan's Viva Zapata (1952), almost a medley of Mexican folk songs, John Huston's The Misfits (1961), and John Ford's Cheyenne Autumn (1964), one of the first subdued scores for western films, and the unreleased score for Stanley Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey (1968), possibly his technical peak.
David Raksin created a score for Otto Preminger's Laura (1944) that kept repeating the same theme whenever the title character was referred to (the theme was going to be recorded by more than 400 artists). A more elaborate score met Otto Preminger's Forever Amber (1947), and probably remained his best one. After these two milestones, his most original soundtracks were Abraham Polonsky's Force Of Evil (1948), Vincent Minnelli's The Bad And The Beautiful (1952) and John Cassavetes' Too Late Blues (1962), each in its own style.
Bernard Herrmann, perhaps the most celebrated of the "symphonic" composers of soundtracks, revealed his subtle psychological talent with Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), as well as John Brahm's Hangover Square (1945), basically a pretext to write his own piano concerto, Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), built around the sound of two theremins juxtaposed to electric instruments, and went on to become the quintessential Hitchcock composer, penning the surrealistic scores for The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), The Trouble With Harry (1956), North By Northwest (1959), permeated by the rhythm of fandango, Psycho (1960), one of the most famous of all times, a cubist clockwork of deconstructed string-based melodies and sound effects, Vertigo (1958), perhaps his tour de force, The Birds (1963), with its harrowing orchestration of dissonance (mainly created by Oskar Sala's "trautonium"), these three being the most original ones, and Marnie (1964), soundtracks that rely on strident passages as metaphors for the horror of the scenes. The music for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) was existential noir at its best. His soundtracks sounded violent because they indulged in sudden contrasts as opposed to smooth melodic flows. Herrmann did not write leitmotifs, he toyed with them as if engaging in a slow, endless semiotic torture.
By the mid-1940s, cinema's composers had become a well-established category, many of them churning out dozens of soundtracks per year. Nonetheless, only Walt Disney had released "original soundtracks" (not modified for the phonographic medium). The first non-Disney album of original soundtrack music was the musical Richard Whorf's Till the Clouds Roll By (1946), based on standards by Jerome Kern, but it was essentially a parade of stars singing Kern's hits. "Tribute" musicals of this kind followed, such as Vincent Minnelli's The Pirate (1948), a tribute to Cole Porter, and were released unadulterated on album.
The style of western soundtracks crystallized with Richard Hageman's scores for John Ford's Fort Apache (1948) and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949), and with Victor Young's scores for John Ford's Rio Grande(1950) and George Stevens' Shane (1953). Young's opulent and romantic style, best represented by For Whom The Bell Tolls (1944), was the quintessential Hollywood style of the era. Young also composed songs such as Stella by Starlight (1947) and My Foolish Heart (1950).
Another master of the western soundtrack was Elmer Bernstein, who scored John Sturges' The Magnificent Seven (1960), the quintessential western soundtrack before Morricone, Henry Hathaway's True Grit (1968) and Don Siegel's The Shootist (1976), but who was also a master of highlighting neurotic characters, such as in Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), for jazz band and orchestra, and in Robert Mulligan's To Kill A Mockingbird (1962), a powerful suite of roots-inspired music for chamber ensemble, and a master of creating claustrophobic atmospheres, as he proved with Vincent Minnelli's Some Came Running (1958). Other jazzy scores of his include Alexander MacKendrick's Sweet Smell of Success (1957) and Edward Dmytryk's Walk on the Wild Side (1962).
The other great western soundtrack of the Fifties was composed by Jerome Moross for William Wyler's The Big Country (1958).
Jerry Fielding had a long career crowned by two sensational soundtracks, Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946) and especially Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969), an abullient western and Latin score, as well as Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971) and Michael Winner's The Mechanic (1972), two scores that flirt with avantgarde music.
Kenyon Hopkins scored Elia Kazan's Baby Doll(1956) and Wild River/ Fango sulle Stelle (1960), as well as Robert Rossen's The Hustler (1961).
Daniele Amfitheatrof (the son of a Russian composer) scored Max Ophuls' Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948) and Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953).
A passion for lushly-orchestral neoclassical melodies is also found in British composer Malcolm Arnold, whose main achievements were David Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), with a main theme derived from the traditional Colonel Bogey, Mark Robson's Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958), with Children's Marching Song, and Bryan Forbes' Whistle Down the Wind (1962).
Classical music conductor Andre Previn composed the eclectic and exuberant soundtrack for Richard Brooks' Elmer Gantry (1960) and recreated the sounds of Paris for Billy Wilder's Irma La Douce (1963).
Legendary conductor Leonard Bernstein scored Elia Kazan's films On The Waterfront (1954) and East of Eden (1954).
Johnny Mandel wrote one of the three or four best jazz scores of the 1950s, for Robert Wise's I Want to Live (1958), and the suspenseful score for John Boorman's Point Blank (1967), as well as hits such as The Shadow of Your Smile, from vincent Minnelli's The Sandpiper (1965), and the theme song Suicide is Painless, from Robert Altman's M.A.S.H. (1970).
The event that symbolically closed the age of classic Hollywood soundtracks was Vincent Minnelli's The Cobweb (1955), scored by Leonard Rosenman, who had debuted on Elia Kazan's East of Eden (1955): it was harsh, dissonant, unnerving music a` la Schoenberg, introducing avantgarde music to the crowds of moviegoers. Rosenman's psychological and non-melodic approach yielded the music for Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Richard Fleischer's Fantastic Voyage (1966) and Ted Post's Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970).
Rock Around The Clock (1954), written in 1953 by James Myers and Max Freedman, was the first rock song used in a movie soundtrack, Richard Brooks' Blackboard Jungle (1955), and the movie turned it into a hit song. But Hollywood consciously capitalized on rock stars, and perfected the symbiosis between film and record, only with Elvis Presley's musicals. The soundtrack albums for the Presley vehicles that Norman Taurog directed, G.I. Blues (1960), Blue Hawaii (1961) and Girls Girls Girls (1962), were the best-selling albums of the early Sixties. The songs were both old and new, composed by a variety of white and black songwriters. Those films were terrible collections of stereotypes, both as cinema and music, but immensely successful. In a sense, they were the first "music videos", because the film per se was only a pretext: people watched the film to see Presley sing the song.
New York: the Post-war Broadway Musical TM, ®, Copyright © 2003 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
After World War II, the most adventurous musicals followed in the footsteps of Oklahoma (1944), and showtunes dominated American popular music.
Jule Styne composed High Button Shoes (1947), with I Still Get Jealous and Papa Won't You Dance With Me, and especially Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1949), based on Anita Loos' 1925 novel, with Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friends. His other musicals included songs such as It's Magic (1948), Three Coins In The Fountain (1954), The Party's Over (1956), Everything's Coming Up Roses (1959), until Funny Girl (1964), the musical biography of Fanny Brice, that launched the career of Barbra Streisand.
Frank Loesser delivered the hit of the decade: Guys and Dolls (1950), that included Sit Down You're Rockin' the Boat, I've Never Been In Love Before and Luck Be A Lady Tonight. The Most Happy Fella (1956), with Standing On The Corner, was even more ambitious. He also composed See What the Boys in the Backroom Will Have (1939), Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunitions (1942, his greatest hit), I Don't Want To Walk Without You Baby (1942), Spring Will Be A Little Late This Year (1944), On A Show Boat to China (1948), Baby It's Cold Outside (1949).
The new standard of quality was set by composer Frederick Loewe and lyricist Alan-Jay Lerner. Loewe's score for the fairy tale Brigadoon (1947), that included Almost Like Being In Love and There But For You Go I, was typical of his delicate romanticism and eclectic style. After Paint Your Wagon (1951), with I Talk To The Trees, Wanderin' Star and They Call The Wind Mariah, the duo reached their zenith with My Fair Lady (1956), an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1914) that boasted countless catchy tunes (With A Little Bit of Luck, I Could Have Danced All Night, On The Street Where You Live, that was a major hit for years). I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face, They also penned Vincent Minnelli's film Gigi (1958), with Thank God For Little Girls, and the eccentric Camelot (1960), based on Terence-Hanbury White's The Once And Future King (1958).
Classical composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein brought to the musical his exuberant creativity: the jazz dance fantasia On The Town (1944), the eclectic Wonderful Town (1953), the comic operetta Candide (1956), based on Voltaire's novel, and finally West Side Story (1957), the decade's masterpiece, an adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet set in the world of street gangs, with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and an endless parade of memorable melodies (America, Dance at the Gym, Tonight, I Feel Pretty, Gee Officer Krupke, Maria and Somewhere) set to rousing rhythms. This musical was, de facto, a most serious attempt at creating an American opera as a genre distinct from European opera. Leonard Bernstein also scored Elia Kazan's films On The Waterfront (1954) and East of Eden (1954).
In Europe, a notable musical was Marguerite Monnot's Irma La Douce (1956). In London, the first major sensation of the post-war musical was Lionel Bart's rock'n'roll score for Frank Norman's play Fings Ain't What They Used To Be (1959), set in the underworld, followed by Bart's most successful work, Oliver (1968). Leslie Bricusse composed Stop The World I Want To Get Off (1961).
Show tunes declined rapidly after the advent of rock music. Unlike jazz, that had coexisted peacefully with the Broadway musical, and the "fake" rock'n'roll of Elvis Presley and the Beatles (who were still, basically, singers in the old tradition), "progressive" rock music of the Sixties seemed antithetic to the whole notion of the show tune. The musical seemed to be dying a slow but unstoppable death, despite Jerry Herman's Hello Dolly (1964), a musical adaptation of Thornton Wilder's play The Matchmaker, Sheldon Harnick's Fiddler on the Roof (1964), an adaptation of Sholom Aleichem's stories, and John Kander's Cabaret (1966), the most original productions of the Sixties. The age of the hippies was better represented by small-budget off-Broadway productions such as Galt MacDermot's Hair (1968), with Aquarius and Let the Sunshine In, Oh Calcutta (1969), an erotic revue devised by British drama critic Kenneth Tynan.
The rock influence peaked in the 1970s with Charles Strouse's Applause (1970), a rock adaptation of Joseph Mankiewicz's film All About Eve (1950), Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar (1971), Jim Jacobs' and Warren Casey's Grease (1972), a nostalgic collage of rock melodies from the Fifties plus their own Greased Lightnin' and John Farrar's You're The One That I Want, Pete Townshend's Tommy (1975), adapted from the Who's 1969 rock opera, and Richard O'Brien's The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), a spoof of horror and sci-fi stereotypes with strong sexual overtones, one of the greatest (and wildest) musicals of all times.
A country where the musical comedy boomed in those years was Italy, whose variety show had been strongly influenced by the American invasion of 1943. Armando Trovajoli composed the two most popular musicals: Rugantino (1962), that included his hit song Roma Nun Fa La Stupida Stasera, and Aggiungi un Posto a Tavola (1974).
The decline of the Broadway musical had several concomitant causes. First and foremost, the competition of television soap operas, that catered to the same audience as the musical. Then the escalating production costs, that simply made it too risky a venture for entrepreneurs who could invest their money in more reliable ventures (a film can be shown in thousands of theaters at the same time). In terms of "taste", the musical never truly managed to assimilate the new taste that developed with the advent of rock'n'roll, disco music and hip-hop. Somehow, the musical had successfully assimilated new genres (ragtime, jazz) up until the Sixties. In the Sixties, rock music introduced not only a new musical paradigm but also new forms of consumption (from Woodstock to the video clip) that were simply not compatible with the theatrical format. Finally, there certainly was a change in the national psyche: as the Cold War forced the USA to abandon its childhood (made of easy victories against clearcut enemies such as the Indians and the Nazis) and entered its adulthood (a difficult time of subtle strategizing and risky undertakings on a global scale), the musical had a hard time abandoning its childhood, and eventually fell out of synch with the rest of society.
