USA > New York > New York City > New York panorama : a comprehensive view of the metropolis > Part 26
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In summarizing some of the important Negro influences of the 19th nd early 20th century on popular music, two interesting developments hay be noted. The first, and most important, is that Negro folk music, long with white folk music, proved a constant freshening influence on opular music, even though the latter most often referred back to this ource material only in diluted form. (White folk music influenced our opular song by way of individual composers rather than in waves of in- uence. It was also an indirect influence, in its inter-relatedness with Negro folk music.) The second development is that the direct Negro contribu- ion to the popular music field became to some extent merely a corollary f the white influence. Thus the impact of new materials, felt so definitely the 19th century (as exemplified, say, in the source-materials of a tephen Foster or a James Bland) was to subside until the emergence of azz music, except in the case of individual composers. The popular music eld was sufficiently strong, economically if not culturally, to take into its haw a variety of influences, assimilate them and utilize them in songs the atterns of which continued to show a fundamental vitality despite the ikewarm sentimentalism that usually marked their construction.
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Tony Pastor and Tin Pan Alley
To bring this story up to the birth of jazz-the second major folk in pr fluence after that of the minstrels-it is essential to review the latter par of the 19th century, this time confining ourselves to the immediate en virons of the Alley. No mention of that period would be properly docu mented without the name of Tony Pastor. His first theater was at 58. Broadway; his second at 201 Bowery, that thoroughfare whose venal glo ries were celebrated in The Bowery Lass, The Boys in the Bowery Pit One of the Boys, and (most famous of all) The Bowery, by Charles H Hoyt, introduced in A Trip to Chinatown, which had its debut in Madi son Square Theatre on November 9, 1891. Tony Pastor's third theater, th one usually meant when Tony Pastor's is referred to, was on East Four teenth Street. It opened October 24, 1881, and one of its specialties wa. the topical song, a sort of March of Time to music.
From Tony Pastor's came such variety stars as Pat Rooney (who sang his own Are You the O'Reilly?), Nat Goodwin, Gus Williams, Denmar Thompson, Neil Burgess, John and Harry Kernell, May and Flora Irwin Evans and Hoey, Delehanty and Hengler. Appearing at Tony Pastor's it that era of minstrels was to the profession what "playing the Palace" be came in the great Keith days before Hollywood took Broadway over the hurdles and national networks brought in the era of "guest stars." Harri gan, of Harrigan and Hart, was also one of the song-writing team of Har rigan and Braham. They composed many comic Irish songs, among them The Mulligan Guards, a number satirizing the pseudo-military groups that sprang up after the Civil War. Subsequently, as Kipling relates ir. Kim, this became the rallying song of British Tommies billeted in India. Tony Pastor was himself an entertainer who introduced to the pre-auto- mobile age the lilting strains of Daisy Bell. Most of us have forgotten the title but not the words of this song about the-bicycle-built-for-two, a song that the English composer, Harry Dacre, first conceived as he was trying to get a bicycle (built for one) through the American customs.
Tin Pan Alley was by 1880 the leading musical machine-shop in the land, though its prominent composers were not always New Yorkers. From 1880 to 1900 there were, however, several New Yorkers who con- tributed to the annual crop of popular songs. In the Good Old Summer Time was written by Roy Shields and George (Honeyboy) Evans, natives, and the number had its debut in the Herald Square Theatre. Sweet Gene- vieve was the work of Stephen Foster's erstwhile collaborator, George
Co
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Cooper. Walking Down Broadway (which Spaeth puts in the 1850's) as the work of William Lingard and Charles E. Pratt, and used the ex- lk in ression "O.K." Joseph J. Sullivan, whose father owned a small dairy pararm in what is now Long Island City, wrote Where Did You Get That e er docu Hat? and introduced it at Miner's Eighth Avenue Theatre. The Band Played On was also written by a New Yorker, John F. Palmer, and had 58 :s debut in the Harlem Opera House.
glo The 20th century, so far, has made a much more impressive showing Pijn respect to composers of New York origin. Several of the big names in s H he song-writing field are those of natives of Manhattan or its sister bor- ladipughs. But the point is of only relative importance. The Alley belonged theo New York, and the tyros from the hinterland could take it or leave it. Our Jsually they took it. Meanwhile, of course, the regional aspects of the wacountry were beginning to be submerged in a national pattern, a process acilitated by the development of transportation. Witness Charles K. Har- angis's After the Ball, written in Chicago and introduced in Milwaukee in a nad New York show, Hoyt's A Trip to Chinatown.
