What makes Tin Pan Alley songs special? This article seeks to answer that question. It gives a short history of Tin Pan Alley. The discussion integrates comments and information on popular songs from many sources—especially from the writings of Dr. John Diamond—and it also incorporates original research and analysis.

I’m in a nursing home, singing with a woman with dementia.  We’re singing “When You’re Smiling.”  Our eyes meet, and I feel like the music is held between us.  It is a common ground where our spirits join. 

This is what I’ve been taught by Dr. John Diamond (and I’ll tell you more about him soon): together, this lady and I can find in the song a sanctuary, a safe haven.   For a moment, we’ll be at peace, and we’ll come away refreshed.  We’ll come away healed—at least for a little while.

Time and again, I’ve seen such healing happen through music.  And so often it has been found in old popular songs, in the “standards.”  Some young fellow gets up to sing and starts with a song that runs all over the map, and he gets nowhere.  Then he tries “You Are My Sunshine,” and everything is smooth sailing.  All of a sudden he knows when to breathe.  He can phrase the song, he can feel the song, and he can make us feel it, too.

So: here’s the problem: what should we sing?  In order to help ourselves, to help others, to draw closer to our loved ones, what should we sing?  What song will provide a safe haven, a sanctuary where we can open our hearts?  Well, for one, Tin Pan Alley songs.  Tin Pan Alley songs are a friendly, welcoming place.  They can so easily become a sanctuary.  And I’ll tell you exactly why.  Read on.

Just look at each decade of the Tin Pan Alley era and you’ll find old friends—“Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home” (1902), “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” (1910), “Look for the Silver Lining” (1920), “Body and Soul” (1930), “Over the Rainbow” (1939), “White Christmas” (1942), or “Music, Music, Music” (1950).  As you can see, there are lots of kinds of Tin Pan Alley songs—but they all hold together as one overall style.  From about 1900 to 1950, a tradition of songwriting produced these songs—songs that became standard items in the repertoires of pop and jazz musicians. 

These songs are not current popular culture—not really.  But, like the big band music written about by Paul Leslie and James Skipper, the songs are “embedded popular culture.”   As William Zinsser puts it, “the songs have become lodged in the nation’s collective memory.”   The tunes turn up behind insurance ads on television.  The lyrics echo in newspaper headlines and cartoons.  They are all around.  They are embedded in our collective memory. 

I fell in love with Tin Pan Alley songs when I was thirteen, when my grown-up sisters dug out our old Ella Fitzgerald records and dragged us young ones to see Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers films.  As an adult, I’ve had the luck and privilege, for a quarter of a century, to study with Dr. John Diamond.  He is a pioneer of holistic philosophy who has done remarkable original research on the healing potential of music—including of Tin Pan Alley songs. 

I’ll try to explain why Tin Pan Alley songs are special, and I’ll draw from many writers to do so.  And, whenever possible, I’ll put together Dr. Diamond’s research with what the other writers say.  To summarize what Dr. Diamond points out: Tin Pan Alley songs are forward-moving, they’re friendly and personal, and, most importantly of all, they are singable. 

First of all, Tin Pan Alley songs are American.  By this I mean, they are free—they are not hide-bound rhythmically. 

The contrast between traditional European and American music, in simple terms, is this: when there are four beats, Europeans emphasize the obvious ones—the first and third beats.  This gives the music a quality that Dr. Diamond usually calls “one-three.”  By contrast, American music, after the coming of ragtime, emphasizes the second and third beats; it is “two-four.”   One-three is the rigid metrical structure.  American music is free—free to move—to weave around between the columns of that structure.

I follow Dr. Diamond’s lead in looking to Henry Pleasants for the best description of this aspect of American music. Let me quote Pleasants at length:

“To him [the jazz musician] the explicit beat is what sends him aloft and keeps him there. It supports his rhythmic, melodic and harmonic flight. He can be with it, ahead of it, behind it or against it. As long as it is there with him, and he with it; as long as his relationship to it is secure, easy and relaxed, he is, so to speak, musically airborne. …

“Basically, this is what is implied by the term, “swing” …. Swinging is, after all, a kind of flying. And the essence of jazz is musical flight, sustained by rhythmic pulsations. …

“Almost all indigenous American music has the beat, more or less, and the performer’s relaxed, swinging relationship to it, whether the specific idiom be ragtime, traditional jazz, swing, bop, rhythm-and-blues, rock ‘n roll, gospel singing, country and western or the songs and dances of the musical. It is this quality of free swinging, with its invitation to free melodic variation, elaboration and invention, that has proved so attractive and has caused this American music to be loved and imitated all over the world.”

Tin Pan Alley songs may not be “jazz” as such.  But they offer what Pleasants describes in the passage above: “the invitation to free melodic variation, elaboration and invention.”  That is a reason why they have become one of the basic foundations of the jazz repertoire. And they offer the same thing to the rest of us, too: structure, yes, but also freedom. 

 The crucial nature of the difference between European and American music is dramatized in a 1999 Broadway revue, Swing!, that pays tribute to the big band jazz of the 1940s.  In a song called “Two and Four,” a stiff-laced, British-accented woman comes out and snaps her fingers on the first and third beats, until the bandleader stops everything and teaches her to snap on the second and fourth beat—“that’s swing!”

We might think that “two-four” is merely an aspect of technique.  But Dr. Diamond has described how it is also an unconscious—or semi-conscious—emotional attitude, as well.  It is a feeling that you have the freedom to move forward.  It is this mentality of forward-momentum that increasingly distinguished the United States as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth century.

Even slow Tin Pan Alley songs are rhythmic.  Allen Forte points out in his study of ballads: “… if there is one stylistic feature that distinguishes the ballad of the Golden Era from the songs of other periods, including those of ‘classical’ persuasion, it is the persistence of the syncopated phrase.”   Either in the composing or the performing, or both, the notes shift around, slipping between the cracks of the regular beat. 

From the mid-1890s onward, some of the rhythmic and melodic characteristics of ragtime and jazz were incorporated into the popular songs of the day.  In his analysis of American popular songs from 1900 to 1950, Alec Wilder points to numerous specific examples, from “You’ve Been a Good Old Wagon” (1895) through Irving Berlin’s “At the Devil’s Ball” (1913), Hoagy Carmichael’s “Star Dust” (1929), and many others, such as “Restless” (1935) and “I Lost My Sugar in Salt Lake City” (1946).  As Forte says about the syncopation in such songs: “These rhythmic characteristics derive from jazz … and are therefore African-American in origin.”   All of these songs are, as Dr. Diamond puts it, “jazzy.”

This sense of rhythmic freedom is not just a matter of the techniques of song composing.  As Pleasants implies and as Dr. Diamond has elaborated upon, no matter if a song is composed without any syncopation whatsoever it can still convey this underlying psychological message to the performer and listener: you are free, free to move forward, free to play between the rigid structures of the musical beat.  