Whilst this section concentrates on musicals developed by and for Hollywood films, the positive effects of the “Hollywoodization” of the Broadway musicals on the popular music culture of America cannot be ignored
The Hollywood musical developed almost as soon as the talkies were born. Indeed, The Jazz Singer, the first full length feature film to use sound, featured a few songs. Despite its use of sound, The Jazz Singer was still mostly silent, but it would not be long before an all singing, all dancing movie would emerge. Released by MGM (who else?), The Broadway Melody of 1929 was the first Hollywood musical with a score by Nacio
Herb Brown and Arthur Freed (part of whose catalog would be used for a movie called Singin' in the Rain years later....); The Broadway Melody of 1929 was a smash hit. It raked in $1.6 million at the box office. It would not be this film that would establish the Hollywood musical, but instead two films released in 1933. 42nd Street would establish Busby Berkley as the screen musical choreographer par excellence, not to mention create many Hollywood musical clichés. Flying Down to Rio would introduce the world to the dance team of Astaire and Rogers. With the success of these two musicals, Hollywood went to work churning out dozens of musicals every year. And while MGM is best known for its musicals, nearly every studio would make them (indeed, the early Busby Berkley musicals were produced by Warner Brothers, while the Astaire and Rogers movies were made by RKO).
Arguably, the genre started to go into decline just as it reached its peak. On the one hand, what is considered by some to be the four greatest Hollywood musicals were all released in a space of four years in the early Fifties: An American in Paris in 1951, Singin' in the Rain in 1952, The Band Wagon in 1953, and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (possibly my favourite musical of all time) in 1954. An American in Paris would even win the Oscar for Best Picture. Unfortunately, just as the Hollywood musical had reached its peak in quality, it also seemed to be losing steam. While An American in Paris, Singin' in the Rain, The Band Wagon, and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers all did reasonably well at the box office, others did not fair so well. Indeed, one needs look no further than the career of Gene Kelly for a measure of the decline of the Hollywood musical. At the height of his career with the back to back triumphs of An American in Paris and Singin' in the Rain, it was not long before two of Kelly's films would fail at the box office--Brigadoon in 1954 and It's Always Fair Weather in 1955. It does not seem to have been the case that audiences were no longer interested in musicals. For the next twenty years Hollywood would produce several big budget adaptations of stage musicals, among them Oklahoma, My Fair Lady, The Music Man, and Fiddler on the Roof. Given the fact that audiences would still attend musical movies, one has to wonder why Hollywood stopped making musical originals of its own.
I rather suspect that there were multiple reasons. Primary amongst these was the advent of regular network television broadcasts in the United States. During World War II 90 million Americans went to the movies every week. In the years following the Korean War this number dropped to 16 million. Quite simply, people preferred to stay home and watch television rather than spend money to go the cinema. The drastic hit that television delivered to the movie industry may also have affected the sorts of musicals that were being made. Competing with television for viewers, the American studios increasingly moved towards big budget spectacles. This was the age of The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur. Naturally, the studios may have chosen to go with "big," lavish musicals such as Oklahoma and My Fair Lady as opposed to "smaller" musicals such as Singin' in the Rain. It must also be noted that the vast majority of musicals after 1955 were based on existing productions adapted from the stage rather than original musical screenplays.
I suspect there is a simple reason for this. With an existing property such as South Pacific or The King and I, there is less of a risk than there is with an original movie such as An American in Paris. Audiences have already heard of the play, so it is reasonable to assume that they will go see the movie (of course, this isn't actually true--look at the success of Brigadoon and, more recently, Rent).
Another factor in the decline of the Hollywood musical may have been the changing tastes of music in America and Europe. From 1929 to around 1955, American music actually changed very little. Oh, there was the rise and decline of the swing bands and various other musical fads, but the works of such composers as Porter, Gershwin, Berlin, and so on were still widely popular. All of this changed in the mid-Fifties with the rise of rock 'n' roll. The new music swept the youth of America, making the old standards passé. With young people listening to Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and the Beatles I rather suspect that the audience for musicals became older than it once had been. And, for better or worse, the biggest audience for going to the cinema has usually been the youth.
A brief history of Radio.
During the 1920’ radio took off. People across the nation found useful information being transmitted. Farmers could keep up with teal market prices. People could reconnect with their roots. Barn dances were broadcast. New forms of entertainment emerged like the Grand Old Oprey, which began as a barn dance in 1925.
In 1927, several more network competitors emerged to challenge NBC. One of them, we know well. It was the Columbia Phonograph Record Company but today we know it as just CBS.
Most of the programming of the late twenties was musical programming. To break up the music, small comedy skits were introduced.
By 1935, 18.5 million families or over 50 million people were into radio. About 60% of homes had radios Radio stars were emerging like George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jack Benny, Al Jolson and Nelson Eddy. Serial melodramas ran during the day and were often sponsored by soap companies, hence the name soap operas.
Roosevelt used his radio “fireside chats” to push through his social programs in the 1930’s.As the country moved towards World War II; newspaper companies began to dispense news through their own radio stations. Radio at the time was the only live, simultaneous source of mass communication we had in this country. It is estimated that the day after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, 62 million Americans listened to President Roosevelt declare war on Japan
A brief History of the recording industry Beginnings: 1890-1900
The story of the sound recording industry is mostly a story of musical entertainment on phonograph discs for the whole period from the invention of the phonograph in 1877 to about the 1950s, when new technologies emerged. Thomas Edison's 1877 invention of the phonograph was followed by many imitators, most notably the "graphophone," which became the basis of the Columbia company. Both inventions used a cylinder record which captured sound in a groove. The primary market was intended to be businessman, lawyers, court reporters, and others who currently used stenography to capture important thoughts or compose letters. Although the sound recorder as a business machine has its own history, it is the entertainment uses of sound recording that made the biggest impact.
The First Peak, 1900-1925 Business phonographs (and graphophones) were selling very poorly in the early years and the phonograph industry was near bankruptcy. But in 1899, someone had the bright idea to build a coin-operated phonograph, record some songs on cylinders, and put the machines into the arcades, which were quite popular at the time. The public loved it. The various companies making phonographs quickly went into the cylinder business. Edison himself had considered a disc phonograph, but it was Emile Berliner who really got the ball rolling. Part of the reason for a disc instead of a cylinder was that Berliner thought it would be easy to stamp out large numbers of copies of disc recordings.
In 1893 he began selling his cheap gramophone player and seven-inch disc records made of hard rubber. Emile Berliner in 1896 hooked up with Eldridge Johnson, a machinist from Camden, New Jersey who designed an improved gramophone player for the Berliner Company. In a short time, the two joined forces to create what would become the Victor Talking Machine Company.
Soon, three companies (Edison, Victor, and Columbia) were the Big Three in the record and record player businesses in the United States, while HMV and the various subsidiaries set up by Edison and Columbia dominated the market in Europe. They were selling about 3 million records a year by 1900 in the U.S. alone. The success of the record industry during the next two decades was phenomenal. Soon, the record industry was one of the most important in the world.
Depression and Consolidation 1925-1940 Manufacturers introduced an improved form of record in the late 1920s called the "electrical recording," hoping to lure customers back. This used microphones and electronic amplifiers in the studio to make the records, but could be played back on the old horn talking machines. Some manufacturers also introduced combination radio-phonographs. While these new technologies helped a little, when the Great Depression came the record companies were too weak to survive on their own.
It was only in the late 1930s that the number of record discs sold began to climb back toward the highs of the 1920s. This was partly due to the gradually improving economy, particularly in the United States. It was also due to the growing number of jukeboxes in use. Jukeboxes consumed large numbers of records because they were usually changed every week or so. But the industry was still in trouble.
The War Years and Afterward, 1941-1955 The coming of World War II was a worldwide tragedy but a boon for the record industry. Suddenly the governments and armed services of many nations had an interest in purchasing and using sound recording equipment. The entertainment industries of Hollywood and elsewhere were called into service to record music for the entertainment of troops and then the general public. Soon the companies would be producing high fidelity sound on disk of 45 rpm the LP disks of 33.3 rpm. The age of recording had arrived and the age of the public buying music on records had also arrived.
THE GREAT AMERICAN SONGBOOK
Of course all of the above and what remains of this article is about the evolution of what had=s become known as the Great American Songbook
Firstly I should say that the great American Songbook is not an individual publication, or a set compilation of songs; it is a generic term for those songs that have survived the vagaries of time and are still popular and well recognized by artists and the general public alike.
For many of the years that I have been infatuated with the music of older times I have preached that period of “The Songbook” stretched all through the Tin Pan Alley years up until around the mid-1950s. I am now beginning to accept that perhaps this was wrong. Alternatively I can accept that the bodies of work produced in sheet music form by the Tin Pan Alley publishers form a foundation for the songs that we know and want to include in the “The Songbook”.
I am inclined to suggest that the modern decisions for the songs that “should or are” being included in the Great American Songbook” includes a fair proportion of the tunes published during the years of say, 1895 to 1920.
JAZZ STANDARDS
Before trying to summarize my personal interpretation of this period of popular music I want to bring in another area into the discussion, that of the group of songs we now call “Jazz Standards”
Jazz standards are certainly not all written by specific “jazz composers”. It is reasonable to say that they are musical compositions which are an important part of the musical repertoire of jazz musicians, in that they are widely known, performed, and recorded by jazz musicians, and widely known by listeners.
There is no definitive list of jazz standards, and the list of songs deemed to be standards changes over time. Songs included in major fake book publications (sheet music collections of popular tunes) and jazz reference works offer a rough guide to which songs are considered standards.
Many are originally Tin Pan Alley popular songs, Broadway show tunes or songs from Hollywood musicals i.e. songs from the so-called Great American Songbook. A commonly played song can only be considered a jazz standard if it is widely played among jazz musicians. The jazz standard repertoire has some overlap with blues and pop standards.
The Jazz Age is considered to have been started in about the 1920s, though Jazz historians place the origins of Jazz much earlier. The date probably comes from the commencement of early jazz recording initially on cylinders and later on disks. Along with this comes the element of dance music, clubs, possibly the prohibition era, all of which played their role in popularizing pop sings for dance and the interpretation of may band leaders of these tunes for dancing by the public.
The 1920 commencement date puts the this genre of music performance clearly into the era of the Great American Songbook, but its repertoire includes a lot of Tin Pan Alley publications. The difference in compiling those songs into a grouping of Jazz Standards is not so much the choice of tunes rather the style of performance those tunes lend themselves to; in this case jazz and swing styles, suitable for dancing during that era and even present times for some people.
CONCLUSION
The Great American Songbook is clearly the result of the development of the popular song in America. Being an immigrant country, the influence of Europe and the various cultures that settled in America, and when we look at the song writers and composers during the development of Broadway and Hollywood musicals, the Jewish creative musical and lyrical contribution stands out from the crowd in an outstanding manner.
I would like to propose that in pragmatic terms the era of the Great American Songbook clearly includes the music of the period of Tin Pan Alley productions of sheet music. I do not question that there is a Tin Pan Alley period of great influence on the popular music scene (1895 to 1920 or there abouts) and that “modern” technology in movies, and audio production signaled the end of such great influence.
I could also say that my cursory and subjective, examination of the songs produced in the two eras – 1895 to 1920 and 1920 to say the mid-1950s –reveals that a majority of the songs come from the later period, but by no means is the pre Tin Pan Alley or that period itself, is without reasonable representation in the Great American Songbook.
