My Melancholy Baby

The First Ballads of the Great American Songbook, 1902-1913

Michael G. Garber

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781496834317
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Histoire et critiques de la musique

2022 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence—Certificate of Merit in the category of Best Historical Research in Recorded Rock and Popular Music Ten songs, from "Bill Bailey, Won't You Please Come Home" (1902) to "You Made Me Love You" (1913), ignited the development of the classic pop ballad. In this exploration of how the style of the Great American Songbook evolved, Michael G. Garber unveils the complicated, often-hidden origins of these enduring, pioneering works. He riffs on colorful stories that amplify the rising of an American folk art composed by innovators both famous and obscure. Songwriters, and also the publishers, arrangers, and performers, achieved together a collective genius that moved hearts worldwide to song. These classic ballads originated all over the nation—Louisiana, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan—and then the Tin Pan Alley industry, centered in New York, made the tunes unforgettable sensations. From ragtime to bop, cabaret to radio, new styles of music and modes for its dissemination invented and reinvented the intimate, personal American love ballad, creating something both swinging and tender. Rendered by Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and a host of others, recordings and movies carried these songs across the globe. Using previously underexamined sources, Garber demonstrates how these songs shaped the music industry and the lives of ordinary Americans. Besides covering famous composers like Irving Berlin, this history also introduces such little-known figures as Maybelle Watson, who had to sue to get credit and royalties for creating the central content of the lyric for "My Melancholy Baby." African American Frank Williams contributed to the seminal "Some of These Days" but was forgotten for decades. The ten ballads explored here permanently transformed American popular song.

Chapter One

THE WORLD OF THE GREAT AMERICAN SONGBOOK

This book is for those who love “Georgia on My Mind” (1930), or “At Last” (1941), or “Fly Me to the Moon” (1954) and want to know where such beautiful songs come from—what their musical ancestors are. These love songs, or ballads, or torch songs, as they are variously called, sprang from the worlds of Broadway, Hollywood, and the sheet music publishing business, called Tin Pan Alley, during the first half of the twentieth century. We still value them for their craft, versatility, and depth. How did this style of ballad originate? It is a tale that startles even experts, a saga of intrigue and surprise, of buying and stealing and giving, of grieving and loving.

My adventure of discovery started with a request for help: my friends, the Dixieland jazz musicians, were booked into a venue where they could not play any songs that were still in copyright.¹ They had to use tunes in the public domain. This meant, in the United States in 2003, works published before 1923. As far as instrumental numbers, this limitation presented no problem—there were plenty of early ragtime, jazz, and blues pieces to choose from. But the singer needed a love song. Usually she sang ballads dating from the Golden Age of American Popular Song, the mid-twenties through the fifties, from “It Had to Be You” (1924) through “When Sunny Gets Blue” (1956). What in the public domain could match those standards?

The classic American popular ballad really starts in 1924 with a sudden flood of enduring standards. As well as “It Had to Be You,” the year produced “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” “The One I Love Belongs to Somebody Else,” “What’ll I Do,” “All Alone,” “Lazy,” “Somebody Loves Me,” “The Man I Love,” “Oh, Lady Be Good,” “Tea for Two,” “I Want to Be Happy,” “How Come You Do Me Like You Do,” “Mandy, Make Up Your Mind,” “Everybody Loves My Baby,” “Jealous,” “June Night,” “My Blue Heaven,” as well as operetta ballads that became jazz favorites, “Indian Love Call” and “Golden Days.”² Following that gush of 1924, wonderful songs flowed forth: “As Time Goes By” (1931), “Try a Little Tenderness” (1933), “I Only Have Eyes for You” (1934), “Over the Rainbow” (1939), “Blueberry Hill” (1940), and “White Christmas” (1942). The tradition continued through decades, producing favorites that bypassed the currents of the rock era, such as “Till There Was You” (1957), “Moon River” (1961), “What a Wonderful World” (1968), and “Send in the Clowns” (1973).

Since most of the great ballads came after 1923, however, they were in copyright, and my friends were in a predicament.³ Their panic led me to create a list of public domain love and torch ballads for the singer to choose from. Eventually they settled on “You Made Me Love You” (1913), which worked out well.

The jazz band’s practical problem set into motion a train of thought in my head. What creations of the 1910s can occupy an equal place with the great works of the second quarter of the century? I realized that there is a specific group of compositions from the years 1902 through 1913 that pioneered that new style, paving the way for the later masterpieces. These pioneer works stayed in the repertoire of singers and instrumentalists, being revived again and again through the decades. Here is the short list:

1902: “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?”