vin While the Alley ground out its lesser products, the predecessors of incommercial pops, it also developed a tradition of songs worthy of com- beparison with folksong. Paul Dresser and Harry von Tilzer were in their thetime outstanding exponents of this tradition. Both were from the midwest ri-and brought with them the genuineness that characterized the best Ameri- can folk music. Among their works, the commercial pops they ground mout for the ickies (persons lacking in taste) of their day have been osforgotten, or are remembered only in a spirit of whimsy; but their con- in tributions to the heritage of popular music remain significant. Paul Dresser a was immensely popular in the 1880's and 1890's. A New Yorker from the midwest, he is mainly remembered for On the Banks of the Wabash e(words by brother Theodore Dreiser) ; but the number of his that is most played today, a favorite of the jazz improvisers, is My Gal Sal.
Dresser died in 1906. By that time the second great composer of popu- lar music in the period was enjoying a fame that was to be his for years to come. Harry von Tilzer was not a New Yorker, but he spent the greater part of his life in Tin Pan Alley-it was he, in fact, who is said to have given the Alley its name. Von Tilzer, like Dresser, produced the kind of popular music that seemed to be in demand. His songs, sentiment and all, emerged from the social environment of which they were a part. Thus we have a number in the coon song tradition, What You Goin' to Do When the Rent Comes Round ?; a toast to his own background, Down Where
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the Wurzburger Flows; a rousing predecessor of the motherhood cycle I Want a Girl Just Like the Girl Who Married Dear Old Dad; a fewab lines, much parodied, anent the popularity of excursion steamers, On them Old Fall River Line; a triumph in teardrops, A Bird in a Gilded Cage, fo and an easy-to-sing perennial, Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie.
In the early years of the 20th century, an up-and-coming New Yorker m with an eye to the main chance wrote Will You Love Me in December A. You Did in May? This young man, James J. Walker, subsequently found other niches for his talent, not the least of which was the Tammany ler mayoralty of New York City. Tiger or Indian, Tammany itself had made u one of several comebacks. Gus Edwards and Vincent Bryan were all set io to give the National Democratic Club smoker the season's bringdown (deflationary influence or person) in the way of a ditty entitled In Mid Merry Old Oldsmobile; but the Tiger's whiskers were out, and the boys gave them Tammany instead. That was in 1905. In those days Tammany Hall was next door to Tony Pastor's, and Casey Jones was just a scab who hadn't joined the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. Those who tripped the light fantastic did it in the genteel measures of the period by gaslight.
William Jennings Bryan took his cue from Tin Pan Alley and told the H world to take back its gold and change to silver. In 1907, a line of chorus girls in daring knee-length bathing suits tripped out across the stage of the Jardin de Paris, on the roof of the New York Theatre in Longacre Square, singing: "And they'll say on the beach, there's a peach, there's a peach of a Gibson bathing girl." This first Ziegfeld Follies established the Ziegfeld spectacle as an annual event. It had "The Taxi Girls" with
"To Hire" signs on their red tin flags. It also featured May Mackenzie, a principal figure in the Harry K. Thaw case, and the comedienne, Noras Bayes, who sang When Mother Was a Girl. This period might also beus called The Merry Widow or Floradora era. The former (first produced in t New York in 1904, at a Third Avenue beer hall known as the Orpheum ) m gave birth to reams of romantic melodies and led directly to the musical "production" films of Hollywood; the latter went lightly operatic and heavily platitudinous with Tell Me, Pretty Maiden. b
Some years before the World War, a singing waiter at the Chatham, a drinking place on Doyers Street near the Bowery, wrote Alexander's Ragtime Band. This composition showed the influence of the improvised b f ragtime that was to lead into jazz. Aside from being of sufficient musical importance to give its composer a place in the annals of hot music, the
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de words of Alexander's Ragtime Band were prophetic-especially the lines fewtibout the bugle call, played as it was never played before, that would thenake you want to go to war. The war clouds were over Europe, and be- ge ore jass had quite become jazz the Alley, like other moulders of popular opinion, had fallen into a kind of anticipatory war propaganda, in the ke midst of which I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier was a still small A voice, rather badly pitched.