A Brief consolidated History
This article is partly, edited, re written, from various parts of the Internet and partly written by myself. I frankly do not know enough about all the aspects of this topic to write it completely myself, but I thought it quite important to bring all of these aspects together under one heading as they relate so very closely to each other. I am certain I would be found guilty of plagiarism in an academic environment, but as I plan to share this only with friends, I just might get away with it! Brian Lemin April 2013
It is far from brief, in fact quite long, it is repetitive as I have used material from other articles I have written, the article does not flow as I would like it to. It achieves only one purpose only, that of bringing together in one place all the complex happenings in history and in American music for the reader to consider, then to explore special areas of interest to themselves. I hope to develop links that will help the reader gain more or better information than I have collected together here.
Introduction.
The history of Tin Pan Alley, Vaudeville, Broadway Musicals, the Hollywood Musical film and the American Popular song are totally intertwined. The Broadway musical and its early variants were the source of the music that the public took home in various forms over the years and enjoyed the music in their homes. One must add to this other influencing factors on the popular song in America, that of the recording industry and Radio Broadcasting.
Trying to intertwine all these influences into one flowing story has been impossible; hence there are sections of this essay dealing briefly with each of these developments. I have included two extensive timelines in the Appendix which will be of interest to those wanting to see, in detail, the development of Popular Music.
Popular Music Pre Musicals.
Scholars seem to disagree as to what, if any, might have been the effect of opera on the development of Broadway musicals and thus the American popular song. It is clear that opera and operettas were indeed very popular in Europe at the time of some considerable immigration into America, and whilst opera has always been performed in America, it would be fair to say that its popularity has waned over the years. It would not be for me to say that the advent of the Broadways musical was the reason for this reduced popularity.
In the United Kingdom, there were two popular musical entertainment sources in the early and mid-1800s, that of the “Musical Hall” a place for popular variety acts that included a lot of music in popular entertainment terms. Then there was the Gilbert and Sullivan entertainment era that probably began with Thespis in 1871. This musical story could well be accepted as a precursor to the Broadway musical, but though they included many catchy and memorable tunes, they were not widely available for the audiences of the Music Hall to remember and sing as they worked, or played at home on the piano or perhaps the ukulele.
Before leaving the UK it is worth mentioning the tradition of Pub singing. It would appear that the songs from the music Hall were learned (by the men!) and sung in the public house as the effect of alcohol took over. It is an interesting aside, that even in my own life time, of how the drunken singers of my early years have been replaced with drunken brawls and injury, even death; but that is an old guy reminiscing!
Vaudeville.
We leave Europe now and we must now look to a more important origin of American popular music, Vaudeville. The truth be known, this is probably a very American term for what the Europeans referred to as “Music Hall”.
After the Civil War, entertainment in America developed in many different ways, but it was probably in the 1840's, minstrel shows, another type of variety performance, and "the first emanation of a pervasive and purely American mass culture," grew to enormous popularity and formed the heart of nineteenth-century show business." Probably the beginning of what became to be known as Vaudeville. It grew out of a collaboration of theatre, circus acts, medicine shows (yes Medicine shows as entertainment!) and burlesque acts from the saloons across the country. Vaudeville became a unique collaboration of all of these types of entertainment, striving to provide something for the entire family.
In the early days, Vaudeville was quite racy and raunchy. As it became clear the country wanted a family- friendly form of entertainment, Tony Pastor stepped out to eliminate the controversial acts and then opened the first Vaudeville theatre in New York City in the mid-1800s. By the turn of the century, vaudeville had become the most popular form of variety entertainment around, bringing in more than $30 million a year (1900s values). Stars came from every nationality and social class, with male and female stars alike. Vaudeville was a beloved form of entertainment that filled the bill of diversity.
By the mid-1920s, the height of Vaudeville, there were over 20,000 acts across the country. Each day, more than two million people enjoyed the entertainment provided by this phenomenon. The popularity continued to increase until about 1932, at which point many Vaudeville performers were transitioning to the burgeoning industry of radio. With the onset of the Great Depression, radio allowed people to continue to enjoy their favorite performers even though their finances would have prevented them from continuing to take in the great performances of vaudeville. As radio and talking movies increased in popularity, the lights faded on the vaudeville stage.
Early Years of Broadway
The Seven Sisters opened in 1860 and was the first ever musical performed on Broadway. The musical production ran for 253 performances. There are no known copies of the play or its score still in existence.
The Black Crook, which premiered in 1866, is thought by many to be the first real Broadway musical. It was a huge success, running for over a year. There were eight revivals of the show on Broadway. Initially, the show was a melodrama. A fire at a nearby theater displaced a ballet troupe and its orchestra, so the producers of The Black Crook decided to add the group to the show to create what they called "A Musical Spectacular."
A significant break with the formats of the vaudeville and the burlesque had been represented by the musical farce The Mulligan Guard Picnic (1878), scored by David Braham and starring comedians Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart, an evolution of the "Mulligan Shows" that Harrigan and Hart had performed around the country for years. Harrigan was the genius behind the storyline and the dialogues, which were taken mostly from everyday's life. This time the audience was laughing at itself, because Harrigan's focus was on ordinary lives. Both the vaudeville and the burlesque had required minimal linguistic skills in the audience, being mostly "physical" (singalong melodies, body movement, facial expressions, stereotyped characters, imitation and parody) while Harrigan's farces represented a significant step towards a more literate form. Ditto for the singers, who were sopranos (Edna May, Lillian Russell, Vivienne Segal) and contraltos (Fay Templeton), not prostitutes turned chanteuses.
Broadway's theater district (42nd Street) was one of the first areas in America to get electric light. By 1880, one mile of the street was lit electrically, earning the nickname, "The Great White Way."
Charles Hoyt's A Trip To Chinatown (1891), that included the tune After the Ball, and Whoop-Dee-Doo (1904), the vehicle for comedians Joe Weber and Lew Fields (still in the style of the burlesque), were some of the musical farces that were able to compete against Gilbert and Sullivan's operettas, the real hits of the 1890s, imitated in New York by productions such as Reginald DeKoven's Robin Hood (1891), John Philip Sousa's El Capitan (1896), Leslie Stuart's Florodora (1900), whose six female stars (the "Florodora girls") became instant celebrities, Howard Talbot's A Chinese Honeymoon (1901).
Bob Cole's A Trip to Coontown (1898) was the first musical comedy entirely produced and performed by blacks in a Broadway theater (largely inspired to the routines of the minstrel show), followed by Will-Marion Cook's ragtime-tinged Clorindy the Origin of the Cakewalk (1898), staged at the "Casino Theatre", and the highly successful In Dahomey (1902), that turned Antigua-born comedian Bert "Mr Nobody" Williams and minstrel George Walker into influential models for all black entertainers.
The European operetta was transplanted to New York by works such as Reginald DeKoven's Robin Hood (1890), Victor Herbert's Babes in Toyland (1903) and Naughty Marietta (1910), with Sweet Mysterty of Life, Rudolf Friml's The Firefly (1912), mostly composed by immigrants.
The first complete artist of the musical comedy was George Cohan, a veteran vaudeville performer and successful songwriter (I Guess I'll Have To Telegraph My Baby, 1898), who composed the lavishly-choreographed musical melodrama Little Johnny Jones (1904), that, like its predecessor The Governor's Son (1901), shunned the random, implausible plots of the musical comedies for a coherent and cohesive storyline. It included the classics Yankee Doodle Dandy and Give My Regards to Broadway, and was blessed with unprecedented success, repeated by 45 Minutes From Broadway (1906), with Mary's a Grand Old Name, George Washington Jr (1906), with You're a Grand Old Flag, and several more. He also wrote That Haunting Melody for Vera Violetta (1911).
Cohan's equivalent in Britain was Lionel Monckton, who created the first British musical in which the songs "were" the plot (rather than the musical being a mere parade of mostly unrelated songs): The Arcadians (1909).
Early 20th Century In 1907, a new Broadway genre was born. Originally called “Follies 1907”, Flo Ziegfeld's lavish production,
would become a Broadway staple for many years to come. New productions were mounted each year until 1925, with additional productions produced in 1927, 1931, 1934, 1936 and 1943. A final Ziegfeld Follies show was produced in 1957, but was a failure.
When Showboat opened in December 1927, it was unlike anything The Great White Way had ever seen. The early part of the 1920s had been filled with lighthearted comedies, such as No No, Nanette and Funny
Face. Showboat featured dramatic themes and the first-ever completely integrated story and score. The term for the story in a Broadway production is the “book”.
Around this time the dance form in the shows moved from “tap” dancing to a form of dancing which was called “ballet”. Not the classical ballet as we now know it but a free flowing choreographed dance sequence. To some historians this too was a decisive moment in the development of Broadway. So the late 20s saw the two changes; from a show that featured individuals and possibly acts, including tap dancing, to shows that had a story line (book) integrated music, the songs of which added too or led the audience into the next part of the story; and choreographed dance sequences appropriate to the story line.
In 1935, the Gershwin brothers and DuBose Heyward debuted Porgy and Bess. It featured an all-African- American cast, which was quite controversial at the time. While considered a masterpiece by many, it has also been criticized for its racist portrayal of African-Americans.
Some of the Major Contributors to Broadway.
Russian-born Irving Berlin (Israel Baline), a former singing waiter, fused the worlds of Stephen Foster, Tin Pan Alley and Broadway in his simple, unpretentious hit songs: Alexander's Ragtime Band (1911), that sounded more like a military march than a ragtime, Everybody's Doing It (1911) for Eddie Cantor, Play a Simple Melody and Syncopated Walk, off his first musical, Watch Your Step (1914), influenced by ragtime, composed for dancers Vernon and Irene Castle, God Bless America (1917) and Oh How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning (1918), off the musical Yip Yip Yaphank (1918), A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody (1919), the signature song of the Ziegfeld follies. Their exuberance became the soundtrack of the Broadway musical in its infancy, merging syncopation (the craze of Tin Pan Alley) and melodrama. Later, Berlin continued to compose songs that defined their era: Mandy (1919), All Alone (1924), Blue Skies (1927), Marie (1929), Easter Parade (1933), White Christmas (1942). His best musical was perhaps Annie Get Your Gun (1946), that contained There's No Business Like Show Business and Anything you Can Do.
Jerome Kern's melodies highlighted musicals, staged in humble venues, such as Sally (1920) that were relatively humble and ordinary compared with the opulence of the extravaganzas that were being staged by the larger theaters. Jerome Kern had re-invented the "musical" by integrating music and story in everyday settings (not the fantasy lands of the operettas), thus wedding Sullivan's aesthetics and Cohan's aesthetics. He then began a collaboration with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II that peaked with Show Boat (1927), his masterpiece, based on the novel by Edna Ferber, a realistic saga produced by Ziegfeld that included several moments of high pathos (the spiritual Ol' Man River, Make Believe, You Are Love, the cakewalk Can't Help Lovin' That Man and Bill, the latter two the songs that turned Helen Morgan into a star). Kern then scored Roberta (1933), with Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, and Yesterdays, Mark Sandrich's film Top Hat (1935), with The Piccolino, Isn't This A Lovely Day, Cheek to Cheek and Top Hat White Tie and Tails, Swing Time (1936), with The Way You Look Tonight, the ambitious and experimental High Wide And Handsome (1937), with The Folks Who Live On The Hill, Lady Be Good (1941), with The Last Time I Saw Paris, etc.
George Gershwin's songs, versified mostly by his brother Ira Gershwin, represented a step forward in rhythm and sophistication, because Gershwin was fluent in both pop, jazz and classical music, a fact best represented by the jazz opera Blue Monday Blues (1922), the main attraction of George White's "Scandals" in 1922, the symphonic Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and the folk opera Porgy and Bess (1935), containing Summertime. After writing an Al Jolson hit, Swanee (1919), Gershwin entered the arena of Broadway musicals with Lady Be Good (1924), that launched the career of dancer Fred Astaire and established the trend of having the title-song as one of the main hits. Other musicals included Someone To Watch Over Me (1926), S'Wonderful (1927), the ballet An American in Paris (1929), I've Got a Crush on You (1930), I Got Rhythm (1930), that launched the careet of Ethel Merman (the band included Benny Goodman, Jimmy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Jack Teargarden, Gene Krupa), and a political satire, Of Thee I Sing (1931) that became the biggest hit of the decade. His Cuban Overture (1932) was one of the first Latin pieces to become popular in the USA.