Even the complex rhythms of African music lack this sense of psychological freedom.  It is what people from the Old Worlds did in the New World.  It is the hallmark of American music.  As Nicholas Tawa points out about songs from the turn-of-the-century, “a new restlessness, brashness making no attempt at restraint, and bumptious activity radiated from coon, rag, and march songs.”   Such songs manifest the full-steam-ahead feeling of American culture.

But.  But, but, but—that is not the whole story. 

Tin Pan Alley songs also continue the great European tradition of lyrical melody.  As Gary Giddens states, this was “a time when melodic tranquility and robust rhythms found common cause,” combining “gentle lyricism and foxtrot rhythms”—the dance and the lullaby. 

Tin Pan Alley melody lines are strong—it is as if the song has a spine.  That is one reason why Alec Wilder, in his analysis of these songs, concentrates on what he calls “the singing line.”  

As Nicholas Tawa says of songs dating from as early as the turn-of-the-century, “melody was at the center of every song, even the rag song—whatever its rhythmic attractions.”   In 1934, the Tin Pan Alley publisher Edward Marks made a similar observation.  Marks points out that while “modern, ‘serious’ composers are getting away from melody altogether ….  the Tin Pan Alley composer ...  has not the option of abandoning melody.  He must have it.”   Perhaps this is why, in these songs, the melody acts as a strong backbone. 

James Morris goes farther, claiming that “popular songs of the twentieth century sustained and nourished fine melodic writing to a greater degree than did any other musical style.”   If so, perhaps this is because the composers were, on the one hand, often very sophisticated and, on the other, they were concentrating their talent and energy on creating a strong melody.  The tune was the most important thing.

But the piano parts are important, too—even if, as was usually the case, the performers rearranged the song.  The melodies create a support that the piano part hangs on. 

But, more: these songs can be seen as part of the great piano-vocal composition tradition of European art music.  The songs have what Forte describes as an “underlying structure that provides long-range continuity and the coherence of the whole”—a solid design, a through-line.  

This deeper level of structure is aided by the songs being written in the tradition of the piano—for, as well as the vocal line, there are full harmonic voicings and other complex permutations in the piano part.  The highest note, the lowest note, the first and last notes, the bass lines, the pivotal chords—all are part of the beautiful arch of the song, like the span of a suspension bridge.  

Forte’s analysis of these deep compositional aspects leads him to suggest, tentatively, that, while the songs are “quintessentially American in spirit,” they might also be seen as “analogous to … the nineteenth century German Lieder of classical music.”   Forte goes on to speculate that while “traditional … tonality was in its final phases in art music, it was thriving in American popular music.”  Thus, Tin Pan Alley might fill “a gap in the history of tonality.” 

In a more explicit way, and from a later perspective, Forte is saying the same thing as Edward Marks had sixty years before: in some ways, Tin Pan Alley continued something that classical music stopped doing. 

Dr. Diamond’s research suggests much the same thing: early twentieth-century American popular song picks up and carries forward some of the important positive values of nineteenth-century European romantic music.  Both have what Diamond calls “lyricism.”   While only some Tin Pan Alley songs are sufficiently well-composed, musically, to parallel nineteenth-century European concert music, all of them of this period (whether sophisticated or simple) have this lyricism.

Usually, Tin Pan Alley songs are nice little bundles.  You can easily fit them in a tiny pocket of your memory. 

As Gerald Mast puts it, they are “compact exercises in musical logic”; as Ian Whitcomb describes, they are “neat and tight.”  

The majority have a refrain of thirty-two measures, divided into four parts—so, each part is eight bars long.  Usually, repetition makes them easy to catch on to.  The sections repeat—often with some slight variation, but in such a way that they are easy to learn. 

The most common forms are either AABA (what Gerald Mast referred to as Type I)—where the B section is a “release” from the repetition of the main strain—or the related forms of ABAB or ABAC (Mast’s Type II), where the song is composed in two equal halves.   I’ll come back to this topic, below. 

As Max Morath points out, “lengthier songs are exceptional,” for Tin Pan Alley songs “are almost always accommodated in just thirty-two bars of music.”   They possess, as Raymond Knapp describes, “a strong feeling of periodicity … and the repetition of key phrases”—often this is the title phrase “a kind of built in ‘jingle’.”   From start to finish, they are built to be memorized and sung: both small and light enough to carry around, day to day, and big enough to bear emotional weight, for special occasions.

The emotional journey of a song is constructed from the words as well as the music.  The lyrics of Tin Pan Alley songs—and the way they fit with the music—are as accomplished and unique as the music. 

Philip Furia has been an important critic of these lyrics, pointing out that they drew upon the “vernacular idiom, [the] comic touches, [the] passionate flair” and the “exuberant expressions of love” characteristic of the blackface performance tradition—the stylized theatricalization of African American culture.   They are outgoing and brash.

As Furia points out, the songwriters combined this slangy blackface-influenced style with that of vers de societe.   This is light verse in which, as its anthologizer, Carolyn Wells, puts it, “enthusiasms are modified, emotions restrained.”   Such society verse thrived at the turn of the century and through the 1930s.  It is filled with frequent rhymes—therefore, you might think it is in danger of being forced and over-clever.  Yet, instead, it is full of “ease” and “playful spontaneity.”  

This society verse—and the songs inspired by that style—managed to have a complex, if lighthearted, emotional tone.  They are “tenderly ironical.”   Both the tenderness and the gently ironic tone can be heard in Tin Pan Alley love songs such as “It Had to Be You” or “My Funny Valentine.”

Tin Pan Alley lyrics are conversational—at least, the later ones are. 

Lyricists of the older style used out-of-date language and high-flown sentiments.  In his brief history of early Broadway lyrics, Lehman Engel gives many examples of such un-conversational “word transpositions” as “blossoms fair” (instead of “fair blossoms”).  Engel speculates that “some lyricists employed archaic or archaic-sounding words in order to create a feeling of the long-ago past, or a churchly mood,” by using language like you’d find in the King James Bible.   

For instance, here are some lines from a popular song from 1902, “Because”: “Because you come to me with nought save love / And hold mine hand and lift mine eyes above / … Because you speak to me in accent sweet / … Because God made thee mine.”  It’s an appealing song, and it stayed a standard for decades, but the words are certainly not everyday language.

Contrast “Because” with “They Didn’t Believe Me,” of 1914.  The latter starts out, “And when I told them / How beautiful you are, / They didn’t believe me.  / They didn’t believe me!” The whole thing flows like an everyday conversation.  No “nought save love” or “thee” or “accent sweet” here!  This is an early example of a relaxed, natural-seeming love song, and it influenced many that came later.   As Nicholas Tawa points out, by 1910, “everyday contemporary slang and other vernacular modes of speech now made up a large portion of song language.”   Lyrics became conversation.

Dr. Diamond emphasizes the fact that Tin Pan Alley songs usually use Anglo-Saxon words.   These are the powerful, direct words in the English language.  These have a pithy, punchy quality.  In fact, you get a lot of songs that concentrate on words of one syllable: “It Had to Be You” (1924), “Where or When” (1937), and so forth. 