ind The period between 1900 and the World War witnessed a great gen- angeral enthusiasm for dancing, in which ballroom dancing, a particularly dairban phenomenon, replaced group and folk dancing. The ragtime dances, sefor the most part, were hybrids, representing the current interest in rag- somgime music and in Continental light music. The latter was epitomized so ibly by the Merry Widow Waltz that there appeared I Want to Be a ys Merry Widow, Since Mariutch Learned the Merry Widow Waltz, and nyfinally (from the pen of a gentleman who sensed the shift in public taste ) holI'm Looking for the Man Who Wrote the Merry Widow.
ho Another phenomenon that persisted into the 20th century was the dia- od lect song. At about the time Robert Cameron Rogers' poem, The Rosary, was being set to music by Ethelbert Nevin and designated "semi-classical," he Harry von Tilzer ground out a commercial pop called Mariutch Make-a usda Hootch-a-Ma-Cootch. This and many other numbers celebrated the of Italian immigrant; and the Italian dialect comedian became a familiar retype along with the Irish, Negro, German and Jewish.
a The smash hit of the 1920's, Yes, We Have No Bananas, has Papa ed Handel to thank for its resounding invocation. It was a pure nonsense th song and a relief to the public from the usual run of sentimental trash e foisted upon them by a music-publishing tradition that had, and still has, ra some pretty low ideas about the mass mind. But the fruit business takes bejus ahead of our story. By 1914, Irving Berlin was well on the way to his in transposing piano and the exploitation of his talent for the production of melodic pops. Other composers already in the limelight were Lew Brown, al Jerome Kern and Gene Buck. 1)
Id The foundations for modern ballroom dancing had already been laid before the war. The old-fashioned waltz gave way to more intimate steps: the hesitation, the turkey trot, the bunny hug, the grizzly bear, the tango and later the fox trot. A popular turkey trot was Tres Moutarde, imported d from France, the title of which indicated that ragtime music was consid- lered hot, in somewhat the same sense that jazz is today. Sigmund Rom- e berg, who subsequently gave his all to the sweet school and to operetta, 1,
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wrote a few turkey trot pieces-Some Smoke and Leg of Mutton. Mayor John Purroy Mitchel invented a step called the "twinkle" and Bernardps Baruch, better known as a banker, also won cups in dancing contests. Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, however, disapproved of such abandon and per- suaded Vernon and Irene Castle to invent the "Innovation," a touchless tango, which was introduced at one of her parties but did not become popular.
Dance fads brought prosperity to such dine-and-dance places as Busta- noby's and Louis Martin's Café de l'Opera. It also popularized the tea dance, which had seemed so extraordinary when it was inaugurated at the Café des Beaux Arts. But jazz, full-blown, had hardly reached Chicago when the country embarked on its first World War. Dance orchestras were, in fact, orchestras, not bands. The bass was still self-respectingly bowed, and music made up in manners what it lacked in melody.
The New York regiments had gone to the Civil War singing Shoo Fly, Don't Bother Me. The song favorite of the Spanish-American War was taken from the minstrels, There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town To- night, the music of which was written in 1886 by Theodore Metz, band- leader for the McIntyre and Heath Minstrels. Words by Joe Hayden were added in 1896. As for the World War, Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever, played amid scenes of marching men in uniform and flying regimental colors, probably made more business for the recruiting sergeants than any- thing especially written for the purpose. And while the folks at home were being stimulated with Prepare, U.S.A. and Just a Baby's Prayer at Twilight, the doughboys themselves were entertained with similar num- bers, including the revived Silver Threads Among the Gold. Parodies on this and other wartime songs were discussed by Philip Sterling in the April 1935 issue of New Theatre magazine. One of the Silver Threads variations begins in this macabre fashion:
Put your wooden arms around me, Hold me in your cork embrace.
We can find sufficient evidence, too, that the Negro regiments had songs in their kit other than They'll Be Mighty Proud in Dixie of Their Old Black Joe. There was a characteristic stanza that went:
Joined the army for to get some clothes, Lordy, turn your face on me. What we're fightin' about nobody knows, Lordy, turn your face on me.
