Weekend Reads: Second-string singers

Cultural anthropologists argue that the 20th century American popular song was the most important artistic creation of America and that the exporting of our popular songs created a worldwide American cultural hegemony. The shorthand term used to describe the hundreds of still-performed American popular songs written from about 1900 to 1970 is the “Great American Songbook.” The famous composers/lyricists/performers of these love songs were once familiar names to most Americans: Cohan, Berlin, Kern, Rogers, Hart, Porter, Gershwin, Hammerstein, Mercer, Carmichael, Van Heusen, Bacharach, Sinatra and Fitzgerald.

Ben Yogoda’s short book (308 pages), The B-Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song (Riverhead Books, 2015), treats the history and culture of this Great American Songbook. The Songbook has three major divisions of songs that are seldom covered in one book: Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood. Yagoda engagingly surveys this beautiful musical landscape.

The title of the book—B-Side—comes from the flip side of a record with the presumed hit on the A-side. The B-side is basically a throwaway song. It is the musical B squad. Yagoda argues that with the coming of rock music in the l960s the great melodic and sophisticated songs of the earlier years ended (the death of Tin Pan Alley). But he claims that from the ashes of the great popular songs of yesteryear rises another generation of popular song composers/lyricists/performers—the B-side—who will stand the test of time: Carole King, Randy Newman, Jimmy Webb, Brian Wilson, Harry Connick Jr., Michael Bublé, and, of course, The Beatles. But Yagoda is so persuasive in arguing the debt we romantic song lovers owe the Italian Catholics, the Jewish immigrants, and the African-American Protestants who created the golden age of the Great American Songbook that his attempt to resurrect the genre fails to persuade.

The new kids on the block, as good as they might be, really are the B-side of the Great American Songbook. As long as proper romance can be engendered by the evergreens of old Tin Pan Alley, Broadway and Hollywood, the upstarts will always play second fiddle to the first stringers.