1905: “Kiss Me Again”

1909: “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now”

1910: “Let Me Call You Sweetheart”

1910: “Some of These Days”

1911: “My Melancholy Baby”

1912: “When I Lost You”

1913: “You Made Me Love You”

These love-themed songs crystallized the styles of their era in a way that proved long-lasting. I shall call them my focus songs or my corpus. Aficionados will immediately ask: Why “Bill Bailey”? It is not a ballad. Nevertheless, as I shall reveal, elements of it contributed to the development of the classic pop ballad. (In fact, all my focus songs have been labeled as ballads—even “Bill Bailey,” albeit less frequently than the others.)⁴ In addition, I identified a handful of numbers, important enough to my discussion to merit sidenotes, although of less enduring appeal, versatility, or influence, such as “I Love You Truly” (1906), “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi” (1911), and (jumping ahead a bit to 1916, but, as I shall reveal, for a good reason) “I’m Sorry I Made You Cry.” Yet another few dozen tunes also weave in and out of my tale to a more limited extent.

Such classics could not have been written without a foundation of tens of thousands of other songs, now forgotten. Over time, singers, instrumentalists, and other artistes found that my core group was especially useful. Each contributed to the final result: the Golden Age ballad. Each led to what Philip Furia describes as that “perfect ‘voice’ for wittily turned lyrics that balance nonchalance and sophistication, slang and elegance,” that earthy, romantic, “thoroughly American rainbow-chaser.”⁵ Each of these landmark works added a piece to the creation of that fresh “voice,” that protagonist of the classic American popular ballad.

During my research, I found that hundreds of renditions of my core song-set are available on YouTube or through iTunes, Freegal, or Amazon. They would hardly seem to need championing—yet they do. Nowadays, high-profile stars rarely feature them.⁶ Those who do cover them usually offer a limited vision of the song. Indeed, interpretations are often perfunctory. Overall, mainstream artists largely ignore the pre-1924 repertoire.

Musicians and fans who do know these early songs tend to be unaware how old they are. Those familiar with “My Melancholy Baby” usually do not realize it was copyrighted in 1911. They think of it as a product of later decades—and associate it with Gene Austin in the twenties, Benny Goodman in the thirties, Frank Sinatra in the forties, or Barbra Streisand in the sixties. “Wow! I didn’t realize it was that old,” I heard again and again as I told people about my research—which is one sign of how such songs proved to be ahead of their time.

I soon discovered that even the most perceptive critics wrote little of substance about these pioneer ballads. Analysts enthuse about some of them, true, but fleetingly—as it were, merely in passing on the way to the meaty songs of later years. Even historians discuss them only briefly. All around, people celebrate the Great American Songbook, but we exist in a state of ignorance about its germination. I set out to tell in detail the fascinating biographies of these ballads and to analyze the songs in depth. The wonderful work of previous scholars and analysts lay scattered, and I had to synthesize them and fit the pieces together, as well as delve into previously untapped sources. I had to explore the geography of Tin Pan Alley.

TIN PAN ALLEY

In the first decades of the 1900s, the music industry made its money by selling sheet music.⁷ Each printed song was arranged for piano and voice, in a key convenient for amateur players and singers. The covers were graced with art suitable for home decoration (often with a little inset square for a photo of one of the many performers who were using the song). On the flip side of the covers and often on the margins as well, the publishers crammed spare space with advertisements for other pieces put out by the same company.⁸ The New York portion of this sheet music industry centered on Broadway. At the turn of the twentieth century it clustered around 28th Street, where it began to be called Tin Pan Alley. Over the ensuing decades, it slowly migrated uptown, until by the late 1930s it mainly roosted at 49th Street in the Brill Building. By extension, the term Tin Pan Alley came to be used to mean the entire commercial songwriting business, whether of New York or Chicago or Los Angeles or points in between.

Figure 1.1. “My Melancholy Baby” (1912). Publisher Theron C. Bennett lists offices in four cities, with specific addresses for the main ones: Denver and New York. The cover features a pair of fancy indoor plants, as might decorate an upscale living room. In the frame-in-the-frame is a photograph of one of several performers who featured the song: handsome Fred Watson, looking cocky—brought into the home along with the sheet music. Photo courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University.

At first, sheet music was king. Beyond a few experiments, there was no radio, no television, no sound movies—and recordings were just beginning to rise to the fore. There were no industry associations who could extract fees from the theatres and restaurants that used the songs, as there would later be, when the American Society for Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) began to take the matter to court. Performers were viewed by publishers as a necessary evil: their renditions served as advertisements, but the stars often had to be bribed to include a song. The staffs of the music houses demonstrated the tunes to performers in the office by day and, after sunset, traveled all night around town to plug the songs. Depending on the era, these song pluggers would go from saloon, to theatre dressing room, to bandstand, to recording studio, to radio station.