Richard Rodgers was the next giant of American pop music after Irving Berlin. With lyricist Lorenz Hart he composed a number of Broadway hits that already included some of Rodgers' memorable melodies: Manhattan (1925), My Heart Stood Still (1927), With A Song In My Heart (1929), Blue Moon (1934), The Most Beautiful Girl in the World (1935). This phase peaked with Babes In Arms (1937), the musical with My Funny Valentine, Johnny One Note and The Lady is a Tramp, and Pal Joey (1940), one of his most innovative works (considered the first musical about an anti-hero). Having refined the craft, Rodgers proceeded to revolutionize it after he partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II with Oklahoma (1944), a daring work that did not rely on gags or girls or catchy melodies but on a "dramatic" story and "dramatic" characters (the songs were monologues and dialogues, not just lyrics), a musical that employed avantgarde dancers (choreographed by Agnes DeMille) instead of chorus girls (and whose dancing numbers were about the story and not mere stage effects). It was also the first musical ever recorded in its entirety on an LP. Rodgers' most experimental work was Allegro (1947), a melodic fantasia rather than a simple sequence of songs. Along the way they charmed the audience with immensely popular tunes such as You'll Never Walk Alone (1945), The Gentleman Is A Dope (1947), Some Enchanted Evening (1949), South Pacific (1949), Whistle a Happy Tune (1951). The album of The Sound of Music (1959) charted for seven years. Rodgers' and Hammerstein's musicals crystallized an American view of the world, that relied on traditional moral values and faith in the USA as a paradise on Earth.
However, the real genius of the decade was Cole Porter, the first New York songwriter who was not afraid to talk about sex, as he proved in Paris (1928), Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929) and The Gay Divorcee (1932), as well as in tunes such as I'm In Love Again (1924), What Is This Thing Called Love? (1929) and Love for Sale (1930). His melodic craft reached its zenith with Anything Goes (1934), followed by several other top-notch musicals and by tunes such as I've Got You Under My Skin (1936), In The Still of the Night (1937), My Heart Belongs to Daddy (1938), etc. His greatest triumph came with the "backstage" musical Kiss Me Kate (1948), based on William Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, followed by Can-Can (1953) and the jazzy soundtrack for Charles Walters' film High Society (1956), featuring Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby.
Some Landmarks and Developing Trends Shuffle Along (1921) was entirely produced and performed by blacks (including the still unknown Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson). The music, including the hits Love Will Find a Way and I'm Just Wild About Harry, was scored by a veteran of the vaudeville and the minstrel-shows, Eubie Blake, who had already scored several ragtime hits. But, more importantly, it introduced white audiences to a wealth of negro dance styles, from tap dancing to jazz dancing, that had been developing in the clubs of Harlem. The success of that musical allowed Blake to score The Chocolate Dandies (1924), another showcase for negro dances that turned Josephine Baker into a star. Blake also crafted hits such as You Were Meant For Me (1923), Dixie Moon (1924) and "Memories of You" (1930). In the meantime another black composer, jazz pianist James Price Johnson, had scored Runnin' Wild (1923), whose main hit, Charleston, launched the biggest dance craze of the decade.
Ray Henderson, one of the most successful Tin Pan Alley composers, as proven by Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody (1918), Georgette (1922), That Old Gang Of Mine (1923), It All Depends on You (1924), Bye Bye Blackbird (1925), Alabama Bound (1925), I'm Sitting on Top of the World (1925), The Thrill Is Gone (1931), Life Is Just A Bowl Of Cherries (1931), teamed up with lyricists Lew Brown and Buddy George DeSylva, a trio that became a legend. They wrote Birth of the Blues and Black Bottom for George White's Scandals of 1925. Their youthful, exuberant Good News (1927) started the trend of satires of college life and incorporated most dancing styles of the time, such as the Charleston (The Varsity Drag), besides their hit The Best Things in Life Are Free. Their musicals were not particularly original but always contained a hit song or two: You're The Cream in my Coffee in Hold Everything (1928), Button Up Your Overcoat and You Are My Lucky Star in Follow Through (1929). They also composed Sonny Boy for Lloyd Bacon's film The Singing Fool (1928) and Keep Your Sunny Side Up and If I Had A Talking Picture of You for their own film Sunnyside Up (1929), one of the most innovative of the early musicals, as well as music for their sci-fi fantasy film Just Imagine (1930).
In the years after World War I, the musical became New York's premier form of entertainment. Harry Tierney's Irene (1919) and Vincent Youmans' No No Nanette (1925), the epitome of the "Roaring Twenties", with Tea For Two and I Want To Be Happy, were the most influential Broadway musicals, while Youmans' Wildflower (1923), with Bambolina, Czech-born Rudolf Friml's Rose Marie (1924) and The Vagabond King (1925), with Only a Rose, and Hungarian-born Sigmund Romberg's Student Prince (1924), with Gaudeamus Igitur and The Drinking Song, The Desert Song (1926) and The New Moon (1928), with Lover Come Back to Me, were still in the old format of the operetta. Will Ortman's Holka-Polka (1925) is only important because it marked Busby Berkeley's debut and his first experiment with eccentric choreography.
Bert Kalamar and Harry Rubenstein, that had already composed Who's Sorry Now (1923) and I Wanna Be Loved By You (1928), scored the Marx Brothers' Animal Crackers (1928), Horse Feathers (1932) and Duck Soup (1933).
London's main novelty at the time was Noel Coward, the new talent that made a splash with his first musicals: This Year of Grace (1928), that included A Room With a View and Dance Little Lady, and Bitter Sweet (1929), including I'll See You Again and If Love Were All, The Third Little Show (1931), with Mad Dogs and Englishmen, plus the revue Cavalcade (1931), with Twentieth Century Blues.
His competitors in Britain were Noel Gay (Richard Armitage), whose fortune peaked with Me And My Girl (1937), that included The Lambeth Walk, and Ivor Novello (David Davies), whose main musicals were Crest Of A Wave (1937), with Rose Of England, and Perchance To Dream (1945), with We'll Gather Lilacs
The Great Depression and the talking movie were supposed to bury the Broadway musical, but, instead, the 1930s turned out to be its golden age. In a sense, the Broadway musical cannibalized both its enemies: it turned the Great Depression and its mood into an epic theme, and it turned the talking movie into a vehicle to perpetuate the musical itself. The big losers were the erotic revues (Ziegfeld's "Follies", White's "Scandals" and Carroll's "Vanities") that looked antiquated and definitely out of touch with the zeitgeist of the Great Depression.
Arthur Schwartz's Three's A Crowd (1930) and especially The Band Wagon (1931), the ultimate "backstage" musical, scripted by playwright George Kaufman and containing Dancing In The Dark, and Harold Rome's Pins and Needles (1937) were musicals that reflected their times. So was Vernon Duke's all-black allegory Cabin In The Sky (1940), that made vocalist Lena Horne's fortune (but, despite the cast of black stars, it contained no black music but melodic ditties such as Takin' A Chance on Love). Russian-born Vernon Duke (Vladimir Dukelsky) also composed April In Paris (1932), Autumn in New York (1934) and I Can't Get Started Without You (1936) for other revues. Expelled from Germany, Kurt Weill also analyzed American society in Knickerbocker Holiday (1938), the psychoanalytical thriller Lady in the Dark (1941) and Lost in the Stars (1949), scripted by Maxwell Anderson. Not so in London, where the hits were Ivor Novello's The Dancing Years (1939) and Noel Gay's Me and My Girl (1937), two rather shallow works.
The Golden Age
In 1943, Rodgers and Hammerstein's first show, Oklahoma, was produced. The duo would go on to write some
of the most beloved Broadway Musicals in history, including Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I and The Sound of Music.
When Brigadoon premiered in 1947, this show marked the first major success of one of Broadway's other power duos, Lerner and Loewe. They had been collaborating for about five years when Brigadoon premiered, and they would continue to work together for many years, creating such memorable shows as My Fair Lady in 1958 and Camelot in 1960.
The above is a very brief history of Broadway and does not do justice to the many shows that produced, hit after hit for the American public to enjoy, play and to remember.
Tin Pan Alley
It is not possible to write this type of article with a strict timeline approach, and with this next heading we have to go back to around the late 1800s.
Tin Pan Alley is the nickname given to the cluster of songwriters and sheet music publishers who set up shop in New York City in the late 1890s and became the center of America's burgeoning pop music scene for half a decade, before being supplanted by the phonograph and radio.
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Origins The groundwork for Tin Pan Alley was laid in the late 1800s, after the Civil
War, when piano and sheet music sales began to escalate. At the same time, copyright control on songs and melodies became regulated. By 1887, more than 500,000 American youths were studying the piano, according to the Parlor Songs website. This led to a boom in sheet music sales, and a growing number of publishers set up shop in New York City, the center of American culture and the arts
A Name Is Born
The section of 28th Street where these music publishers congregated soon became known as Tin Pan Alley. According to Parlor Songs, "the name is attributed to a newspaper writer named Monroe Rosenfeld who while staying in New York coined the term to symbolize the cacophony of the many pianos being pounded in publisher's demo rooms, which he characterized as sounding as though hundreds of people were pounding on tin pans!
Tin Pan Alley also saw songwriters and publishers organize for more rights, chiefly in the area of copyright protection. The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) was founded in 1914 and continues to represent those groups to this day. Tin Pan Alley's success was not to last. The advent of both radio and the phonograph (Record Players) put a damper on sheet music sales, and the publishers of Tin Pan Alley soon took a backseat to the record companies that were selling recorded music, first 78s and then 45s and LPs, now to the digital age.
Music publishers still played an important role in the popular music industry, but the money they generated came more and more from royalties and less and less from sheet music. Tin Pan Alley's legacy lives on today through the rich body of work the songwriters and music publishers produced throughout the late 1890s and early 1900s.
Tin Pan Alley classics include "Shine On Harvest Moon," by Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth, 1908; also 1908; Irving Berlin's "Alexander's Ragtime Band," 1911; "Way Down Yonder In New Orleans," by Creamer and Turner Layton, 1922; "Yes, We Have No Bananas," by Frank Silver and Irving Cohn, 1923; "Ain't She Sweet," by Jack Yellen and Milton Ager,1927; and "Happy Days Are Here Again," also by Yellen and Ager, 1930.
From the “Alley” to the songs.
“Pop” or popular songs were part of the American culture long before Tin Pan Alley emerged as the “Financial” driver of Pop music. Below is a synopsis about songs that are candidates for being the first American Pop
Song.
"Home, Sweet Home" (1823)
This coincides with the invention of the gramophone. When gramophone records were invented, short songs were slow to catch on "“which is surprising, because they were ideal: early discs could hold only a few minutes of music. Yet even as late as 1910, over three-quarters of records sold were classical pieces. Still, recorded music allowed a greater audience for music than ever before, no longer limited to households with a piano or a sight-reading singer.
Written by John Howard Payne, the simple lyrics and hummable melody made this opera song a hit with the masses.
But what really might give it the "first pop song title is that, some 80 years later, it was one of the first songs to win major success on the gramophone, famously performed by at least three of the earliest recording stars: Australian diva Dame Nellie Melba, Italian "Queen of Song" Adelina Patti, and the "Swedish Nightingale", Jenny Lind.
"O, Susanna!" (1848)
A big hit (but we're not sure exactly how big).