Dr. Diamond credited Gene Lees with bringing this point to his attention.  Lees writes:

“Cole Porter uses French to light and sardonic effect in such songs as ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’, urging the recipient of the attentions to use her mentality and wake up to reality. But when he wants to evoke strong images and emotions, he turns to Anglo-Saxon.”

Porter contrasts the occasional French-derived word like “mentality” with most of the other words in the lyric, which are down-to-earth Anglo-Saxon ones: “skin” (not “epidermis”);  “part” (not “component”); “give in” (not “surrender”); and so forth. 

In an interview, Harry Mount, the author of Carpe Diem: Put a Little Latin in Your Life, makes a similar point to Diamond and Lees: “People use the Latinate to show off or to be evasive.”  

With that in mind, imagine if Porter had instead written, “I’ve acquired you subjacent to my epidermis.”  Try singing it.  You begin to see the difference?  “I’ve got you under my skin” is a witty metaphor, yet its language is curt and slangy—and direct.

Similarly, “Ain’t She Sweet” (1927) has mostly one-syllable words—Anglo-Saxon words.  Indeed, fifty-seven out of sixty-eight words are of one syllable.  Supposedly, the composer of the song, Milton Ager, was especially proud of the lyricist Jack Yellen’s use of the word “confidentially”—a multi-syllable word derived from old French and, ultimately, from Latin.  But I would guess that Ager and Yellen realized that the other words in the song—the short words all around “confidentially”—set it off like a jewel in precious metal.

From about 1910 through the mid-1940s, Tin Pan Alley songs usually have each single syllable matched to just one note.  Just think of any example: “After you’ve gone/ and left me cryin’.” “Come on and hear/ Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”

There are occasional exceptions.  Sometimes, near the end of a phrase—particularly near the end of a song—the songwriters will throw in an extra note or group of notes.  One example comes with the repeated title phrase of “Carolina in the Morning” (1922) where “morning” comes out on four notes: “mo-o-orning.”  Here the stretching of the syllable comes at the end of a repeated phrase—a mini-cadence, as it were. 

In “Someone to Watch Over Me,” the multi-note syllable is placed on the title phrase at the end of the first section, “me-ee.”  It is the only syllable in the whole song to receive more than one note.  At the end of “Come Rain or Come Shine” (1946), the last word is stretched into a vocal slide: “shi-i-ine”—a kind of blues-styled slur.  

But, more usually, the musical setting is, as it’s called, “syllabic.”  There is one note for every syllable: “I miss you so/ since you went away/ my buddy.”  This makes the songs more conversational, for the words flow without any musical distractions and fancy furbelows.  And it contrasts with many styles before and since. 

For instance, in “Because,” the word “love” has two notes: “nought save lo-ove.”  Hymn words often fit to hymn tunes in the same kind of rough fashion: “Christ the Lord is risen toda-ay.”  In 1913, when Fred E. Weatherly fit his poem “Danny Boy” to the traditional “Londonderry Air,” he used those same kinds of patterns: “the pipe are ca-alling” and “the roses fa-alling” and so on through “mea-eadow” and “sha-adow.” 

These are beautiful songs, and singable enough, but the extra notes catch in my mind, like a bit of mental friction that has to be pushed through.  They are not quite as easy as Tin Pan Alley songs such as “Take me out to the ballgame/ Take me out to the crowd!”

By the 1920s, the fashion was more and more to have one-note, one-syllable.  And it stayed that way for twenty-five years. 

By the late 1940s, however, some writers stray away from that—perhaps most notably, Rodgers and Hammerstein, in their influential musicals, particularly starting with two songs from Allegro (1947), “You Are Never Away” (which features “sta-ar” and “wi-ild”) and “The Gentleman Is a Dope” (where the man is a “pro-o-oblem”).  Even in some of their most famous songs, they violate the syllabic tradition they themselves had helped to establish.  For example, in “I Whistle a Happy Tune” (1951), they set words like “deception” as “de-eception” and “to” as “to-o.” 

This trend continued even more prominently in independent commercial songs of the rock-and-roll era.  In “All I Have to Do Is Dream” (1958), an American pop song from after the height of Tin Pan Alley, you can see how “you” and “life” are on two notes, and the word “dream” is stretched out over either three or even five notes: “dre-e-e-e-eam.”   In fact, this is the “hook” of the song—the really memorable bit that grabs your ear and memory.  But it involves a lot of extra notes—it’s less economical and concise—and it makes the words fit less closely to the melody than in the best Tin Pan Alley tradition. 

Just think how “spot on” is the combination of words and music is in many famous songs: “I wish that I could shimmy like my sister Kate.  / She shivers like the jelly on a plate!” or “Bet your bottom dollar / you lose the blues/ in Chicago” or “You’re the top!”

Notice, too: the syllables are given the correct emphasis.  That’s very important in helping them to seem conversational. 

As Engel says, the rule for the best lyricists was: “Words should be sung as closely as possible to the manner in which they are spoken.”   And, by and large, they manage to live up to this standard.  Again, there are some exceptions—but, overall, it’s true. 

Admittedly, the songwriters do tend to have trouble with words ending in “y,” such as the title word in “Tenderly” (1946).   Of course, it should be “tenderly,” but, in this song, the long note over the last syllable makes it closer to “tenderly.” 

And sometimes they make a wrong emphasis a special effect, such as Irving Berlin does with the word “rubdown” in “You’re Just in Love” (1951), making it “rubdown” when you’d normally say “rubdown.”  As Berlin must have realized, with certain kinds of rhythmic songs you can get away with that, and it even makes the song better.  Philip Furia calls it, in this context, a “clever ragging of words against music,” an unexpected rhythmic emphasis.   But this only works if it is used sparingly, and if all the other syllables and words—the vast majority of the other words in the song—are emphasized conversationally, as they are in most Tin Pan Alley songs.

As Tin Pan Alley style developed, the songs almost always used exact rhymes. 

Before 1925, you get some imperfect rhymes.  Irving Berlin used some: in “At the Devil’s Ball” (1912), he tries for a triple rhyme consisting of “saw” “door,” and “law”: “But the funniest devil that I ever saw/ was taking the tickets from folks at the door./ I even caught a glimpse of my mother-in-law!”  In “Daddy Come Home” (1913), he rhymes “come home” with “I can’t hold my own.” 

But by 1923 Berlin had stopped using imperfect or forced rhymes.  And, after the mid-1920s, you rarely find any writer trying to rhyme “all” with “walls” or “time” with “mine.” 

The college-educated lyricist, Edward Eliscu, tells an amusing story which illustrates the shift to the stricter standards of perfect rhyming.  In 1929, he collaborated on the lyrics for a Broadway show, Great Day!, with Billy Rose, the tough, hustling master of Tin Pan Alley hits such as “You Tell Her, I Stutter” (1922), in which Rose rhymes “around her” with “drown her.”  Eliscu remembers, “Billy seemed astounded that, in spite of confirmed Tin Pan Alley usage, ‘home’ really did not rhyme with ‘alone.’”   In such an encounter, you can see the “smart-ass college kids” teaching the hardboiled veterans. 