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yo ar sts Among the major numbers that helped to build up and sustain the war psychology were George M. Cohan's Over There; Johnson and Wenrich's Where Do We Go from Here ?; the enormously successful Keep the Home Fires Burning; Goodbye Broadway, Hello France; the sentimental Rose of No Man's Land; and that most popular of the stuttering songs, m K-K-K-Katy. But before passing judgment on composers who helped put he war across, it might be well to recall our original premise: that popu- ta ar music-and this applies particularly to its shortcomings-emerges as teupart of a social pattern.
the 00 At the top of the sheet-music business in the early 1920's, after the World War, a smash hit might last more than a year and reach a sale of as,000,000 copies. By 1931 the life-span was reduced to three months and he probable sheet sale to a mere 300,000 copies. Several factors brought ibout this change. While the phonograph did much to reduce sheet-music ysales, the radio was the main factor in cutting down the life expectancy asof a song hit. That anguished request, "Please turn off the radio," is occa- o· sioned as often by the monotony of hearing the same tune time after time us by the undistinguished quality of so much of the popular music on rc he air.
When the radio came in, it edged out the phonograph and all but al sounded the knell of sheet music. As usually happens in such crises, the composers and lyricists were left holding the bag. But recently, through e the organization of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Pub- # ishers, the claims of the rank and file song-writers have been getting more attention. It is significant that the 20th century witnessed not only a re- a habilitation of the popular music field but of its composers and interpret- eers as well. At the same time that ASCAP began to come to life to express sin some measure the needs of composers, Local 802 of the American Fed- eration of Musicians cleaned house and elected a rank and file progressive slate of officers. The new administration of Local 802 has done much to protect and improve the status of musicians in general.
Blues into Jazz
In bringing the story of popular music up to the 1920's, the introduc- tion of jazz into this music is of sufficient importance to warrant separate treatment. Among the elements that went to make up ragtime were those that were later to engender the jazz strain itself-the potpourri of the American songbag and particularly the folk music of the Negro people.
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In ragtime a sense of its quasi-folk origins was preserved in low places.in The pianist of the honky-tonk and working-class dance halls improvisedth ragtime and played the blues as well. It was this improvised ragtime thatw showed the closest relation to the jazz that succeeded it.
Late in the 19th century this style produced its greatest composer, theco Negro Scott Joplin. He wrote Maple Leaf Rag, still a favorite with holy musicians, and he also tried his hand with ragtime material in classica.ras forms. Among other numbers that have come down into jazz is Ida, Sweeral As Apple Cider, written by Eddie Leonard, the minstrel star, in 1903 th Long before 1900, honky-tonk pianists were encouraged with the admoni 0 tion "Jass it up!" and someone who shouted this at the Original Dixie land Band in Chicago is indirectly responsible for the use of the word a:gof applied to New Orleans hot music. The most reputable evidence places inso as slang, neither Northern nor Southern, traceable to Elizabethan usage or In ragtime, two features of jazz were already in evidence: rhythmic vatla riety and emphasis, and melodic improvisation.
In the realm of popular music, ragtime was not jazz, yet what distin guished them was less a treatment of different materials than a greate: refinement of melody and rhythm. In dance rhythm this was particularly obvious-the jerky gyrations of ragtime gave way to the rhythmically more graceful variations of the foxtrot. Perhaps the toddle, which cele brated in dance form the early days of the new music, best exemplified this. Rather silly as viewed from the sidelines, this dance step of Chicago emphasized all four beats of the measure and the vibrato as well. Subse quently the development of improvised jazz to its highest point was tobr find its accompaniment in an urban folk dance, the Lindy Hop. The namebe identifies it as to period. As to style, it varied from city to city, sometimes descending to vulgar and senselessly rhythmic elaborations, but never los ing sight of its fundamental steps. In New Orleans it utilized the shages as well. In the Carolinas it achieved in city-country dances what the Man hattan supper clubs achieved years later in their publicity columns-the-a Big Apple. In Harlem's Savoy Ballroom during the year of the Lindy Hof many of the greatest jazz improvisers were playing-Louis Armstrong Earl Hines, Coleman Hawkins, Joe Smith. These are names of perhapszna little significance to the public today, but to musicians and composers who know their indigenous music they are names that immediately suggest the tremendous creative force that went into the development of jazz.
