[Dixielandjazz] Irving Berlin books reviewed - Long Read, But Interesting

[Robert Ringwald]

Mr. Berlin Himself
"The Irving Berlin Reader" by Benjamin Sears (ed.)
"Irving Berlin's American Musical Theater" by Jeffrey Magee
by John Shaw
Los Angeles Review of Books, October 28, 2012
Irving Berlin had a socko surprise for the opening night audience of 1915's Stop!
Look! Listen!, his second full-length Broadway score. There was no bigger songwriter
working the street than Berlin, then 27 years-old and four years into his reign as
Tin Pan Alley kingpin. He had established himself with several solid hits even before
his first mega-hit, "Alexander's Ragtime Band," sold two million copies in 1911.
In 1913, a profile in Green Book Magazine praised him as "beyond all question the
world's most consistently successful writer of popular songs," whose consistent success
was "absolutely without precedent." By 1915, he had the clout to pull together a
stunt so splashy that it's hard to imagine its equivalent today.
Berlin and producer Charles Dillingham had packed Stop! Look! Listen! with such once
lustrous, now-forgotten singers and comedians as Gaby Deslys, Walter Wills, Florence
Tempest, Marion Sunshine, and Harry Fox. But on opening night, an even bigger star,
not listed in the program, waited in the wings. With the closing number under way,
"Everything in America Is Ragtime," no less than John Philip Sousa marched his celebrated
brass band onstage, playing the song. The house went wild. Gaby Deslys, the leading
lady, was thunderstruck and stopped singing until Sousa urged her to continue. Berlin
and Dillingham hadn't let the cast in on the surprise.
The Sousa anecdote comes from Jeffrey Magee's Irving Berlin's American Musical Theater,
the first book-length study of his theatrical work; the Green Book Magazine piece
appears in The Irving Berlin Reader, a career-spanning anthology of writings on Berlin
edited by Benjamin Sears. Taken together, the two books suggest that we have barely
begun to apprehend the scale and scope of Berlin's career. Most people know Berlin
as one of the top contributors to the Great American Songbook, a master of the love
ballad and the rhythm song, and the author of "White Christmas" and "God Bless America,"
ubiquitous cultural phenomena that transcend the status of "hit songs." Usually considered
alongside other Great American Songbook composers (such as George Gershwin, Cole
Porter, Richard Rodgers, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, Harry Warren, Hoagy Carmichael,
and Fats Waller) and lyricists (like Ira Gershwin, Porter again, Lorenz Hart, Oscar
Hammerstein II, Yip Harburg, Johnny Mercer, Dorothy Fields, Al Dubin, and Andy Razaf),
Berlin certainly belongs in this company, perhaps even at the head of it. But even
this picture fails to capture his dominance over the popular music of the 1910s and
early 1920s -- as a songwriter, vaudeville star, publisher, theater owner, and impresario
-- or the cultural authority he wielded later in his career.
Berlin's longevity and adaptability were unique: he started before all of the above-named
songwriters except for Kern, and outlasted most of them, too. The distance Berlin
traveled from his first self-invention to his last may have been as great as any
popular songwriter. His ragtime-era songs were the rough equivalent of early rock
and roll.
"My Wife's Gone to the Country (Hurrah! Hurrah!)," was as noisy, vulgar, and sexual
in 1909 as Billy Riley and The Little Green Men bellowing "My gal is red hot / Your
gal ain't doodley-squat" in 1957. A Jewish refugee from the Russian pogroms whose
family came to America in 1893 when he was five, Berlin came of age in an urban milieu
of rowdy bars and vaudeville houses that was as disreputable in its day as the rural
roadhouses and urban street corners that birthed rock and roll. Just as the mid-fifties
and early sixties gave us the Stroll, the Twist, the Hully Gully, the Watusi, the
Mashed Potato, the Jerk, and the Fly, Berlin's early success coincided with a profusion
of dance crazes. Though ragtime had been popular since the 1890s, it didn't immediately
inspire the nation to take up social dancing. But the turn of the decade brought
a proliferation of animal dances -- the Turkey Trot, the Grizzly Bear, the Snake
Dip, the Kangaroo Hop, the Wallaby Jump, and -- to name the one that lasted -- the
Fox Trot, invented by Vernon and Irene Castle to fit the rhythms of W.C. Handy's
"Memphis Blues." Berlin did his part: his "Grizzly Bear" was a hit of 1910, and his
1911 followup, "Everybody's Doin' It Now" ("it" being the Grizzly Bear, not, or maybe
not, you know, it) was even bigger.