If you thought that pop music was an American invention"¦ you may be right. Pennsylvania-born Stephen Collins Foster's songs were inspired by (and often mistaken for) Negro spirituals, with their smoother and more accessible melodies than the intricate, opera-inspired tunes of the time. Exactly how successful this song was is difficult to say, because song piracy was an issue even in the mid-19th century. Over 20 editions of the sheet music, mostly illegal, had spread all over the U.S. within three years. But despite the piracy, the publisher still made $10,000. (As a mere writer, Foster himself was given $100 for his troubles.)
"Old Folks at Home" (1851)
In 1852, "Old Folks at Home" had unprecedented sales of 130,000 (in legal copies); back when 10,000 was considered a good sale and 50,000 a major hit. Like "Home Sweet Home," "Old Folks at Home" was a sentimental ballad of homesickness. During the Civil War, it was sung by soldiers on both sides. Foster still didn't become wealthy from his success. Before the war was over, he had died in New York at age 38, reportedly suicide.
"After the Ball" (1892)
This was the first million-seller—and this was before records!
The success of "After the Ball" was truly amazing. Before it was published, million-selling songs were unheard of. "After the Ball" sold five million copies within a year—as sheet music. The secret: a new(ish) concept called PR. Charles K Harris, one of America's first songwriter-publishers, cannily promoted his song. In the U.S., baritone J. Aldrich Libbey performed it at beer halls and theaters, in return for a share in the royalties. In
Britain, it was a music-hall favorite. The mournful ballad also established Tin Pan Alley (a group of music publishers clustered around New York's Broadway) as the Mecca of popular song. Despite the detailed story
told by the lyrics, the tune itself was simple enough. Harris couldn't even read music. "After the Ball" is his only song that anyone remembers, but that was enough for him to retire.
"I'll Never Smile Again" (1940)
This was the first #1 song on the Billboard charts—and it introduced the first pop star who drove his fans wild; Frank Sinatra.
Irving Berlin once suggested that it's the audience, rather than the melody, that makes the pop song. Even though a lot of early recording stars had their fans, none of them really inspired the idolatry and mass hysteria
equated with a true pop star—until Frank Sinatra. "Ol' blue eyes"� (as he'd later be known) hit the big time as a
vocalist with bandleader Tommy Dorsey on "I'll Never Smile Again," composed by Ruth Lowe. Sinatra was not credited on this song, but in college surveys, he still displaced his own hero, Bing Crosby, as the most popular male vocalist.
"I'll Never Smile Again" has another claim: it was the first number one song in Billboard magazine's "Music Popularity Chart," the model for the countless pop sales charts that have ruled the music industry ever since.
Hollywood musicals and their Influence.
Music had been part of cinema since its inception, but the musical score was neither controlled by the film producer nor the same for each projection: it was up to the theater to decide which musicians to hire (usually only one per projection, an organist) and it was largely up to the musician to write or improvise the music for the film. Rudolph Valentino popularized the tango in Rex Ingram's The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), but it was the dance, not the music, that caught the imagination of world audiences. Many of Valentino's fans had no idea what a tango sounded like.
Occasionally the studio would provide the theaters with "suggestions" on what kind of music to play. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) first came with an orchestral "soundtrack" prepared by Joseph-Carl Briel that featured music by Liszt, Verdi, Beethoven, Wagner and Tchaikovsky, then came with an original score composed by Victor Herbert. Classical composers were frequently asked to work on such film scores. In France, Arthur Honegger composed the music for Abel Gance's La Roue (1923) and Napoleon (1927), while Erik Satie composed music for Rene' Clair's Entr'acte (1924). In Russia, Edmund Meisel composed the music for Sergei Eisenstein's masterpiece Potemkin (1926), an even more sensational and organic piece of music. Several more classical composers scored the music for important silent films. For the theaters that could not afford an orchestra, the American Photoplayer Company introduced a seven-meter long player-piano, the "Fotoplayer Style", that could play orchestral music as well as sound effects, so that each theater could customize its own sountrack (about 10,000 were built between 1910 and 1928). And it was for a film, Alan Crosland's Don Juan (1926), that 16-inch 33 1/3 RPM records were introduced (a size and a speed determined by the size and speed of a reel of film).
What studios did provide was "theme" songs, that usually accompanied the movie: Charmaine, composed by Erno Rapee for Raoul Walsh's What Price Glory (1926), based on a Hungarian waltz from 1913, Diane, composed again by Erno Rapee for Frank Borzage's Seventh Heaven (1927), Ramona, another waltz, composed by Mabel Wayne for Edwin Carewe's Ramona (1928), etc
In 1926 Alan Crosland's Don Juan was released with a musical soundtrack prepared by the studio. The evening opened with a short musical film in which movement and sound were synchronized, the first public demonstration of Lee Forest's "Vitaphone". Another short musical film was made in 1927 of Xavier Cugart's tango orchestra.
The "talking" movies were officially born with Alan Crosland's The Jazz Singer (1927), a musical adaptation of Samson Raphaelson's The Day of Atonement (1926), already staged on Broadway, but turned by the Warner studios into a suite of melodies from disparate sources (Tchaikowsky, Hebrew folk music, Irving Berlin's Blue Skies) and a vehicle for pop star Al Jolson. This film was, actually, mostly silent. Lloyd Bacon's The Singing Fool (1928) was more of the same, but Ray Henderson's Sonny Boy became a nation-wide hit (the soundtrack included several older Henderson-Brown-DaSylva songs), and caused an avalanche: the Hollywood studios started hiring Broadway stars (Fanny Brice, Sophie Tucker, Marilyn Miller) as well as foreign stars (Maurice Chevalier) and providing them with vehicles for their debut on the big screen. Charles Reisner directed the Hollywood Revue (1929), which was really a Broadway revue starring Marie Dressler next to Hollywood comedians such as Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, and that included Nacio Herb Brown's Singin' in The Rain and You Were Meant for Me. The "Ziegfeld Follies" were immortalized in Thornton Freeland's musical film Whoopee (1930), that included Walter Donaldson's Making Whoopee and My Baby Just Cares for Me, was choreographed by Busby Berkeley, and turned Eddie Cantor into a star. The studios also began transposing Broadway hits to the big screen, and one of them, Roy Del Ruth's 1929 version of Sigmund Romberg's The Desert Song (1926), is credited with being the first fully musical operetta of cinema, followed by an adaptation of Irving Berlin's The Cocoanuts (1925) for the Marx Brothers, and by Harry Pollard's version of Jerome Kern's Show Boat (1927), all of them in 1929.
After these tentative marriages of picture and sound came the first serious talking movies: King Vidor's Halleluja (1929) was the first musical drama, dedicated to negro music (mostly spirituals plus Irving Berlin's Waiting At The End Of The Road), Ernst Lubitsch's The Love Parade (1929) was the first musical comedy (protagonist Maurice Chevalier), scored by Victor Schertzinger (Dream Lover, March of the Grenadiers), Rouben Mamoulian's Applause (1929) was the first "backstage" musical, starring Helen Morgan and including Jay Gorney's What I Wouldn't Do For That Man?. But perhaps the first real musical should be considered The Broadway Melody (1929), scored by Nacio Herb Brown and directed by Harry Beaumont, the composer being much more important than the director (Wedding of the Painted Doll, You Were Meant for Me).
Nacio Herb Brown was a towering figure of the era, crafting (besides those 1929 hits): the instrumental Doll Dance (1921), Singin' in The Rain (1929), Pagan Love Song (1929), The Broadway Melody (1930), Paradise (1932), Eadie Was A Lady (1932), Beautiful Girl (1933), Temptation (1933), All I Do Is Dream of You (1934), You Are My Lucky Star (1936), I've Got a Feelin' You're Foolin' (1936), Good Morning (1939), I'm Feelin' Like a Million (1938), Alone (1940), Make 'Em Laugh (1952), all them created for movie soundtracks.
After one year, the novelty was already old news, and the cinematic musical seemed dead. Instead, along came choreographer Busby Berkeley and composer Harry Warren (real name Salvatore Guaragna), already the author of Rose Of The Rio Grande (1922), I Found a Million-Dollar Baby (1930) and You're My Everything (1931), a couple that crafted Lloyd Bacon's 42nd Street (1933), with Lullaby of Broadway, Shuffle Off to Buffalo, You're Getting To Be A Habit With Me and 42nd Street, Mervin LeRoy's Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), with High Life, I've Got To Sing A Torch Song, Pettin' In The Park, Remember My Forgotten Man, Shadow Waltz, especially The Gold Diggers' Song/ We're In The Money, and Lloyd Bacon's Footlight Parade (1933), with Honeymoon Hotel and Shanghai Lil. Berkeley redefined the musical as a visual and dynamic show in which the opulence is not due to the stage effects but to the colorful and geometric patterns created by the dancers. Thus 1933 became a watershed year. The golden age of the Hollywood musical had just begun.
Warren's later hits (written for a variety of films) included: I Found a Million Dollar Baby (1931), You're My Everything (1931), I Only Have Eyes For You (1934), The Girl At The Ironing Board (1934), The Boulevard of Broken Dreams (1934), Lulu's Back In Town (1935), September In The Rain (1937), You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby (1938), Daydreaming (1938), Jeepers Creepers (1938), Chattanooga Choo Choo (1940), There Will Never Be Another You (1942), You'll Never Know (1943), On the Atchison Topeka and the Santa Fe (1945), The More I See You (1945). He wrote more than 900 songs. The soundtracks and the songs make Warren one of the most influential composers of both Hollywood and Broadway of all times.
Broadway veteran Vincent Youmans scored the hits (Carioca, Flying Down To Rio) of Thornton Freeland's Flying Down To Rio (1933), another important step in the development of the cinematic musical because it inaugurated the legendary dancing/singing couple of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. They were the stars of Mark Sandrich's 1934 version of Cole Porter's The Gay Divorcee, that included only one Porter original and a set of new songs (notably Con Conrad's The Continental and Needle in a Haystack), William Seiter's 1934 version of Kern's Roberta and, finally, their quintessential musical, Mark Sandrich's Top Hat (1935), scored by Irving Berlin.
Harold Arlen, the veteran of the "Cotton Club", was called in to score Victor Fleming's Wizard of Oz (1939), the musical that turned Judy Garland into a star, and Arlen delivered one of most famous ballads of all times, Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Arlen's other Hollywood hits were: Last Night When We Were Young (1935), Lydia the Tatoo'd Lady (1939), Blues in the Night (1941), perhaps his artistic peak, That Old Black Magic (1942), Happiness is a Thing Called Joe (1943), Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive (1944), Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home (1946). He wrote more than 400 songs.
Two important "musicals" of the age did not follow the Hollywood dogmas: Sergey Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (1938), scored by classical composer Sergey Prokofiev, and Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940), a cartoon that introduced stereo sound. Also notable was Michael Curtiz's Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), a musical biography of George Cohan.
Bing Crosby and Bob Hope starred in a series of musical comedies, starting with Victor Schertzinger's The Road To Singapore (1940) and ending 22 years later. Both became enormously popular. Bob Hope's signature song was Leo Robin's Thanks For The Memory (1938).
Hollywood: the Post-war Musical Films Hugh Martin scored Vincent Minnelli's nostalgic epic Meet Me In St Louis (1944), that included Kerry Mills' Meet Me In St Louis (1904) and Martin's The Boy Next Door, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, and The Trolley Song. The musical genre was declining in Hollywood, but Vincent Minnelli dominated whatever was left of it by employing Cole Porter for The Pirate (1948), George Gershwin for An American In Paris (1951), Frederick Loewe for Gigi (1958).
In the 1950s, Stanley Donen managed to compete against Minnelli with Singin' In The Rain (1952), starring Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse, for which Nacio Herb Brown assembled a sort of personal anthology of hits. Gene DePaul scored Donen's second classic, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954).
George Cukor's best musical were as light as his comedies: A Star Is Born (1954), scored by Ray Heindorf, and Les Girls (1957), scored by, scored by Cole Porter.
The best of the Doris Day musicals was probably David Butler's Calamity Jane (1953), scored by Sammy Fain.
