VOLUME 23 #3

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image of Ben Yagoda's book B-side
Photo by Evan Krape

What killed the great American song?

OUR FACULTY | There’s a line in journalism professor Ben Yagoda’s new book that he finds quite telling: “People are fascinated with the period right before they were born.”

Perhaps that’s why he chose to focus on the decline of the Great American Songbook—the uniquely American collection of “great songs” from the 1920s-1950s—in his most recent book, "The B-Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song."

Called “a spirited history of American popular music” by The New Yorker and hailed for “humor and colorful anecdotes” by Entertainment Weekly, the book opens in 1953, the year before Yagoda’s birth.

That was the year Arthur Schwartz, a prominent member of “Tin Pan Alley” (the moniker for such famed music publishers and songwriters as Irving Berlin, Ira Gershwin and Schwartz—whose hits were sung by the likes of Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Ella Fitzgerald) brought a lawsuit against the broadcast and recording industry, accusing them of a conspiracy to not play their songs.

What killed the great American song, Yagoda wondered. As it turns out, “There was no villain. Just historical forces.”

Those forces are the heart of The B-Side, which traces broad musical trends from the 1920s into the mid-1960s through a series of intertwined stories. Among them are the battle between two competing licensing organizations, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers and Broadcast Music, Inc.; the schism in jazz after World War II; the impact of radio and then television; and the bitter, decades-long feud between Mitch Miller and Frank Sinatra.

In this excerpt shared with the Messenger, Yagoda writes about Tin Pan Alley’s frustrations at the turning musical tide of the early 1950s.

From The B-Side

What was getting played? When he turned on the radio, Schwartz could only shake his head. What came out of the box—and had been coming ever since the end of the war, it seemed to him—were novelty numbers, lachrymose ballads, simplistic jingles, hillbilly hokum. The smash hit of the previous year, 1953—number one on the charts for eight consecutive weeks and in the top 10 for a total of 17—was Patti Page’s “The Doggie in the Window.” The writer was not a cowboy or a hick but a 32-year-old Atlantic City native and Tin Pan Alley pro named Bob Merrill. Merrill (born Henry Levan) specialized in novelty numbers, most of them recorded by Columbia artists, and many of them vaguely regional. But “Doggie,” with its insistent waltz beat, simplistic melody, and nursery school lyrics—which, once heard, positively could not be extracted from a listener’s head—was somehow emblematic, not only of Merrill’s output, but of this particular moment in American popular song.

Interviewed by Cue magazine in 1953, Merrill said, “Don’t get me wrong. I’m no Tchaikovsky. I can’t read or write a note. I compose all my songs on this toy xylophone I bought at the five-and-ten for $1.98.” He said he put numbers on the xylophone keys so he could easily transcribe the melody. “You can’t fool yourself with fancy arranging,” he said. “All my hits have a very simple, hummable melody.” At that point, Merrill claimed he had earned more than $250,000 from his songs. That emboldened him to purchase a new, better xylophone, which cost $6.98.

By way of explaining his success, Merrill told Cue his songs were “all about America, they are all wholesome, and they are all happy.”

Had the world turned mad, or just imbecilic? That was the basic question the old-line songwriters continually asked one another over corned beef sandwiches at Lindy’s or Nate ’n Al’s, or in brief conversations in the lobby of the Brill Building, the Times Square office building that for decades had been the epicenter of songwriting and music publishing. The whole thing was a mystery. As Schwartz later said, referring to his colleagues, “Their conclusions were the same as mine, that the simultaneous change in our position as writers of songs that could receive exploitation could not be coincidence or the result of the atom bomb or the Russian preparation for the next world war… It must be somebody’s doing.”

At this point, the “somebody” who had sabotaged the songwriters, in their increasingly certain estimation, was actually an interwoven collection of entities: the biggest radio networks, CBS and NBC; the record companies they owned, Columbia and RCA Victor, respectively; and a song-licensing organization they had collectively formed more than a dozen years earlier, Broadcast Music, Inc., commonly known as BMI. BMI was a competitor to the venerable association Arthur Schwartz, Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin and everybody like them belonged to.