Through collaborations and interactions like that of Rose and Eliscu, lyricists were pressured to conform to a new style.  For about twenty years, the songwriters use mostly perfect rhymes, saving near-rhymes for clever surprises, only employed for some specific, witty effect.  You rarely find in a Tin Pan Alley song—one that is meant to be serious—any misplaced accents or imperfect rhymes. 

That changed, in its turn, in the late 1940s and 1950s.  The folk song revival and the spread of the blues tradition began to influence more strongly the commercial New York songwriters.  In this aesthetic, imperfect rhymes are valued as seeming more spontaneous, free, and sincere. 

By 1965, Paul Simon, in “The Sound of Silence”—certainly a serious song—rhymes “brain” and “remains.”  In fact, Simon strays from the Tin Pan Alley style in a number of ways: he gives more than one note to a syllable, at the same time emphasizing unimportant words (like “was”) or unaccented syllables (making “softly” into “softly-y”).  In doing so, Simon, like many writers since the 1960s, is perhaps paying tribute to certain older traditions, such as those of folk songs and concert songs.  Altogether, the effect is very different from any Tin Pan Alley song.

The writers of Tin Pan Alley, at the height of their skill, made it a point of major importance that the words and syllables are correctly emphasized and that the rhymes are exact.  As Stephen Banfield puts it, “the melopoetic formula is strictly accentual and almost entirely syllabic.”   I want to emphasize the “and” in that last statement: it’s the two things together that help make the songs so conversational. 

These factors make the song easier to sing and to memorize—and, after all, what are songs for, but to memorize and to sing? 

Tin Pan Alley is a rare tradition, because its writers stuck so strongly to these aesthetic principles.  In doing so, the songwriters had to develop a great deal of discipline and craft. 

So … the rhymes help make the song easy to memorize. 

And these songwriters don’t just put rhymes at the end of the lines, but also in the middle of phrases—what are called “internal rhymes.”  For instance, as Philip Furia points out, Irving Berlin in “Say It with Music” (1921) can refer to “a melody mellow played on a cello,” and thus make three rhymes.   Similarly, in 1922, Gus Kahn writes, in “Carolina in the Morning,” about “strolling with my girly where the dew is pearly, early in the morning.” 

As lyricist E.Y. “Yip” Harburg pointed out, “Where the rhyme falls makes it either hard or easy to remember.  … You want to rhyme in as many places as you can without the average ear spotting it as purely mechanical.”   This “makes a song memorable”—and makes a song easy to memorize, too, which is something a little bit different than “memorable”!   For instance, “The Star Spangled Banner” is memorable, but I haven’t found anybody yet who said it was easy to memorize!

Tin Pan Alley songs got more personal as the decades went by.  A lot of the early songs are rather impersonal—they are set up as stories about other people. 

For instance, “After the Ball” (1892) is a story about a man who has never married: “A little maiden climbed an old man’s knee, / begged for a story …” And then the man gets to tell his story. 

In “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home” (1902), we are told about Bill’s deserted wife, about the fact that “she moans the whole night long.”  And then the lyric quotes what she says: “I’ll do the cooking, honey,” and so forth. 

These types of songs flourished before 1910.  Nicholas Tawa made a survey of songs from 1890 to 1910 and found that most have third person verses, just as does “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home.”   Such songs were set up as stories about people, rather than personal expressions by people. 

By the late 1910s, this has changed.  Probably, if “Bill Bailey” had been written later, the line would say, “I moan the whole night long.”   As Raymond Knapp puts it, “songs had moved away from the self-contained narratives … to a type of song whose basic task was to articulate expressively a moment.”  

Indeed, by the mid-teens, we see the growth of the “torch song” mentality in blues songs such as “St.  Louis Blues” (1914) or bluesy pop songs like “I Ain’t Got Nobody” (1917), which are personal statements from start to finish.

Dr. Diamond has pointed out that the truly powerful Tin Pan Alley songs are the slow ballads—the love songs.   These lyrics are the most personal of all, and the best of them emphasize the direct, emotional communication between the singer, the “I,” and the beloved, the “you.”  They are, as Diamond calls them, “I-you” songs.   In the words of James Morris, they “explore the ‘you and me’ vein: ‘I’ sing of my feelings for ‘you’ and ‘your’ response to ‘me,’ and both are clearly matters of great importance.”  

These song-protagonists are speaking strongly of their emotions to someone they love, as in “You Made Me Love You” (1913): “You made me love you …/ You made me happy, sometimes, / you made me glad.  / But there were times, dear, you made me feel so bad.” 

These “new and more personal lyrics,” as Morris calls them, increased in number after 1910.  They stayed a dominant part of Tin Pan Alley right through to the changeover to rock-and-roll.  Indeed, after doing a survey of songs of 1955, near the tail end of the tradition, Donald Horton stated, “American popular songs are frequently written in the mode of direct address, of intimate conversation, in which the speaker and the person spoken to are identified as ‘I’ and ‘you.’”  

These songs most often say “I love you.”  In a 1934 interview, lyricist Dorothy Fields articulated this as the songwriter’s goal:

“I’m always looking for a new way to say ‘I love you’.  You see, we phrase his love-making for the boy who isn’t very facile with words.  We give him something that he can sing softly as he dances with his girl or sits in the moonlight, soul wracked with emotions he can’t express.”

And Fields certainly succeeded in expressing loving ardor, in steamy songs such as “I’m in the Mood for Love” or “Don’t Blame Me.”  Fields could write tough and sassy, but she could also be tender.  In fact, “tenderness” is a word that recurs memorably in two of her lyrics: the famous “The Way You Look Tonight” and the less well-known “Let Me Look at You,” with its lovely phrase, “passionate tenderness.”

The performers also sought to encourage loving intimacy between people.  Indeed, how could they help but do so, concentrating on lyrics such as those that Fields and her peers wrote? 

The singer, Sylvia Syms, said, “Maybe there’s a boy and girl in love sitting there … well, when I sing to them, I’d like to become part of their love affair.  I’d like to make them fall more in love with each other.”   Song and singer together aspired to help people behave lovingly towards each other, to become closer together.

As Isaac Goldberg noted, “Most song is but an oft-renewed technique of saying ‘I Love You,” and, because of this, love songs “speak for the speechless.”  

In a therapeutic setting, Dr. Diamond uses them in just that way:

“If I’m working with a couple, … the changes we get singing “Always” are remarkable.  We get them to hold each other’s face, up close, and sing that.  … But there aren’t that many [of such love] songs, and we need them.  … The world desperately needs … songs that help us to be one with the other person.” 

And the few songs that Dr. Diamond has found that strongly help these couples are all from Tin Pan Alley: “Always,” “True Love,” “You’re the Only Star (In My Blue Heaven),” and so forth. 

Some of these Tin Pan Alley love ballads—a very, very few—have an additional sincerity, a believability beyond that of most songs.  With these songs, Dr. Diamond has shown, “the listener, when hearing it sung, believes that the writer wants to express love, really wants to.”   Irving Berlin could achieve that, with “Always,” while Cole Porter could not, with “True Love.” 