But rock'n'roll, launched by a soundtrack, Richard Brooks' The Blackboard Jungle (1955), was pervasive also in musical films, particularly Elvis Presley's numerous vehicles: Jailhouse Rock (1956), Girls Girls Girls (1962) and Viva Las Vegas (1964), all based on his hits.
Robert Stevenson's Mary Poppins (1964), scored by Richard Sherman Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, (Chim Chim Cher-Ee, Feed The Birds, A Spoonful of Sugar), signaled that the musical was transitioning from entertainment for adults to entertainment for children.
Martin Scorsese's New York New York (1977), scored by John Kander (notably the title-tune), and Blake Edwards' Victor/Victoria (1982), scored by Henry Mancini and Leslie Bricusse, were the only notable musicals for adults for a while, a sign of rapid decline.
It was, in fact, the Disney corporation that dominated musical films in the 1990s. Alan Menken scored several Walt Disney animated musical productions: The Little Mermaid (1989), Robert-Jess Roth Beauty and the Beast (1991), John Musker's and Ron Clements' Aladdin (1992), Mike Gabriel's and Eric Goldberg's Pocahontas (1995), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996). Elton John took over for The Lion King (1994).
Hollywood: Film Music Charlie Chaplin composed his own music for City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936) and Limelight (1952). That was the exception, and few film-makers would imitate him. He wasn't clear at all whose job was to score the soundtracks.
German cabaret pianist Friedrich Hollaender scored Josef von Sternberg's Der Blaue Engel/ The Blue Angel (1930), which included Marlene Dietrich's signature tune Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe Eingestellt/ Falling In Love Again. Von Sternberg kept changing musicians: Karl Hajos scored Morocco (1930) and Franke Harling Shangai Express (1932) and The Scarlet Empress (1934).
In the 1930s, after a few years of experimentation, scoring film soundtracks became an art in earnest thanks to a small group of foreign-born musicians, first and foremost two Austrian-born and classically-trained composers. Erich-Wolfgang Korngold's coined a lush, overwhelming, operatic style with Michael Curtiz's Captain Blood (1935) and especially The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and The Sea Hawk (1940), as well as Charles Gerhardt's Anthony Adverse (1936) and Sam Wood's Kings Row (1942).
Max Steiner explored many different moods, sensational in Ernest Schoedsack's King Kong (1933), one of the first soundtracks to rely heavily on sound effects, pathetic in Victor Fleming's Gone With The Wind (1939), including Tara and countless references to traditional songs, exotic in Michael Curtiz's Casablanca (1942), melodramatic in Irving Rapper's Now Voyager (1942), gloomy in John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), epic in John Ford's The Searchers (1956), romantic in Delmer Daves' A Summer Place (1959), whose instrumental theme was a massive hit for Percy Faith's orchestra, etc. He also scored Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep (1946), John Huston's Key Largo (1948), Raoul Walsh's White Heat (1949).
Roy Webb (the New Yorker among all these foreigners) invented the musical language for the light comedy with the soundtracks to George Cukor's Sylvia Scarlett (1935), Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby (1938) and Rene` Clair's I Married A Witch (1942). Then he turned to Jacques Tourneur's horror movies, such as Cat People (1942), I Walked With A Zombie (1943) and Out Of The Past (1947), and to psychological thrillers such as Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Robert Siodmak's Spiral Staircase (1946) and Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious (1946).
The master of horror was Austrian organist Hans Salter who developed a new language for trivial suspense vehicles such as Frank Skinner's The Son of Frankenstein (1939), Christy Cabanne's The Mummy's Hand (1940), George Waggner's The Wolf Man (1941). The soundtracks for Jack Arnold's The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) and The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) were more accomplished but simply recycled the vocabulary he had devised in the 1940s.
A master in the grand lush orchestral style, and a veteran vaudeville pianist and conductor of Broadway musicals, Alfred Newman scored jazz-tinged and classical-tinged soundtracks for King Vidor's Street Scene (1931) and William Wyler's Wuthering Heights (1939). His frequently colorful and exuberant scores taught a whole generation how to write music for films: John Cromwell's The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), William Dieterle's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), William Wyler's Wuthering Heights (1939). The success of his score for Henry King's The Song Of Bernadette (1943) convinced the record labels that soundtracks were a viable product (until then, very few scores had been released on record). He then scored some classics such as Joseph Mankiewicz's All About Eve (1950), Henry Koster's The Robe (1953), the first Cinemascope film, Jean Negulesco's How To Marry A Millionaire (1953), Billy Wilder's The Seven Year Itch (1955), and went on to compose Love Is a Many Splendored Thing (1955),
The western movie developed its own musical language, thanks to Ukrainian-born Dmitri Tiomkin. After working on magniloquent music for Frank Capra's Lost Horizon (1937), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Meet John Doe (1941) and It's A Wonderful Life (1946), as well as for Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt(1943) and Dial M For Murder (1954), Tiomkin focused on the western in a series of breathtaking scores: King Vidor's Duel in the Sun (1946), Howard Hawks' Red River (1948) and Big Sky (1952), Fred Zinnemann's High Noon (1952), the first movie to be promoted by its theme song (originally titled Do Not Forsake Me) rather than viceversa, and George Stevens' Giant (1956). Having become the darling of Hollywood producer, he applied his hit-oriented language to John Sturges' Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957) and Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo (1959), but also to the tv themes Rawhide (1959) and Gunslinger (1961), as well as to Alfred Hitchcock's I Confess (1953) and Dial M for murder (1954). Each of them contains at least a song that was meant to be just that, a song, and a catchy one, as opposed to music that underpins the story.
Hungarian-born Miklos Rozsa helped develop the musical language of the film noir with his ominous scores for Zoltan Korda's Jungle Book (1942), which was re-recorded with a symphonic orchestra and issued on a three-record album, Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944) and The Lost Weekend (1945), Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), Robert Siodmak's The Killers (1946), whose theme song became the theme for the tv series Dragnet, scores that sometimes utilized the theremin (for the first time in Lost Weekend, played by Sam Hoffman); Vincent Minnelli's Madame Bovary (1949), the first film soundtrack (other than cartoons and musicals) to be released in its original format on record; and the epics of Mervin LeRoy's Quo Vadis (1951) and William Wyler's Ben Hur (1959).
Another poet of the film noir was German-born Franz Waxman, who scored Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940), Suspicion (1941) and Rear Window (1954), as well as Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) and George Cukor's The Philadelphia Story (1940).
Austrian cabaret composer Anton Karas (basically an amateur) ended up composing one of the most famous themes, the one for Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949), containing Harry Lime Theme.
Hugo Friedhofer, who had assisted Korngold and Steiner, applied their late-romantic lesson in his moving and nostalgic soundtrack for William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).
The prolific Adolph Deutsch scored several of cinema's masterpieces: Raoul Walsh's High Sierra (1941), John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Apartment (1960).
Joseph Kosma, who set Prevert (Les Feuilles Mortes, Barbara, En Sortant de l'Ecole, Les Enfants qui s'Aiment, La Peche A la Baleine, Inventaire, 1956) and other French poets to music, was the musical hero of French cinema before World War II: Jean Renoir's Le Crime de M Lange (1936), La Grande Illusion (1937), La Bete Humaine/ Human Beast (1938), La Regle du Jeu (1939), as well as Marcel Carne's Les Enfants du Paradis/ Children of Paradise (1945).
The most important, and most prolific, of the classical composers who wrote for the cinema was Dmitri Shostakovich, who scored 34 films. They are mostly bombastic and celebratory, for example: Grigori Kozintsev's and Leonid Trauberg's Novyj Vavilon/ The New Babylon (1929), Odna (1931), Maxim (1935), The Tale of the Priest and His Servant Balda (1936) and Vyborg District (1938), Sergei Yutkevich's Zlatyye Gory/ Golden Mountains (1931) and Vstrechnyj/ Counterplan (1932), Lev Arnstam's Zoya (1944), Aleksandr Dovzhenko's Michurin (1949), Mikhail Chiaureli's Fall of Berlin (1949), Alexander Faintsimmer's The Gadfly (1955), Grigorii Roshal's God Kak Zhizn/ A Year Is Like A Lifetime (1965). Shostakovich found a more personal cinematic language for Grigori Kozintsev's Hamlet/ Hamlet (1964) and Korol Lir/ King Lear (1969).
French composer Georges Auric employed classical melody in a slightly oneiric way for Jean Cocteau's cinematic poems Le Sang d'un Poète (1930) and La Belle et la Bète (1946), Henry Clouzot's Le Salaire De La Peur/ Wages of Fear (1953), Otto Preminger's Bonjour Tristesse (1957), Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961), and with a light touch for British comedies such as Henry Cornelius' Passport to Pimlico (1949) and Charles Crichton's The Lavender Hill Mob (1951).
British classical composer Arthur Bliss crafted one of the most original of the early soundtracks, for Alexander Korda's science-fiction movie Things to Come (1935).
The scores of Armenian classical composer Aram Khachaturian for Amo Bek-Nazarov's Pepo (1935) and Zanzegur (1936) were among the most celebrated of Soviet cinema.
Among the most popular scores of the 1930s were the soundtracks for Walt Disney's series of Silly Symphonies, shown between 1929 and 1939. These included Frank Churchill's Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?, off Three Little Pigs (1933), Lullaby Land of Nowhere (1933) and Somebody Rubbed Out My Robin (1935), as well as Leigh Harline's Help Me Plant My Corn (1934) and The Penguin Is a Very Funny Creature (1934). Walt Disney's Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs (1937), whose best numbers (I'm Wishing, Whistle While You Work, Heigh Ho, Some Day My Prince Will Come) were composed by Frank Churchill, was even more important, both because the songs were an organic whole and because, for the first time, a label (Victor) released original soundtrack music (not the same songs interpreted by other musicians) as a an "album" of three 78 RPM records (of which at least two, Whistle While you Work and Heigh Ho, became extremely popular). By the same token, Pinocchio (1939) featured one of the era's most famous songs, When You Wish Upon A Star, again by Leigh Harline. Walt Disney's films turned the animated cartoon into a musical. They also legitimized the soundtrack as a commercial product. In fact the expression "original sound track" was coined by the Disney studios for the release of music from Pinocchio as a three-record album in 1940.
But the first truly original composer of cartoon music was Carl Stalling, who, after scoring Walt Disney's The Skeleton Dance (1929), composed soundtracks for the cartoons of "Bugs Bunny", "Daffy Duck", "Tweety", "Sylvester" and many more from 1930 till 1958. He was given access to a vast library of recorded music and took fully advantage of it. He was, in fact, the first composer to rely on the recorded works of other composers. His scores were frenetic collages of jazz (especially Raymond Scott's instrumentals), folk, pop, classical music and commercial jingles, as well as his own music. They indulged in fractured rhythms, truncated melodies, dissonant orchestration, demented timbres, hysterical tempos and distorted instruments.
Harline's hit, outside the Disney cartoons, was Hal Walker's Road to Utopia (1945), a very popular musical comedy for Bob Hope and Bing Crosby.
In Italy, Alessandro Cicognini scored several classics of Neorealism, such as Alessandro Blasetti's Quattro Passi Fra le Nuvole (1942), Vittorio DeSica's masterpieces Sciuscia/ Shoeshine (1946), Il Ladri Biciclette/The Bicycle Thief (1947), Umberto D (1955) and Miracolo a Milano/ Miracle in Milan (1951), but also comedies such as Mario Camerini's Grandi Magazzini (1939) and Mario Monicelli's Guardie e Ladri/ Guards and Thieves (1951).
American composer Aaron Copland scored a few films in his typical orchestral style overflowing with references to the American tradition, notably Lewis Milestone's The Red Pony (1949) and William Wyler's The Heiress (1949).
Allan Gray (born Joseph Zmigrod in Poland) was one of the main British composers of soundtracks, and also scored John Huston's The African Queen (1951).