Distinctions of rhythmic and melodic refinement aside, more importan differences between ragtime and jazz become perceptible only as one look
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nto the history of jazz music. First of all, this music was discovered in he South, where it had become an urbanized folk music. Negro and white, the bands of improvising musicians in New Orleans played "ear nusic"; and while they picked up odd jobs here and there, they were onsidered "fakers" (faking was, in fact, an early word for jamming, ery free and spirited group improvisation by a small or jam band) as far s local musical circles were concerned. New Orleans papers became larmed when New York announced jazz as of New Orleans origin, and hey relinquished all claim to this new product of an urban life. It was olely this improvised music of New Orleans origin, however, that had irst claim to the word. That it was radically different from popular music of the day should be obvious from the above. It was to become patently o in 1917, when Victor issued two records-one by Joseph C. Smith's orchestra, the other Livery Stable Blues, a recording by the Original Dixie- and Jazz Band then playing at Reisenweber's in New York City. It is of ome significance that when jazz bands play this latter piece today they usually conform to a modification of the original orchestral pattern.
This music was born of various elements-of Negro worksongs, spirit- hals, and blues; of ragtime, Creole songs and mountain "ballets"; and, uriously, of military and brass band music. Early in the 20th century, funeral music-already an established tradition in New Orleans-featured dvhat came to be known as the nucleus of a jazz band (minus piano, "which couldn't march ) : cornet, clarinet, trombone, drums. The usual pro- se- edure at funerals was to play a slow blues (vernacular lament, usually but not always statement, repetition, response; usually but not always, "pentatonic scale) on the trip to the graveyard. For the return, something ively and gay would be featured, such as that favorite of New Orleans larinets, High Society Rag-still to be a featured item in 1937 with Sharkey Bonano and his New Orleans Sharks, Manhattan's most popular "Dixieland-style band. High Society seems to have been inspired by the flute passage in a John Philip Sousa march. le
The irrepressible gaiety of this number makes people question its use at funerals. A similar question was asked in the winter of 1936-7, when Tamiris and her group, aided by an orchestra and a Negro chorus, all of The WPA Dance Theater, interpreted On to de Buryin' from Negro Songs of Protest, a collection by Lawrence Gellert. Krehbiel, an authority on folk nusic, remarked that most Negro spirituals and worksongs were in major keys, the blues finding expression in the minor scale. He discovered also That Negroes were encouraged to sing happy songs, since the melancholy
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sort might remind them of their miserable lives; their folk singers also believed in a hereafter that would reward them with all that had previ ously been denied them. As for the forceful rhythms, some plantation owners paid bonuses to singers who could increase the output of world through the use of fast tempo.
One of the most interesting aspects of early jazz is that for the mos part it is a folk music without words. Tiger Rag, High Society and other important numbers had no words until their acceptance in the popula: music field demanded that lyrics be added to them. The blues did have words, and many of them had words of social significance; but when i came to recording the blues, the many significant lyrics, for fairly obvi ous reasons, were neglected and emphasis was placed on the sexuall' conditioned blues. It is important to understand these blues, if only so that one may clearly evaluate the cheap and tawdry imitations of then which emerged from Tin Pan Alley.
The folk music of the American Negro has never been without socia connotations. Spirituals were the language of the Underground Railway in the 19th century, just as they are the language of unity today in those parts of the South where the right of collective bargaining is denied share croppers and they must organize secretly, and just as in Harlem they have gone into the making of "Rent Blues" or theme songs of a housing prob lem. Industrialism and the gradual urbanization of the South brought th folksong to the city; but there was little place for it there in a milieu al ready dominated by popular music, and it retreated to the honky-tonk. } honky-tonk car was sometimes hooked on to the train that carried itineran workers from job to job; and Meade (Lux) Lewis, one of the greates of blues pianists, celebrates this in a wordless but beautifully composer piece of music called Honky Tonk Train Blues.
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A majority of the early jazz songs that have become known in orches tral repertoires as swing standards evolved as the result of collective im provisation. The Dixieland Band is responsible for several, as is Kin Oliver's Creole Band. The New Orleans Rhythm Kings, a band of Nev
d Orleans and Chicago musicians, contributed Farewell Blues, Bugle Cal Rag, Tin Roof Blues, and other numbers. Hoagy Carmichael, for man® years associated with New York's Tin Pan Alley, composed Washboard Blues while still at the University of Indiana leading a jazz band ther and working with other bands such as the Wolverines, the midwest 01 ganization that featured Bix Beiderbecke. All in all, the South and th midwest gave the Alley a score or more of talented composers wh b
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