The lush canopy of Berlin's oeuvre grew from scrappy vaudevillian roots, and the
theater remained a prime venue for his work. Magee, who teaches music and theater
at the University of Illinois and is the author of a previous book on swing pioneer
Fletcher Henderson, is an apt reader of Berlin's songs; at his best, he combines
the lyric-oriented acuity of Philip Furia and the musical expertise of Charles Hamm
(authors of excellent book-length Berlin studies). The book's real contributions,
though, are Magee's fresh research and stimulating insights into Berlin's stagecraft.
Magee brings the atmosphere of Berlin's early shows to life. In revues and book musicals
of the 1900s and 1910s, extravagantly unpredictable comedians would go off script
and talk directly to the audience. If people laughed, the business stayed. Singers
could add songs, unrelated to any plot, on any night of the show, but Berlin bucked
convention: from 1914's Watch Your Step, his first full-length production as sole
songwriter, Berlin refused to allow the interpolation of other writers' songs in
his shows, unless the collaboration was agreed to from the start. One Berlin specialty
that is rarely mentioned today was the extended, complex montage of classical tunes
fitted with satirical lyrics. Watch Your Step featured the ghost of Verdi complaining
-- to a Verdi melody -- of his treatment in the show. In such freewheeling surroundings,
a surprise visit by the world's most famous brass bands fit right in.
*
Before the advent of original cast recordings in the 1930s, many of the non-hit numbers
from Broadway shows went unrecorded, making the newspaper reviews unearthed by Magee
one of the only sources of information about how they might have sounded. Watch Your
Step included another innovation with which the songwriter is rarely credited. The
New York World called Berlin "this virtuoso of syncopation who introduced cow bells,
tin pans, squawkers, rattles and other election-night musical instruments into the
modern dance orchestra." In 1914, tin pans and "squawkers" (whatever they may have
been) made for successful novelty entertainment. The entertainment world didn't shun
the triviality that "novelty" connotes, and Berlin's innovation was quickly forgotten
-- hit today, gone tomorrow.
Three years after Berlin brought the noisemakers into the Broadway pit band, the
French composer Erik Satie wrote parts for typewriter, foghorn, and milk bottles
into his score for the ballet Parade, the famous extravaganza by Diaghilev's Ballets
Russes that boasted a scenario by Cocteau and sets by Picasso. The typewriter and
foghorn remain one of Satie's claims to fame as a pioneer of musical modernism, and
the contrasting fates of Berlin's techniques and their seemingly independent reinvention
by Satie point up cultural differences between popular and classical music, or, as
the distinction was known at the time, between entertainment and art. Since Beethoven,
ambitious classical composers have worked on the stage of musical history, aiming
for posterity by looking backward and forward simultaneously. This Janus-faced gaze
suggests a gap, the possibility of something missing between history's past and posterity's
future -- namely, the present.