Alex North wrote some memorable melodies, such as Unchained Melody (1955), sung by gospel singer Roy Hamilton for Hall Bartlett's Unchained (1955), as well as disturbing "mood music", such as the soundtracks for Elia Kazan's cinematic adaptation of Tennesse Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), the first major score to be based on jazz, Kazan's Viva Zapata (1952), almost a medley of Mexican folk songs, John Huston's The Misfits (1961), and John Ford's Cheyenne Autumn (1964), one of the first subdued scores for western films, and the unreleased score for Stanley Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey (1968), possibly his technical peak.
David Raksin created a score for Otto Preminger's Laura (1944) that kept repeating the same theme whenever the title character was referred to (the theme was going to be recorded by more than 400 artists). A more elaborate score met Otto Preminger's Forever Amber (1947), and probably remained his best one. After these two milestones, his most original soundtracks were Abraham Polonsky's Force Of Evil (1948), Vincent Minnelli's The Bad And The Beautiful (1952) and John Cassavetes' Too Late Blues (1962), each in its own style.
Bernard Herrmann, perhaps the most celebrated of the "symphonic" composers of soundtracks, revealed his subtle psychological talent with Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), as well as John Brahm's Hangover Square (1945), basically a pretext to write his own piano concerto, Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), built around the sound of two theremins juxtaposed to electric instruments, and went on to become the quintessential Hitchcock composer, penning the surrealistic scores for The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), The Trouble With Harry (1956), North By Northwest (1959), permeated by the rhythm of fandango, Psycho (1960), one of the most famous of all times, a cubist clockwork of deconstructed string-based melodies and sound effects, Vertigo (1958), perhaps his tour de force, The Birds (1963), with its harrowing orchestration of dissonance (mainly created by Oskar Sala's "trautonium"), these three being the most original ones, and Marnie (1964), soundtracks that rely on strident passages as metaphors for the horror of the scenes. The music for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) was existential noir at its best. His soundtracks sounded violent because they indulged in sudden contrasts as opposed to smooth melodic flows. Herrmann did not write leitmotifs, he toyed with them as if engaging in a slow, endless semiotic torture.
By the mid-1940s, cinema's composers had become a well-established category, many of them churning out dozens of soundtracks per year. Nonetheless, only Walt Disney had released "original soundtracks" (not modified for the phonographic medium). The first non-Disney album of original soundtrack music was the musical Richard Whorf's Till the Clouds Roll By (1946), based on standards by Jerome Kern, but it was essentially a parade of stars singing Kern's hits. "Tribute" musicals of this kind followed, such as Vincent Minnelli's The Pirate (1948), a tribute to Cole Porter, and were released unadulterated on album.
The style of western soundtracks crystallized with Richard Hageman's scores for John Ford's Fort Apache (1948) and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949), and with Victor Young's scores for John Ford's Rio Grande(1950) and George Stevens' Shane (1953). Young's opulent and romantic style, best represented by For Whom The Bell Tolls (1944), was the quintessential Hollywood style of the era. Young also composed songs such as Stella by Starlight (1947) and My Foolish Heart (1950).
Another master of the western soundtrack was Elmer Bernstein, who scored John Sturges' The Magnificent Seven (1960), the quintessential western soundtrack before Morricone, Henry Hathaway's True Grit (1968) and Don Siegel's The Shootist (1976), but who was also a master of highlighting neurotic characters, such as in Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), for jazz band and orchestra, and in Robert Mulligan's To Kill A Mockingbird (1962), a powerful suite of roots-inspired music for chamber ensemble, and a master of creating claustrophobic atmospheres, as he proved with Vincent Minnelli's Some Came Running (1958). Other jazzy scores of his include Alexander MacKendrick's Sweet Smell of Success (1957) and Edward Dmytryk's Walk on the Wild Side (1962).
The other great western soundtrack of the Fifties was composed by Jerome Moross for William Wyler's The Big Country (1958).
Jerry Fielding had a long career crowned by two sensational soundtracks, Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946) and especially Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969), an abullient western and Latin score, as well as Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971) and Michael Winner's The Mechanic (1972), two scores that flirt with avantgarde music.
Kenyon Hopkins scored Elia Kazan's Baby Doll(1956) and Wild River/ Fango sulle Stelle (1960), as well as Robert Rossen's The Hustler (1961).
Daniele Amfitheatrof (the son of a Russian composer) scored Max Ophuls' Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948) and Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953).
A passion for lushly-orchestral neoclassical melodies is also found in British composer Malcolm Arnold, whose main achievements were David Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), with a main theme derived from the traditional Colonel Bogey, Mark Robson's Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958), with Children's Marching Song, and Bryan Forbes' Whistle Down the Wind (1962).
Classical music conductor Andre Previn composed the eclectic and exuberant soundtrack for Richard Brooks' Elmer Gantry (1960) and recreated the sounds of Paris for Billy Wilder's Irma La Douce (1963).
Legendary conductor Leonard Bernstein scored Elia Kazan's films On The Waterfront (1954) and East of Eden (1954).
Johnny Mandel wrote one of the three or four best jazz scores of the 1950s, for Robert Wise's I Want to Live (1958), and the suspenseful score for John Boorman's Point Blank (1967), as well as hits such as The Shadow of Your Smile, from vincent Minnelli's The Sandpiper (1965), and the theme song Suicide is Painless, from Robert Altman's M.A.S.H. (1970).
The event that symbolically closed the age of classic Hollywood soundtracks was Vincent Minnelli's The Cobweb (1955), scored by Leonard Rosenman, who had debuted on Elia Kazan's East of Eden (1955): it was harsh, dissonant, unnerving music a` la Schoenberg, introducing avantgarde music to the crowds of moviegoers. Rosenman's psychological and non-melodic approach yielded the music for Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Richard Fleischer's Fantastic Voyage (1966) and Ted Post's Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970).
Rock Around The Clock (1954), written in 1953 by James Myers and Max Freedman, was the first rock song used in a movie soundtrack, Richard Brooks' Blackboard Jungle (1955), and the movie turned it into a hit song. But Hollywood consciously capitalized on rock stars, and perfected the symbiosis between film and record, only with Elvis Presley's musicals. The soundtrack albums for the Presley vehicles that Norman Taurog directed, G.I. Blues (1960), Blue Hawaii (1961) and Girls Girls Girls (1962), were the best-selling albums of the early Sixties. The songs were both old and new, composed by a variety of white and black songwriters. Those films were terrible collections of stereotypes, both as cinema and music, but immensely successful. In a sense, they were the first "music videos", because the film per se was only a pretext: people watched the film to see Presley sing the song.
New York: the Post-war Broadway Musical TM, ®, Copyright © 2003 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
After World War II, the most adventurous musicals followed in the footsteps of Oklahoma (1944), and showtunes dominated American popular music.
Jule Styne composed High Button Shoes (1947), with I Still Get Jealous and Papa Won't You Dance With Me, and especially Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1949), based on Anita Loos' 1925 novel, with Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friends. His other musicals included songs such as It's Magic (1948), Three Coins In The Fountain (1954), The Party's Over (1956), Everything's Coming Up Roses (1959), until Funny Girl (1964), the musical biography of Fanny Brice, that launched the career of Barbra Streisand.
Frank Loesser delivered the hit of the decade: Guys and Dolls (1950), that included Sit Down You're Rockin' the Boat, I've Never Been In Love Before and Luck Be A Lady Tonight. The Most Happy Fella (1956), with Standing On The Corner, was even more ambitious. He also composed See What the Boys in the Backroom Will Have (1939), Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunitions (1942, his greatest hit), I Don't Want To Walk Without You Baby (1942), Spring Will Be A Little Late This Year (1944), On A Show Boat to China (1948), Baby It's Cold Outside (1949).
The new standard of quality was set by composer Frederick Loewe and lyricist Alan-Jay Lerner. Loewe's score for the fairy tale Brigadoon (1947), that included Almost Like Being In Love and There But For You Go I, was typical of his delicate romanticism and eclectic style. After Paint Your Wagon (1951), with I Talk To The Trees, Wanderin' Star and They Call The Wind Mariah, the duo reached their zenith with My Fair Lady (1956), an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1914) that boasted countless catchy tunes (With A Little Bit of Luck, I Could Have Danced All Night, On The Street Where You Live, that was a major hit for years). I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face, They also penned Vincent Minnelli's film Gigi (1958), with Thank God For Little Girls, and the eccentric Camelot (1960), based on Terence-Hanbury White's The Once And Future King (1958).
Classical composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein brought to the musical his exuberant creativity: the jazz dance fantasia On The Town (1944), the eclectic Wonderful Town (1953), the comic operetta Candide (1956), based on Voltaire's novel, and finally West Side Story (1957), the decade's masterpiece, an adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet set in the world of street gangs, with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and an endless parade of memorable melodies (America, Dance at the Gym, Tonight, I Feel Pretty, Gee Officer Krupke, Maria and Somewhere) set to rousing rhythms. This musical was, de facto, a most serious attempt at creating an American opera as a genre distinct from European opera. Leonard Bernstein also scored Elia Kazan's films On The Waterfront (1954) and East of Eden (1954).
In Europe, a notable musical was Marguerite Monnot's Irma La Douce (1956). In London, the first major sensation of the post-war musical was Lionel Bart's rock'n'roll score for Frank Norman's play Fings Ain't What They Used To Be (1959), set in the underworld, followed by Bart's most successful work, Oliver (1968). Leslie Bricusse composed Stop The World I Want To Get Off (1961).
Show tunes declined rapidly after the advent of rock music. Unlike jazz, that had coexisted peacefully with the Broadway musical, and the "fake" rock'n'roll of Elvis Presley and the Beatles (who were still, basically, singers in the old tradition), "progressive" rock music of the Sixties seemed antithetic to the whole notion of the show tune. The musical seemed to be dying a slow but unstoppable death, despite Jerry Herman's Hello Dolly (1964), a musical adaptation of Thornton Wilder's play The Matchmaker, Sheldon Harnick's Fiddler on the Roof (1964), an adaptation of Sholom Aleichem's stories, and John Kander's Cabaret (1966), the most original productions of the Sixties. The age of the hippies was better represented by small-budget off-Broadway productions such as Galt MacDermot's Hair (1968), with Aquarius and Let the Sunshine In, Oh Calcutta (1969), an erotic revue devised by British drama critic Kenneth Tynan.
The rock influence peaked in the 1970s with Charles Strouse's Applause (1970), a rock adaptation of Joseph Mankiewicz's film All About Eve (1950), Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar (1971), Jim Jacobs' and Warren Casey's Grease (1972), a nostalgic collage of rock melodies from the Fifties plus their own Greased Lightnin' and John Farrar's You're The One That I Want, Pete Townshend's Tommy (1975), adapted from the Who's 1969 rock opera, and Richard O'Brien's The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), a spoof of horror and sci-fi stereotypes with strong sexual overtones, one of the greatest (and wildest) musicals of all times.
A country where the musical comedy boomed in those years was Italy, whose variety show had been strongly influenced by the American invasion of 1943. Armando Trovajoli composed the two most popular musicals: Rugantino (1962), that included his hit song Roma Nun Fa La Stupida Stasera, and Aggiungi un Posto a Tavola (1974).
The decline of the Broadway musical had several concomitant causes. First and foremost, the competition of television soap operas, that catered to the same audience as the musical. Then the escalating production costs, that simply made it too risky a venture for entrepreneurs who could invest their money in more reliable ventures (a film can be shown in thousands of theaters at the same time). In terms of "taste", the musical never truly managed to assimilate the new taste that developed with the advent of rock'n'roll, disco music and hip-hop. Somehow, the musical had successfully assimilated new genres (ragtime, jazz) up until the Sixties. In the Sixties, rock music introduced not only a new musical paradigm but also new forms of consumption (from Woodstock to the video clip) that were simply not compatible with the theatrical format. Finally, there certainly was a change in the national psyche: as the Cold War forced the USA to abandon its childhood (made of easy victories against clearcut enemies such as the Indians and the Nazis) and entered its adulthood (a difficult time of subtle strategizing and risky undertakings on a global scale), the musical had a hard time abandoning its childhood, and eventually fell out of synch with the rest of society.