This was a particular strength of Jerome Kern, in ballads such as “They Didn’t Believe Me,” “All the Things You Are,” and “Dearly Beloved.”   In these “believable” songs, the songwriters (particularly the composers) are helping the singer and the listeners feel they can open their hearts and fuse with another, to be, as Dr. Diamond describes, “one with the other person” while “the two hearts melt together so as to create a new being, their Love.” 

Tin Pan Alley songs are sometimes derided because they stick so closely to the topic of romance.   Songs about love dominate the repertoire.  In 1941, John Peatman found that ninety-two percent of songs in the Hit Parade had, as he put it, “sex interest.”   It is their limitation, but it is also their glory. 

Isaac Goldberg and Sylvia Syms and Dorothy Fields would agree with Dr. Diamond: we all need ways to say “I love you,” and we all want to be told it.  It a message that human beings most want to hear and feel. 

The “I-you” love song continues today, of course, but with diminished significance, and without Tin Pan Alley’s mix of other wonderful qualities.  As James T. Carey found out, surveying songs of 1966, by the rock era “themes other than love and courtship” had risen from thirteen percent to over thirty percent of the prominent pop songs.   The love song was in decline.

Tin Pan Alley love songs are very handy.  As Horton noted, most such songs could be sung by either gender, with “no clues to the sex of the speaker … and the same verses could be used by either sex in addressing the other”—therefore, almost anybody can use these songs to communicate to almost anybody else.   The songs are about love, “dating and courtship,” and conversational, “as though the songs were fragments of dialogue.”   They are for everyday use.

Also, both words and music become increasingly intimate.  Dr. Diamond has shown in his research how the melodies, too, start to be focused close up—as close as six inches away.  

This new closeness coincides with the start of American cabaret, where you could dine and be entertained, yes—but you were also able to interact with the performers and participate in the entertainment.  Sometimes, in this format, the singer could go from table to table, fielding requests and singing them to each party in turn, then and there and unaccompanied.   Of course, they also had to do the opposite—to sing to the whole room, loudly overriding the instruments. 

Dr. Diamond has found that “My Melancholy Baby” (1912) demonstrates the transition to closeness allowed by cabarets.  It has two focuses—both far away and close up.   And look at how well the words go with that close focus: “Come to me, my melancholy baby, / cuddle up and don’t be blue … / Smile, my honey dear, / while I kiss away each tear.”  The lyrics agree with the melody in inviting intimacy.  By the mid-1910s, you get more of such songs—ones that focus about six inches away. 

Soon, the songs become not just close, but touching.  The development of the telephone, the radio (which insinuated itself into American culture in 1922), and the, oh, so sensitive electric microphone (which became common in 1925), made people accustomed to performances which sounded as if the singer was very close to the listener.  As Morath puts it, “a new breed of vocalists … could croon ballads into the warm intimacy of the carbon microphone.”   Both performer and listener could imagine that this intimacy and warmth were physical and real. 

These technological developments form the background for those melodies that Dr. Diamond finds, those which promote the feelings of it being okay to touch and be touched.  

The earliest song with this level of intimacy that Dr. Diamond has found is “What’ll I Do?” written by Irving Berlin in the first months of 1924.  The inspiration for this waltz might have been an earlier one that Berlin had written when Dorothy, his first wife, died: “When I Lost You” (1913).   Certainly, he wrote “What’ll I Do” while on a holiday with Dorothy’s brother. 

Perhaps, in remembering Dorothy, Berlin had found a new capacity for intimacy himself … perhaps, because of this, he was ready for a new relationship.  At any rate, within three months he met his second-wife-to-be, Ellin McKay.   Supposedly, she said on meeting, “Oh, I love your song, ‘What Shall I Do’”!   Although she could not accept the slangy contraction of the title phrase, she might have sensed the promise of intimacy at the heart of the song.

Berlin followed up “What’ll I Do” with other “touchable” songs in 1925—such as “Remember” and “Always” (which became his wedding gift to Ellin). 

Soon other songwriters were also writing such deeply intimate ballads: Rodgers and Hart with “Here in My Arms” (1925), Vincent Youmans with “More than You Know” (with lyricists Billy Rose and Edward Eliscu, 1929), Harry Warren and Al Dubin with “I Only Have Eyes for You” (1934), Cole Porter with “Easy to Love” (1936), and so forth.

More often than not, the words of Tin Pan Alley songs are positive.  They talk about love, or the humor of life, or optimism, or high spirits. 

For example, in 1941, John Peatman found that in hit songs about love, only thirty-four percent were about unhappiness in love.   Even such torch songs, which sometimes get weepy or vindictive, are often alleviated with positive gestures.  They can show real affection—as in “If We Can’t Be the Same Old Sweethearts, We’ll Just Be the Same Old Friends” (1915)—or humor—“Oh! How I Laugh When I Think How I Cried over You” (1919). 

Even more on the positive side: one major topic of the central period, from 1920 through 1950, is optimistic philosophy—“Look for the Silver Lining” (1920), “The Best Things in Life Are Free” (1927), “I’ve Got a Pocketful of Dreams” (1938), “Powder Your Face with Sunshine” (1948), and so forth.  

The sentiments are friendly.  This is what Alec Wilder probably meant when he described his childhood joy at returning again and again to see the 1921 Broadway show Shuffle Along, “to hear all those friendly songs”—songs like “I’m Just Wild About Harry” and “Love Will Find a Way.”

Perhaps sometimes Tin Pan Alley “cheer up” songs become a bit simplistic or corny.  But counterbalancing them in the repertoire are songs of great emotional sophistication—especially songs from the Great Depression, from 1929 through 1941.  Timothy Scheurer and a number of other commentators have discussed these at length.  Scheurer says that the lyrics are marked by “understatement ….  wit and, occasionally, irony; sophisticated rhymes schemes; and … the use of allusions.”   These songs refer to the world of the sophisticated—to luxury items and to great art, literature, and philosophy—but always with lightheartedness.

Dr. Diamond finds that Depression-era songs are different from other Tin Pan Alley songs.  They contrast with those in the 1920s and, again, those of World War II and after, which tend to depict life as a sunny dream.  Those in the Depression contain hints of the nightmare, those darker elements that complicate our human existence.   You can see this dark and sophisticated outlook in certain song titles, such as “Dancing in the Dark” (1931) or “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” (1936), as well as in witty but poignant torch songs, such as “Just One of Those Things” (1935) or “It Never Entered My Mind” (1938). 

There are, from this era, even songs of social protest, such as the lament of an unemployed man, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime” (1932), or the imagistic description of lynching in the American South, “Strange Fruit” (1939).  From Pollyanna to Karl Marx—almost every philosophy was within the range of Tin Pan Alley songs.

As the Tin Pan Alley style developed, it increasingly allowed for the songs to have depth and power—even when playful and lighthearted, but perhaps especially in the serious ballads.  For, although the refrains are “short and compact,” as David Jenness and Don Velsey put it, they are also long enough to have drama—to have a clear beginning, middle, and end.  