Which is precisely what Berlin kept in focus throughout his long career. Berlin worked
at staying current, plundering the past or exploiting momentary fads as occasion
demanded, with little or no apparent concern for his relationship to music's past
-- or future. This is true of many other pop writers, but Berlin's grit and resourcefulness
meant that he succeeded longer than any of his peers, or anybody since. Staying up-to-date,
in Berlin's day as in ours, required continual engagement with ever-changing musical
fashions. "Alexander's Ragtime Band," though hardly the first rag-themed popular
song, won Berlin the nickname "King of Ragtime" on the strength of its commercial
success. History hasn't recognized this title as legitimate, justly giving the crown
instead to Scott Joplin, the greatest composer of instrumental piano rags. The Berlin
Reader includes a fine article by Charles Hamm that addresses the accusation that
Berlin stole Joplin's music for "Alexander's Ragtime Band." Hamm's examination of
the evidence ultimately confirms the judgment of ragtime scholar Edward Berlin (no
relation to the songwriter): While several measures of Joplin's "A Real Slow Drag"
are similar to the verse of Berlin's tune, "the resemblance is not extensive and
could not [...] be called a theft." And while Berlin was one of the many white songwriters
to work in the originally African-American style of ragtime, no evidence supports
the rumors that he paid a black ghostwriter to write his tunes.
In 1917, a few months after the first commercial recordings of jazz became available,
Berlin wrote "Mr. Jazz Himself." Jazz was now king, and Berlin's tricky, infectiously
syncopated tunes like 1921's "Everybody Step" and 1922's "Pack Up Your Sins and Go
to the Devil" became known as quintessential "jazz songs," which didn't necessarily
mean what history has come to call "jazz," but instead signified, at the time, songs
performed in the jazz style. When swing -- considered a distinct style from jazz
-- came in the 1930s, Berlin contributed such standards of the repertoire as "Cheek
to Cheek" and "Let Yourself Go."
After World War II, keeping up sometimes meant looking back. Rodgers and Hammerstein's
Oklahoma! (1943) started a fad for nostalgic shows on western themes; Berlin responded
with Annie Get Your Gun (1946), which took place in the era of Berlin's childhood
and became the biggest hit of any of his stage shows. As late as 1962's Mr. President,
his last complete show, he was still making an effort to keep pace with the latest
dances; five decades after "Grizzly Bear," he wrote "The Washington Twist." By this
time, though, he had finally lost the country's rhythmic pulse, and neither the song
nor the show was a hit.
For Berlin, staying contemporary wasn't only a matter of musical style. Current events
saturated his work. His 1918 Army show, Yip Yip Yaphank, introduced the soldier's
perennial lament, "Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning." In 1932, near the peak
of the Depression, he wrote "Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee," with a lyric fashioned
from such cliches of the time as "just around the corner," "rainbow in the sky,"
and "the clouds will soon roll by." Another song from the same show laced similar
bromides with vinegar: "Long as the best things in life are free, / I say it's spinach
/ And the hell with it." The heartrending "Supper Time," written from the point of
view of an African American woman who has to tell her children that their father
has been lynched, came in 1933, six years before Billie Holiday first sang Abel Meeropol's
more famous "Strange Fruit." But many of his 1930s successes made common cause with
Hollywood's escapist efforts to distract audiences from their economic troubles,
most memorably in the hit-laden scores for the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers vehicles
Top Hat and Follow the Fleet.
Uneasy about a looming European catastrophe in 1938, he wrote about "storm clouds"
gathering "far across the sea" in the little-known verse to "God Bless America."
(The complex, fascinating tale of the relationship between Berlin's anthem -- one
of the few songs that Berlin claimed as being an expression of his personal feelings
-- and Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Time" is a story for another occasion.)
In 1940 he lamented the storm clouds' breaking with "It's a Lovely Day Tomorrow."
In 1942 he wrote another war show, This Is the Army. In his Broadway hit of 1950,
Call Me Madam, he celebrated the post-war boom, confirming an earlier prediction
with "It's a Lovely Day Today," and a year later he rewrote the same show's Eisenhower
number, "We Like Ike," as "I Like Ike," helping to popularize a phrase and a Presidential
candidate.