The songwriters rarely got much profit from their creations. It was the publishers who invested thousands of dollars to make a ditty available to the public. If the gamble paid off, it was the publishers who got the profits. To get a song known to many people in the 1910s took intensive work, many contacts in the entertainment industry, and large amounts of money invested in staff, overhead, cover art, printing costs, the aforementioned bribes, and various musical arrangements for all kinds of amateur and professional performers. They could not depend on advertising alone. In 1916 publisher Louis Bernstein tried a concerted newspaper campaign; it failed. In 1920 L. Wolfe Gilbert got the Woolworth store chain to promote his house’s song “Afghanistan”—again, a flop. Bernstein proclaimed, “songs must be heard by the people who buy them.”⁹ Therefore, song pluggers continued to go out and visit the performers to persuade them to put the company’s products in their repertoire books. Eventually, the pluggers invaded the recording studios in the guise of “artists and repertory” men, to control (or, at least, try to control) what songs got on disc.

Tin Pan Alley helped promote the musical scores of Broadway and the songs of Hollywood, but they were not in the business of filling theatre seats: their profits always came from sheet music sales. At the peak of the business, around 1910, printed copies of a song could sell in the four or five millions and bring wealth to the brash Tin Pan Alley entrepreneurs who publicized and sold each aspiring hit to the public. The Alley developed a song style that saturated the musical landscape, permeating the great American middle-class household from coast to coast, and bleeding into every other genre of music.

THE COMPLICATED AUTHORSHIP OF CLASSIC POPULAR SONGS

In mapping the history of the enduring Tin Pan Alley ballads, I found I was exploring uncharted terrain—partly because most writings on classic American popular song focus on a few great artists, ignoring the thousands of others who contributed to the style. Take, for instance, Alec Wilder: in his influential musical analysis, American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950, he dwells for half the book on only six composers: Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, and Harold Arlen.¹⁰ In his introduction to Wilder’s book, James T. Maher articulates this view clearly: “Innovation … followed the metabolic rise and fall of the creative output of individual song writers.”¹¹ Therefore, Wilder followed “the strands of the separate careers of those composers who have contributed most” to the “musical distinctions of the American popular song.”¹² Writing years later, Allen Forte focuses on the exact same half-dozen songwriters in over 60 percent of his tome, The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era, 1924–1950.¹³ The lyricists who set words to the melodies of those six composers are the focus for Philip Furia, who lingers for almost 80 percent of The Poets of Tin Pan Alley on only ten wordsmiths.¹⁴ These critics reveal deep beauties in what they examine—but stick to a narrow corpus. Judging by such studies, the invention of the classic American popular song style would seem the accomplishment of a few handfuls of geniuses.

My exploration of these earliest classic ballads songs, however, opens our sight to unexpected vistas. Yes, the great artists are represented here—in particular, Irving Berlin. In addition, however, there are other important figures—surprising ones. Many of the early innovators were uncredited at the time and are now so obscure that we can only barely identify them. Further, all these songs were changed after publication—revised, pared down, added to—sometimes by the authors themselves, often by the publishers, and always by the performers, who adapted them freely. The singers, arrangers, and instrumentalists became, over the course of time, uncredited co-authors of the songs. Performers made alterations that became part of the tradition surrounding the song—indeed, that, for most practical purposes, became part of the song itself.

Innovation in classic American popular song was social, collective, communal. The contributions of uncredited songwriters and arrangers before publication or for re-publication—and of performers after publication—all those factors point to this valuable addition to our understanding. I will be presenting evidence of this throughout the following pages.

There are other aspects of this phenomenon. First, songwriters wrote under the influence of the competition, encouragement, and inspiration offered by others. This is sometimes manifested in the spurring on of friends. In one famous instance, E. Ray Goetz prodded Irving Berlin into writing “When I Lost You,” a tale I will tell more fully in a later chapter.

Second, songs also tended to be published in cycles. Thus “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” (1918) is followed by “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” (1919), “Castle of Dreams” (1919), and “I’m Always Watching Clouds Roll By” (1920). The traits of successful works were repeated in new pieces and, through this process, became established as conventions. Because the Tin Pan Alley style consolidated (or, harsher critics might say, ossified), for generations songwriters could continue to lean on these innovations-turned-cliché. Therefore, it is not surprising to find, more than ten years after “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” and “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,” a derivative song like “I’m a Dreamer That’s Chasing Bubbles” (1929). For decades, writers could lean on the generic patterns establis...