The songs create an emotional journey, one that climaxes and resolves.  This is done through both the words and the tunes.  Wilder and Forte both point out many of the musical techniques composers used to build these satisfying emotional archs, such as creating a busier, more notey melody in the middle sections, or ascending to higher notes near the end of the song. 

Dr. Diamond has explored two other facets of Tin Pan Alley from this era—positive qualities in certain songs that enrich the repertoire.  Between 1925 and 1945, most pop songs are in the structure AABA.   In other words, they have a main melody which is immediately repeated once.  Then it breaks away into what was called a “release”—a new, different melody.  Then it returns back to the initial strain.  Many famous songs use that format, such as “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” (1925), “I Got Rhythm” (1930), “Blue Moon” (1935), and “Over the Rainbow” (1939).

One special part of these AABA songs is the release.  The melodies of their middle sections often soar freely, and the lyrics either generalize or particularize or otherwise intensify the emotional message set up in the opening sections.  They truly do seem to “release”—musically and emotionally. 

Dr. Diamond demonstrates that these release sections convey a feeling of what he calls “efflorescence”—like a bud that comes into full bloom, the release has an energy that flowers and spreads its perfume and pollen to the world.  

Interestingly, this phenomenon starts during the era when American popular culture did flower and spread across the world—from the mid-1910s onwards, and especially after the mid-1920s.

These four sections of the song—AABA—are like a miniature drama, rising to a climax in both the story and the music, and then resolving.   Songwriter Johnny Mercer gave this advice to his young friend Margaret Whiting, at the start of her singing career: “Think of a ballad as a one-act play.  Find the top moment in a song and build to that.”   Frank Sinatra was a master at this.  As singer Julius LaRosa appreciated (and, of course, tried to do himself), Sinatra “was able to turn a thirty-two bar song into a three-act play.”   Morath calls them “three- to four-minute dramas of poetic wit and wisdom.”   The songs are charged with events and emotions.

Mercer calls the Tin Pan Alley song a one-act play—LaRosa, a three-act play—I think of it as a four-act play.  Either way, the principle is the same. 

Sometimes the songs themselves make this drama-like structure clear.  In 1918, Irving Berlin wrote a song, “First Act, Second Act, Third Act,” which follows a love plot through as the lyric develops, from section to section.  Lorenz Hart wrote words—ones that were never used—for a song, in which he starts the sections, “Act one,” “Act two,” and so forth.  He later wrote different words for that same melody—it turned into “Blue Moon”!  Even in its final form, you can see that the song builds in emotional tension, like a play, and then resolves.  It can be performed like a dramatic monologue.

Dr. Diamond points out, too, that the AABA songs are like a four-movement symphony.   The first section is a strong introductory statement, like a fanfare.  The second is like the scherzo movement—it takes off into the air like a little dance.  The release is the third movement—the slow one, where everything deepens.  And then the final section is a grand conclusion, wrapping it all together.  When the songs are thought of in this way, these little, seemingly mundane miniatures expand, filling out with energy and vitality.

Songs from musicals have yet another special quality—they have greater depth.  Dr. Diamond shows that such songs have an additional strength—that, as he puts it, they “go deeper.”  

Other writers seem to sense the greater richness to Broadway songs.  For instance, Alec Wilder writes in such as way that “theatre song” becomes his highest form of praise, over and over again.   David Jenness and Don Velsey agree: “Wilder was right … the deeper songs did tend to come from shows.”  

As Dave Laing says, musical comedy songs are “anchored to a specific angle or aspect of a love affair.”   That symbolic “anchor” plumbs down to a deep layer of human experience.  They were written to be the expression of individualized characters in emotionally-charged situations—and you can feel it, even when the songs are lighthearted and witty. 

Many hits from the Tin Pan Alley era are from Broadway musicals or movie musicals.  Take a year between 1903 and 1949 and you’ll find that anywhere from ten percent to sixty percent of the hit songs were featured in musicals.   Just look at these—“Kiss Me Again” (1905), “Tea for Two” (1924), “A Foggy Day” (1937), “Blues in the Night” (1941), “Some Enchanted Evening” (1949), and so on. 

Whether written for shows or not, Tin Pan Alley songs are singable. 

All these songs were written for amateurs to sing—and hum, and whistle—and dance to—but especially to sing—for the average “man in the street” or “woman in the street” to stand on the corner at the streetlamp and to improvise harmonies with some other guys or gals, or to loll out on the porch on a summer night and play the ukulele and sing together, or to sit in their living room, playing at their upright piano and singing. 

A song like “Blue Moon” shows how unique the chemistry is in a first-rate Tin Pan Alley song: it can be a dramatic monologue, but it can also be a song to sing all together around the campfire.  It works equally well either way.  (That’s one of the reasons it’s become so over-done, to the extent that one of my friends who most loves these songs nevertheless hates to hear “Blue Moon.”)

Tin Pan Alley came at a crucial pivot point in human history—just between the age of live music and the age of mechanized music.  Sure, in the latter part of the 1800s, some people could buy large music machines, with discs or cylinders, that played various compositions—a kind of giant music box.  But these were limited to the rich. 

And, sure, commercial sound recordings started up in 1889 and became popular enough to have million-sellers by the early 1900s.   But records did not really challenge the prevalence of live music until the end of World War I.

So, at first, Tin Pan Alley was kept alive by the amateur singer, buying sheet music and taking it home, where he or she might play it on the ukulele or piano or banjo.  People heard the songs demonstrated in all the live venues that you can imagine, from the organ grinders out on the sidewalk, to music stores, music sections in department stores, outdoor band concerts, beer gardens, musical comedies, and so on and so forth.  Pluggers would frequent these places and get the audience to sing along—therefore, the songs were designed for group singing. 

The peak of sheet music sales came in 1910, marked by the success of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” and “Down by the Old Mill Stream,” both topping six million copies.   These are the kinds of song you hear and almost can’t resist joining in on. 

The year before, however, in 1909, there was a change that signaled the way things would go in the future: the copyright laws were altered, and suddenly the music publishers got two cents for every piano roll or recording that got sold.  Therefore, the decade of 1909 to 1919 was a transition to the era of the record.  Not all the time, but sometimes, music publishers could make more money by getting a song recorded by a top recording artist than they could by getting ordinary people to sing it themselves. This was the start of a long, slow shift from people making music themselves—without electronics—to being passive listeners.  It took forty years, from 1909 to 1958, for passivity to win out definitively. 

Records seemed to triumph in 1921, when suddenly the profit from record sales beat sheet music sales.  Then records sales went down—then up, then down again.  Throughout the 1920s, the profits kept shifting back and forth—sheet music, records, sheet music, records.  Thus, songs of the 1920s perhaps strike the most perfect balance between a highly personal style—suitable for professional performance, sometimes complex or idiosyncratic—and the simple, jolly, communal, “join-in-ability” of amateur singing.