For more than 40 years, Berlin addressed his present moment with up-to-date music
and timely, often topical, lyrics, keeping up with the changing styles and tracking
the innovations. In the introduction to 1943's Penguin Book of Sonnets, editor Carl
Withers wondered why "'experimentation,' which as a single cultural trait has come
to be highly valued in science and mechanics, is still popularly undervalued, or
unvalued, in the arts." Withers was not talking about popular music, Broadway, or
Hollywood. Those weren't the arts, in the view of the time, they were entertainments.
In the popular arts of the Hollywood film, the Broadway show, and the songs that
went with them, however, innovations -- new rhythms, new sounds, new ways of putting
images together -- have always been prized, as long as they went over with an audience,
as the rattles and "squawkers" of Watch Your Step showed. Berlin was conscious of,
and apparently comfortable with, the ephemerality of his achievements, and seems
to have agreed with the distinction between art and entertainment. In 1939, he coolly
assessed the inexorability of the march of musical fashion in the lines, "Ragtime
is dead and so is jazz / And swing will leave us cold." And 25 years earlier he he
had written, "Popular song, you will never be missed / Once your composer has ceased
to exist, / While Chopin, Verdi, Beethoven and Liszt / Live on with each generation."
Despite these predictions about the obsolescence of his songs, many have lasted,
and some have made their way into the everyday fabric of contemporary life in a way
that almost nothing from the twentieth century classical repertory has. So far, at
least, Berlin lives on with each generation.
*
Magee and Sears treat seriously an aspect of Berlin's art that hasn't lasted: his
attraction to blackface minstrelsy. When Berlin was breaking into show business,
blackface -- as used by white performers like Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor and black
ones like Broadway star Bert Williams and, early in his career, jazz legend Jelly
Roll Morton -- was an established part of the vaudeville scene, as were songs and
routines ridiculing Jews, Irish, Germans, Italians, Native Americans, "rubes," and
Chinese. Like many of his contemporaries, Berlin wrote his share of this material.
He didn't exempt his own tribe, writing a breakthrough hit for Fanny Brice, "Sadie
Salome Go Home," which made fun of a Jewish stripper and her naive boyfriend, along
with other "Hebe" songs, as they were known in the trade. If they were popular, Berlin
wrote them; when they stopped being so, he stopped.
Berlin appears not to have personally been a bigot. As the producer of This Is the
Army, with its all-military cast, he led the first integrated Army unit in American
history, and insisted on presenting the show in integrated theaters. He stood up
for Ethel Waters, the African American star of his 1933 revue As Thousands Cheer,
which featured her searing rendition of "Supper Time"; when her white co-stars objected
to taking a bow with her, Berlin gave them a choice: Share the curtain call with
Waters, or cut it altogether. The Berlin Reader includes a 1942 article from the
Richmond Afro-American that objected to the word "darky" in his song "Abraham." Berlin
read it and ordered his publishing company to change the lyric.
But it was too late to change the word in the movie it appeared in, 1942's Holiday
Inn, or to remove the blackface makeup from the visage of Bing Crosby, the star who
introduced it. According to a memo discussed by Magee, Berlin had originally conceived
"Abraham" to be sung by an African-American singer or choir. Except for the word
"darky," the rest of the lyric -- a celebration of Lincoln's emancipation of the
slaves -- wasn't insulting. But the makeup was, which Berlin seemingly failed to
understand. A year after Holiday Inn, the film version of This Is the Army again
brought out the burnt cork for a staging of "Mandy," a racially inspecific song that
was already old-fashioned when Berlin introduced it in Yip Yip Yaphank, and which
he had been keen on reprising in the new show. The scene could be taken as a self-referential
nod to the showbiz conventions of an earlier era, but no amount of contextualization
can evade the degrading nature of blackface, and Berlin's inability to fully grasp
its offensiveness reveals him to have been of his time in less than admirable ways.
Berlin's own judgment was that This Is the Army was the biggest thing he ever did.