Whilst this section concentrates on musicals developed by and for Hollywood films, the positive effects of the “Hollywoodization” of the Broadway musicals on the popular music culture of America cannot be ignored
The Hollywood musical developed almost as soon as the talkies were born. Indeed, The Jazz Singer, the first full length feature film to use sound, featured a few songs. Despite its use of sound, The Jazz Singer was still mostly silent, but it would not be long before an all singing, all dancing movie would emerge. Released by MGM (who else?), The Broadway Melody of 1929 was the first Hollywood musical with a score by Nacio
Herb Brown and Arthur Freed (part of whose catalog would be used for a movie called Singin' in the Rain years later....); The Broadway Melody of 1929 was a smash hit. It raked in $1.6 million at the box office. It would not be this film that would establish the Hollywood musical, but instead two films released in 1933. 42nd Street would establish Busby Berkley as the screen musical choreographer par excellence, not to mention create many Hollywood musical clichés. Flying Down to Rio would introduce the world to the dance team of Astaire and Rogers. With the success of these two musicals, Hollywood went to work churning out dozens of musicals every year. And while MGM is best known for its musicals, nearly every studio would make them (indeed, the early Busby Berkley musicals were produced by Warner Brothers, while the Astaire and Rogers movies were made by RKO).
Arguably, the genre started to go into decline just as it reached its peak. On the one hand, what is considered by some to be the four greatest Hollywood musicals were all released in a space of four years in the early Fifties: An American in Paris in 1951, Singin' in the Rain in 1952, The Band Wagon in 1953, and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (possibly my favourite musical of all time) in 1954. An American in Paris would even win the Oscar for Best Picture. Unfortunately, just as the Hollywood musical had reached its peak in quality, it also seemed to be losing steam. While An American in Paris, Singin' in the Rain, The Band Wagon, and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers all did reasonably well at the box office, others did not fair so well. Indeed, one needs look no further than the career of Gene Kelly for a measure of the decline of the Hollywood musical. At the height of his career with the back to back triumphs of An American in Paris and Singin' in the Rain, it was not long before two of Kelly's films would fail at the box office--Brigadoon in 1954 and It's Always Fair Weather in 1955. It does not seem to have been the case that audiences were no longer interested in musicals. For the next twenty years Hollywood would produce several big budget adaptations of stage musicals, among them Oklahoma, My Fair Lady, The Music Man, and Fiddler on the Roof. Given the fact that audiences would still attend musical movies, one has to wonder why Hollywood stopped making musical originals of its own.
I rather suspect that there were multiple reasons. Primary amongst these was the advent of regular network television broadcasts in the United States. During World War II 90 million Americans went to the movies every week. In the years following the Korean War this number dropped to 16 million. Quite simply, people preferred to stay home and watch television rather than spend money to go the cinema. The drastic hit that television delivered to the movie industry may also have affected the sorts of musicals that were being made. Competing with television for viewers, the American studios increasingly moved towards big budget spectacles. This was the age of The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur. Naturally, the studios may have chosen to go with "big," lavish musicals such as Oklahoma and My Fair Lady as opposed to "smaller" musicals such as Singin' in the Rain. It must also be noted that the vast majority of musicals after 1955 were based on existing productions adapted from the stage rather than original musical screenplays.
I suspect there is a simple reason for this. With an existing property such as South Pacific or The King and I, there is less of a risk than there is with an original movie such as An American in Paris. Audiences have already heard of the play, so it is reasonable to assume that they will go see the movie (of course, this isn't actually true--look at the success of Brigadoon and, more recently, Rent).
Another factor in the decline of the Hollywood musical may have been the changing tastes of music in America and Europe. From 1929 to around 1955, American music actually changed very little. Oh, there was the rise and decline of the swing bands and various other musical fads, but the works of such composers as Porter, Gershwin, Berlin, and so on were still widely popular. All of this changed in the mid-Fifties with the rise of rock 'n' roll. The new music swept the youth of America, making the old standards passé. With young people listening to Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and the Beatles I rather suspect that the audience for musicals became older than it once had been. And, for better or worse, the biggest audience for going to the cinema has usually been the youth.
A brief history of Radio.
During the 1920’ radio took off. People across the nation found useful information being transmitted. Farmers could keep up with teal market prices. People could reconnect with their roots. Barn dances were broadcast. New forms of entertainment emerged like the Grand Old Oprey, which began as a barn dance in 1925.
In 1927, several more network competitors emerged to challenge NBC. One of them, we know well. It was the Columbia Phonograph Record Company but today we know it as just CBS.
Most of the programming of the late twenties was musical programming. To break up the music, small comedy skits were introduced.
By 1935, 18.5 million families or over 50 million people were into radio. About 60% of homes had radios Radio stars were emerging like George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jack Benny, Al Jolson and Nelson Eddy. Serial melodramas ran during the day and were often sponsored by soap companies, hence the name soap operas.
Roosevelt used his radio “fireside chats” to push through his social programs in the 1930’s.As the country moved towards World War II; newspaper companies began to dispense news through their own radio stations. Radio at the time was the only live, simultaneous source of mass communication we had in this country. It is estimated that the day after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, 62 million Americans listened to President Roosevelt declare war on Japan
A brief History of the recording industry Beginnings: 1890-1900
The story of the sound recording industry is mostly a story of musical entertainment on phonograph discs for the whole period from the invention of the phonograph in 1877 to about the 1950s, when new technologies emerged. Thomas Edison's 1877 invention of the phonograph was followed by many imitators, most notably the "graphophone," which became the basis of the Columbia company. Both inventions used a cylinder record which captured sound in a groove. The primary market was intended to be businessman, lawyers, court reporters, and others who currently used stenography to capture important thoughts or compose letters. Although the sound recorder as a business machine has its own history, it is the entertainment uses of sound recording that made the biggest impact.
The First Peak, 1900-1925 Business phonographs (and graphophones) were selling very poorly in the early years and the phonograph industry was near bankruptcy. But in 1899, someone had the bright idea to build a coin-operated phonograph, record some songs on cylinders, and put the machines into the arcades, which were quite popular at the time. The public loved it. The various companies making phonographs quickly went into the cylinder business. Edison himself had considered a disc phonograph, but it was Emile Berliner who really got the ball rolling. Part of the reason for a disc instead of a cylinder was that Berliner thought it would be easy to stamp out large numbers of copies of disc recordings.
In 1893 he began selling his cheap gramophone player and seven-inch disc records made of hard rubber. Emile Berliner in 1896 hooked up with Eldridge Johnson, a machinist from Camden, New Jersey who designed an improved gramophone player for the Berliner Company. In a short time, the two joined forces to create what would become the Victor Talking Machine Company.
Soon, three companies (Edison, Victor, and Columbia) were the Big Three in the record and record player businesses in the United States, while HMV and the various subsidiaries set up by Edison and Columbia dominated the market in Europe. They were selling about 3 million records a year by 1900 in the U.S. alone. The success of the record industry during the next two decades was phenomenal. Soon, the record industry was one of the most important in the world.
Depression and Consolidation 1925-1940 Manufacturers introduced an improved form of record in the late 1920s called the "electrical recording," hoping to lure customers back. This used microphones and electronic amplifiers in the studio to make the records, but could be played back on the old horn talking machines. Some manufacturers also introduced combination radio-phonographs. While these new technologies helped a little, when the Great Depression came the record companies were too weak to survive on their own.
It was only in the late 1930s that the number of record discs sold began to climb back toward the highs of the 1920s. This was partly due to the gradually improving economy, particularly in the United States. It was also due to the growing number of jukeboxes in use. Jukeboxes consumed large numbers of records because they were usually changed every week or so. But the industry was still in trouble.
The War Years and Afterward, 1941-1955 The coming of World War II was a worldwide tragedy but a boon for the record industry. Suddenly the governments and armed services of many nations had an interest in purchasing and using sound recording equipment. The entertainment industries of Hollywood and elsewhere were called into service to record music for the entertainment of troops and then the general public. Soon the companies would be producing high fidelity sound on disk of 45 rpm the LP disks of 33.3 rpm. The age of recording had arrived and the age of the public buying music on records had also arrived.
THE GREAT AMERICAN SONGBOOK
Of course all of the above and what remains of this article is about the evolution of what had=s become known as the Great American Songbook
Firstly I should say that the great American Songbook is not an individual publication, or a set compilation of songs; it is a generic term for those songs that have survived the vagaries of time and are still popular and well recognized by artists and the general public alike.
For many of the years that I have been infatuated with the music of older times I have preached that period of “The Songbook” stretched all through the Tin Pan Alley years up until around the mid-1950s. I am now beginning to accept that perhaps this was wrong. Alternatively I can accept that the bodies of work produced in sheet music form by the Tin Pan Alley publishers form a foundation for the songs that we know and want to include in the “The Songbook”.
I am inclined to suggest that the modern decisions for the songs that “should or are” being included in the Great American Songbook” includes a fair proportion of the tunes published during the years of say, 1895 to 1920.
JAZZ STANDARDS
Before trying to summarize my personal interpretation of this period of popular music I want to bring in another area into the discussion, that of the group of songs we now call “Jazz Standards”
Jazz standards are certainly not all written by specific “jazz composers”. It is reasonable to say that they are musical compositions which are an important part of the musical repertoire of jazz musicians, in that they are widely known, performed, and recorded by jazz musicians, and widely known by listeners.
There is no definitive list of jazz standards, and the list of songs deemed to be standards changes over time. Songs included in major fake book publications (sheet music collections of popular tunes) and jazz reference works offer a rough guide to which songs are considered standards.
Many are originally Tin Pan Alley popular songs, Broadway show tunes or songs from Hollywood musicals i.e. songs from the so-called Great American Songbook. A commonly played song can only be considered a jazz standard if it is widely played among jazz musicians. The jazz standard repertoire has some overlap with blues and pop standards.
The Jazz Age is considered to have been started in about the 1920s, though Jazz historians place the origins of Jazz much earlier. The date probably comes from the commencement of early jazz recording initially on cylinders and later on disks. Along with this comes the element of dance music, clubs, possibly the prohibition era, all of which played their role in popularizing pop sings for dance and the interpretation of may band leaders of these tunes for dancing by the public.
The 1920 commencement date puts the this genre of music performance clearly into the era of the Great American Songbook, but its repertoire includes a lot of Tin Pan Alley publications. The difference in compiling those songs into a grouping of Jazz Standards is not so much the choice of tunes rather the style of performance those tunes lend themselves to; in this case jazz and swing styles, suitable for dancing during that era and even present times for some people.
CONCLUSION
The Great American Songbook is clearly the result of the development of the popular song in America. Being an immigrant country, the influence of Europe and the various cultures that settled in America, and when we look at the song writers and composers during the development of Broadway and Hollywood musicals, the Jewish creative musical and lyrical contribution stands out from the crowd in an outstanding manner.
I would like to propose that in pragmatic terms the era of the Great American Songbook clearly includes the music of the period of Tin Pan Alley productions of sheet music. I do not question that there is a Tin Pan Alley period of great influence on the popular music scene (1895 to 1920 or there abouts) and that “modern” technology in movies, and audio production signaled the end of such great influence.
I could also say that my cursory and subjective, examination of the songs produced in the two eras – 1895 to 1920 and 1920 to say the mid-1950s –reveals that a majority of the songs come from the later period, but by no means is the pre Tin Pan Alley or that period itself, is without reasonable representation in the Great American Songbook.