Of course, folk songs are also written for amateurs.  Indeed, they are written by many (anonymous) amateurs.  But here’s one thing that makes a Tin Pan Alley song a little better than traditional folk songs for us today: it is a product of the age of electronics.  You can feel the sophistication and you can feel the machine rhythms, but it’s still singable. 

Like “Blue Moon,” Tin Pan Alley songs achieve a balance between the “feel” of folk music, designed for all to sing, and the “feel” of music meant to be performed by professionals using electronic technology, such as microphones, recordings, and so forth.

So, Tin Pan Alley was the first great musical style to emerge from an electronic world.  And because of electronic media—records, radio, talking pictures—Tin Pan Alley songs spread throughout all the places around the world where the United States had influence—and, remember, the U.S.A. had a newly-strong, global imperial power following the War in the Phillipines in 1898.

In waves, American pop music and dance took Europe by storm—in 1903, 1911, 1925, and so on.  My friends have gone into a nursing home in Germany and sung “Tea for Two,” and all the residents hum along, for they all know it.  And, from the European countries, Tin Pan Alley songs sailed and flew throughout the colonies and empires of Europe, as well. 

In 1955, the theatre artist Robert Breen was touring Egypt and heard a concert of “American Folk Music”—but it wasn’t, it was all Harold Arlen songs: “Stormy Weather,” “Blues in the Night,” and so forth.  The Egyptian conductor refused to believe the tunes were not “old folk ballads” of the United States.   Tin Pan Alley songs permeate international culture in a way that makes people lose track of their original context. 

Tin Pan Alley was the first new music of the global era, yet, amazingly, it is rooted in the middle-class parlor and the neighborhood street curb.  Its importance is immeasurable because it is part of the present that links us to the long ages of the past. 

Dr. Diamond puts this point forcibly:

“There have never been songs like Tin Pan Alley songs, before or since.  They are America’s great contribution to world culture—in a sense, to human history.  I don’t know if Jennifer Lopez or P. Diddy have heard Al Jolson sing or even heard of him. I don’t know if they know ‘Always’.  But Al Jolson and ‘Always’ are in them, somehow it’s there—just as rap is already there, latent, in ‘Always’.  Tin Pan Alley is in all of us who live today.”

Tin Pan Alley combined a unique set of virtues, and, due to a coincidence of historical circumstances, took on an unprecedented importance not only in English-speaking middle-class culture, but in global culture.  They are of high quality, and they appeared at a momentous time, at a turn in human history.

Like most of his generation, the journalist William Zinsser grew up with Tin Pan Alley songs:

“The America of my boyhood was a self-entertaining nation. Every home seemed to have a piano and at least one member of the family who could play it, and every five-and-ten-cent store sold sheet music of the latest hits.”

But even as Zinsser grew up, this situation changed.  The balance between live and electronic, between participating and passively listening, tipped over towards mechanization and professionality, starting in the mid-1940s. 

Look at what happened. 

First, electronic tape began to be used, so that even “live” radio broadcasts weren’t actually live anymore.   That was 1946.

Les Paul began to record his electric guitar over and over, layering his own music to create something that no one could duplicate on the back porch.  That was 1947. 

Soon, top singing stars were alone in the studio, dubbing their vocals over pre-recorded accompaniments, losing the immediate interaction with the musicians.  That was 1948.

Thanks mostly to the hits of Les Paul and his singer-wife Mary Ford, the overdubbing of singers became the highly-popular “Sound” of the early 1950’s. 

Then guitars replaced pianos and big-band instruments as the basic medium for young people learning music.  The link was particularly strong between the electric guitar and young men, who found, in basements and garages, their outlets (in both senses of the word).

Then multi-track recording and artificial reverberation—these became standard items by the late 1950s. 

All this enabled the “wall of sound” aesthetic of producer Phil Spector—a thick, highly-manipulated texture—and then the use of electronic feedback as part of rock.  What people listened to grew further and further from the music that could actually be made by people without an electronic outlet to plug into!

Sanjek points out that there was a “short-lived resurrection of the sheet-music business in 1957,” and then “that market collapsed again”—“it was no longer the quality of a song that counted, but its sound on recordings.”   In 1958, at last and definitively, “records became more important than sheet music.”   And why write songs that are singable, if people are not going to be singing them?

Yet another significant shift came in the 1970s—and perhaps this is the most important of all: music became not just reproduced by a machine, but made by a machine.  Suddenly, the recording studio became dominated by the drum machine and the synthesizer. 

No longer did the machines merely amplify the music—now they controlled it.  Soon, digital recording technology transformed even acoustic performances into machine-gun bytes. All of these factors made music more and more mechanized, less and less directly expressive of the voice and, thus, of the animating breath of life. 

While all this was going on, some songwriters were still making songs in the tradition of Tin Pan Alley style.  Some of these are wonderful to sing, such as “Hello, Dolly” (1964) or “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever” (1965).  

David Jenness and Don Velsey praise about one thousand of these later songs.  But, even as they praise, they identify aspects of these songs that make them, yes, wonderful for a singer to put over in a club, but hard for the amateur to sing through from start to finish, whether in the shower, on the porch, in the living room, or on the street corner. 

I’ll quote extensively from Jenness and Velsey in what I write below—not to turn their words against them, but because they articulate so well changes in Tin Pan Alley-tradition song style in the second half of the twentieth century.

After about 1950, the old-style songwriters were no longer “dominant.”   The composer Arthur Schwartz found that out in 1951, when the RCA Victor record company refused to record the songs from his Broadway show, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.   The writers lost their confidence—and you can hear it in their songs.  As Jenness and Velsey note in regard to certain songs, the tunesmiths and their songs became “demoralized.”  

When the Beatles came along, even the youngsters—those composers and lyricists who had replaced the old Tin Pan Alley tradition with a rock-and-roll-influenced style—were shaken.  And the singers were, too—as Connie Francis recalled: “It was all over by 1969. It was terrible. With the British Invasion, I did what all American artists did: I cried a lot.”   Songwriter Ellie Greenwich, with many recent hits to her credit, recollects that, when the Beatles’ songs hit the charts in the United States, “mortal fear set in to the writers, so we didn’t know what to write … I think everyone of us panicked … we got scared.”   And Francis and Greenwich were only in their twenties at the time.  Imagine what Harold Arlen felt, at age sixty! 

The musician who specialized in only writing songs faded from prominence in the popular song market, and the advent of the singer-songwriter was under way.  With this change, the last remnants Tin Pan Alley were transformed beyond recognition. 

John Kander, composer of “Cabaret,” reflected back on the late 1960s: “What was the point of trying to lay in a bunch of hit songs for a show if there was no one willing to record them?  Rock groups figured out they could make more money if they wrote their own material rather than depending on professional songwriters.”   The younger generation of Broadway songwriters just gave up trying to create stand-alone song hits.

Even the old-time writers, who might be thought secure in their adult-market niche, sound as if their morale was lowered.  By the late 1960s, some of the Tin Pan Alley-tradition songs sound as if they’d been written before.  As Jenness and Velsey opine, they are “hackneyed” or “shopworn” or “contrived.”   Others are “not fully convincing”—they “meander”—they’re “adrift.”   The style had lost its vitality, its spine. 