To the extent that we can leave aside the antiquated racial attitudes that the "Mandy"
number reflected, that assessment rings true. . He volunteered to write and produce
the show to raise money for the Army Emergency Relief Fund. From its Broadway run,
its American tour, and the 1943 film adaptation, This Is the Army earned an estimated
$10 million for disabled veterans and widows and orphans of soldiers. After its money-making
run, Berlin toured with the show through Europe, North Africa, and Southeast Asia,
playing for American and allied troops, often near the front lines, continually writing
new material to address local circumstances. He added four songs for the London run
(including "My British Buddy"), five in Italy (including "The Fifth Army Is Where
My Heart Is," in honor of the troops the company was performing for), a song for
New Guinea radio ("I'm Getting Old in New Guinea"), and one for the Philippines ("Heaven
Watch Over the Philippines"). Berlin was also one of the show's stars, reprising
Yip Yip Yaphank's "Oh How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning" in his World War I uniform,
which still fit.
The show brought Berlin to the height of his cultural authority. Joshua Logan, who
directed the Broadway run, wrote a hilarious account, included in The Berlin Reader,
of the songwriter's ability to cut through red tape where Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme
Commander of the Allied Forces, couldn't. No-nonsense, battle-seasoned commanders
held Berlin in awe, and not just because they were star-struck. Berlin was raising
money and morale on an unprecedented scale, changing the way the Army conducted business
by integrating his unit, and donating not only his time and talents, but his copyrights.
To this day, the royalties for the songs from This Is the Army and several others,
including "God Bless America," go completely to charity. Irving Berlin's estate does
not own them.
*
It says something about Berlin's productivity, longevity, and significance that the
only serious complaint that I can level at Benjamin Sears's Berlin Reader is that
it's far too short. It omits fascinating, hard-to-find material, such as the eloquent
introduction Kate Smith gave for the first performance of God Bless America. Sears,
a professional singer who has released four CDs of Berlin's songs, may not have had
the authority to make the book longer. Oxford University Press published an indispensable
Duke Ellington Reader in 1993; it weighs in at 500 pages. The same publisher's Richard
Rodgers Reader (2002) is 350 pages, their George Gershwin Reader (2004) is only 300
pages, and the present book is just over 200 -- not an encouraging trend. It isn't
as though there's a dearth of material to choose from: the Library of Congress holds
uncounted thousands of contemporary articles and documents in its Irving Berlin Collection.
Even given the limitations of length that Sears seems to have been working under,
I would have liked to have seen more documentary sources and fewer latter-day analyses,
which one doesn't have to visit the Library of Congress to see. Similarly, while
Irving Berlin's Musical Theater runs to a relatively robust 394 pages, it's still
a chapter too short. In an otherwise thorough survey of Berlin's stage career, why
does Magee omit discussion of his 1949 Broadway show Lady Liberty? The book is also
less readable as it might be, despite a wealth of engaging material: in accord with
reigning academic style, Magee sometimes hides a charming anecdote or pithy quote
in an endnote.
My complaints about both books are ultimately quibbles -- when dealing with a life
and career as capacious as Berlin's, something is bound to be left out. What can't
be quibbled with is the standard line on Berlin: that he was a great songwriter,
a wide-ranging, consistently inventive composer and lyricist. Despite his five-decade
pursuit of the hit of the moment, many from the "classic era" of the 1920s through
the 1950s, and even a handful of antique gems from the 1910s, have survived. While
not neglecting the hits, both Magee's book and Sears's anthology give lively accounts
-- more detailed than conventional biographies have managed -- of two fascinating
moments when Berlin rose above the ranks of his peers: The 1910s, when he was the
new pop phenom, and World War II, when he became an actor on the stage of world history
-30


-Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
Amateur (ham) Radio Operator K6YBV
916/ 806-9551

Women will never be equal to men until they can walk down the street 
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