Volume 43, Number 16 · October 17, 1996
Here To Stay
By Brad Leithauser
OTHER BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE
Ira Gershwin: The Art of the Lyricist
by Philip Furia
Oxford University Press, 278 pp., $25.00
The Poets of Tin Pan Alley: A History of America's Great Lyricists
by Philip Furia
Oxford University Press, 322 pp., $12.95 (paper)
The Complete Lyrics of Ira Gershwin
edited by Robert Kimball
Knopf, 414 pp., $49.50
Gershwin: His Life and Music
by Charles Schwartz
Da Capo, 428 pp., $14.95
Lyrics on Several Occasions
by Ira Gershwin
Knopf, (out of print)
The Memory of All That: The Life of George Gershwin
by Joan Peyser
Simon and Schuster, (out of print)
Fascinating Rhythm: The Collaboration of George and Ira Gershwin
by Deena Rosenberg
Dutton/Signet, (out of print)
The 'golden age' of the American popular song is commonly held to run from about 1925 to 1950. One might quibble over the exact dates, but there's no questioning the form's range, richness, drive, durability. As it happens, its heyday corresponds with golden periods for other American genres—the Hollywood screwball comedy, the modern novel of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Faulkner, the theatrical renaissance led by O'Neill. But to my mind, none of the others matches Tin Pan Alley for perpetual freshness and replenishment. For anyone susceptible to the music's spell it's obvious why James Joyce once remarked that the soul of a culture is to be discovered in its music halls. The songs of Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, and Hoagy Carmichael really are 'standards' in the broadest sense—not only perennial melodies, but touchstones that crystallize a momentous chapter in our nation's culture.
Review, 4601 words
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