As if to compensate, the songwriters start trying too hard.  Again, in the words of Jenness and Velsey, many of their songs come across as “strenuous,” “vehement,” “unremitting,” “hard-sell,” and “overdone.”   More than that, some are “manic” “demented,” “frantic”—they sound like Irving Berlin “on speed.” 

If these songs were people, you wouldn’t want to invite them into your living room.  They’re not friendly. 

Such songs are meant for the professional, meant to hold the stage, not share the home.  And they show it.  They are “hard to sing,” “requiring lots of voice,” “big declarative,” “grandiose,” and “overblown.”   Or they sound “stretched”—they’re simply too long to sing in the shower, “a bit bigger, a bit longer, a bit more complex” than most of the older Tin Pan Alley songs.   And that “bit” can make a huge difference when you’re trying to sing a song through in the shower or around the living room piano.

Often enough, too, later lyrics are more about sex—and more openly about sex—than about love.  Certainly not about romance.  Relations are no longer idyllic—as they were in, for example, the poetic metaphor of “Stars Fell on Alabama”—or domestic—as in “My Blue Heaven.”  Instead, the protagonists of the songs brag insinuatingly “The Best Is Yet to Come” (1959), or celebrate casual sex as “The Friendliest Thing Two People Can Do” (1961).  Fun and witty as they are, there’s a lack of tenderness and heart in such songs.

Tin Pan Alley songs paint a big universe on a small canvas, they are simple yet complex, both personal and dramatic, generalized but particular, and akin to folk music but rooted in modern life.  They are usually poetic yet conversational, positive but sometimes bittersweet.  In special cases, they can be deep and intimate and believable. 

They are as familiar as is advertising.  Just take the case of Irving Berlin: I hear on television his song “Steppin’ Out with My Baby” playing behind an image of a baby—even though it’s an ad for life insurance!  And, for months, riding public transport in Manhattan, I looked up and saw the “Poems on the Subway” sign—it’s the lyric for Berlin’s “Always”!  And that’s not to mention “White Christmas,” which remained for many decades the most-recorded song—ever!

And thus, we live in the twilight of the Tin Pan Alley era.  It’s not popular culture, in the sense that it’s so rarely “top forty” material, yet it’s still around.  It is, indeed, “embedded popular culture.”  “Tea for Two,” “Night and Day,” “Blue Moon,” “Summertime”—these are songs recognized and sung around the world.  Even if we think we don't know them, we know them. 

They show us the music in everyday language: “Everybody’s Doing It Now,” “Just One of Those Things,” “It Never Entered My Mind,” “Accentuate the Positive”!

The songs demonstrate that the lyricism of classical music and the rhythmic freedom of jazz can fuse—and can be domestic and intimate and usable.  Like wallpaper in a room, Tin Pan Alley is part of the background for our musical lives.

And our musical lives are important.  Singing is important—in fact, it’s good for us—more so than just listening.   And having something you can really remember and sing through is important—something friendly and accessible, yet sophisticated.  Tin Pan Alley songs are friendly—and, which is slightly different, they are user-friendly.

That is why Tin Pan Alley songs—and the ways they are special—are important. 

So next time you’re taking a seventh-inning stretch and singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” or you’re shopping in December and suddenly realize you are hearing “White Christmas” over the public announcement system for the thousandth time, or you turn on the television and a young contestant on American Idol is singing “At Last” or “Over the Rainbow” … think about it. 

And sing along.
 

(Please note again: The footnotes for this article have not yet been loaded onto this internet version.)

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Banfield, Stephen. “Popular Song and Popular Music on Stage and Film,” in The Cambridge History of American Music, edited by David Nicholls, 309-344. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Berlin, Irving. The Complete Lyrics of Irving Berlin, edited by Robert Kimball and Linda Emmet. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.

Betrock, Alan. Girl Groups: The Story of a Sound. New York: Delilah, 1982.

Bordowitz, Hank. “Daddy’s Girl: Connie Francis’ 40 Years in Music,” Sheet Music Magazine 20:1 (Jan.-Feb., 1997): 4-5, 57.

Carey, James T. “Changing Courtship Patterns in the Popular Song,” The American Journal of Sociology 74:6 (May 1969): 720-731.

Diamond, John. "Best Songs (Addition),” unpublished audiotape, Feb. 13, 2004. South Salem, NY: Diamond Center, 2004.

————— “Composing—We Gotta Write Love Songs,” edited unpublished audiotape, T493. South Salem, NY: Diamond Center, 1998.

————— “Difference Between Songs Written for Shows and Not,” unpublished audiotape, Jan. 29, 2004. South Salem, NY: Diamond Center, 2004.

————— Facets of a Diamond: Aspects of a Healer. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books; Bloomington, IL: Enhancement Books, 2002.

————— The Healer: Heart and Hearth. Bloomingdale, IL: Enhancement Books, 1997.

————— “’Important’ Music and the Fear of Freedom,” unpublished audiotape, Jan. 8, 2006. South Salem, NY: Diamond Center, 2006.

————— “Speaking Voice—Forward Movement—Gall Bladder 20—Jazz,” unpublished audiotape, Sept. 12, 1996. South Salem, NY: Diamond Center, 1996.

—————  “Mellifluous Music,” unpublished audio lecture.

————— “Music and Identity: The Vox Pop Is Pop,” unpublished edited audiotape, T410. South Salem, NY: Diamond Center, 1995.

————— “Music Which Is Singable,” unpublished audiotape, June 19, 2003. South Salem, NY: Diamond Center, 2003.

————— “Songs and Intimacy,” unpublished audiotape, Feb. 12, 2004. South Salem, NY: Diamond Center, 2004.

————— “The Turning Point in Film and Song,” unpublished audiotape, Mar. 22, 2004. South Salem, NY: Diamond Center, 2004.

Dunning, John. On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Eliscu, Edward. With or Without a Song: A Memoir, edited by David Eliscu. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2001.

Engel, Lehman. Their Words Are Music: The Great Theatre Lyricists and Their Lyrics. New York: Crown Publishers, 1975.

Forte, Allen. The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era, 1924-1950. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Furia, Philip. The Poets of Tin Pan Alley: A History of America’s Great Lyricists. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Furia, Philip, and Michael Lasser. American’s Songs: The Stories Behind the Songs of Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Garber, Michael G. “Reflexive Songs in the American Musical, 1898 to 1947.” Ph.D. dissertation, City University of New York, 2006.

Gardner, Edward Foote. Popular Songs of the Twentieth Century: Volume I—Chart Detail and Encyclopedia, 1900-1949. St. Paul, Minn.: Paragon House, 2000.

Granata, Charles L. Sessions with Sinatra: Frank Sinatra and the Art of Recording. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2004.

Gavin, James. Intimate Nights: The Golden Age of New York Cabaret. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991.

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This article is copyrighted by Michael G. Garber, March 2008