Reinventing Dixie

Tin Pan Alley's Songs and the Creation of the Mythic South

John Bush Jones

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780807159446
• eBook ISBN: 9780807159460
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Tin Pan Alley, once New York City's songwriting and recording mecca, issued more than a thousand songs about the American South in the first half of the twentieth century. In Reinventing Dixie, John Bush Jones explores the broad impact of these songs in creating and disseminating the imaginary view of the South as a land of southern belles, gallant gentlemen, and racial harmony.In profiles of Tin Pan Alley's lyricists and composers, Jones explains how a group of undereducated and untraveled writers—the vast majority of whom were urban northerners or European immigrants— constructed the specific and detailed images of the South used in their song lyrics. In the process of evaluating the origins of Tin Pan Alley's songbook, Jones analyzes these songwriters' attitudes about North-South reconciliation, ideals of honor and hospitality, and the recurring theme of the yearning for home. Though a few of the songs employed parody or satire to undercut the vision of a peaceful, romantic South, the majority ignored the realities of racism and poverty in the region.By the end of Tin Pan Alley's era of cultural prominence in the mid-twentieth century, Jones contends that the work of its writers had cemented the "moonlight and magnolias" myth in the minds of millions of Americans. Reinventing Dixie sheds light on the role of songwriters in forming an idyllic vision of the South that continues to influence the American imagination.

1

THE ALLEY AND ITS DENIZENS

In many ways this book is about myths. That’s myths plural, not just one myth, as might be expected in a look at Americans’ perception of the South in the first half of the twentieth century as filtered through popular music. The book looks at yet other myths, including earlier ones about the South created by southerners in the nineteenth century, specifically the Plantation (a.k.a. Old South) Myth before the Civil War and the Lost Cause Myth after the Confederacy was defeated (see especially Chapter 8). Other myths surrounded the popular song industry, the makers of those songs, and the geographic hub where many of those songs were published in the early days. Portions of one of these myths remain intact, but I will debunk considerable parts of it, after which I will debunk a second widely held myth wholesale.

A Local Habitation and a Name

What became known as Tin Pan Alley was never one fixed locale. The popular music publishing industry was analogous to Nathan Detroit’s legendary “oldest established, permanent, floating crap game” in the musical Guys and Dolls, with firms moving their offices to various spots in New York City most advantageous to their trade. The first significant gaggle of publishers clustered around Union Square on East 14th Street near Tony Pastor’s music hall in the 1880s to take advantage of peddling their songs to singers performing there and in other nearby vaudeville houses. Publishers’ offices often followed the theatres, accounting for their gradual movement uptown over time. Around the turn of the twentieth century (hereafter to be called just the turn of the century), the favored locale for several major firms (though with little connection to the city’s theatrical life) became West 28th Street between Broadway and 6th Avenue. The publishers moved on later, but here the myth of Tin Pan Alley’s naming occurred.

Precisely when the naming legend began to circulate isn’t known, but what is known is when that single block of West 28th Street began to be familiarly called Tin Pan Alley. According to Fred R. Shapiro, editor of the authoritative Yale Book of Quotations, other than a quite nonmusical reference to “a rumpus among a number of women in Tin Pan Alley … [which] branches off from Wallace Street” in New Haven, mentioned by that city’s Evening Register on August 8, 1890 (e-mail to me on September 6, 2011), the first known print mention of the Alley as New York City’s “publisher’s row” appeared on page 4M of the Metropolitan section in the Sunday edition of the New York World on May 3, 1903, in a piece by Roy L. McCardell titled “A Visit to ‘Tin Pan Alley,’ Where the Popular Songs Come From” (e-mail of July 27, 2011). McCardell first says that the Alley “Gets Its Name from the Jangling of Pianos That Are Banged and Rattled There Day and Night as New Songs are Being ‘Tried On.’” Two short paragraphs later the writer reiterates his point with little variation or elaboration: “It gets its name from the tin-panny sounds of pianos that are banged and rattled by night and day as new songs and old are played over and over into the ears of singing comedians, comic opera prima dinnas [sic] and single soubrettes and ‘sister teams’ from vaudeville.” He goes on to assert, “Now, ‘Tin Pan Alley’ is considered a term of reproach by the Tin Pan Alleyites. They prefer to designate it as ‘Melody Lane.’” My research didn’t confirm this, but I did notice, when I started looking at every issue of Billboard and Variety starting in 1910 for evidence of the popularity of Dixie tunes, that “Tin Pan Alley” was used familiarly, and in a nonpejorative way, as it has been ever since. One point the article indirectly made is that if people, even if just in the music trade, were familiar with the term “Tin Pan Alley,” the name must have been coined at least a few years before the article’s date for it to have become current by 1903.

The Alley’s pianos may have sounded like so many tin pans clanging together, but the question remains as to who dubbed the Alley thus and when. Isaac Goldberg’s Tin Pan Alley, published in 1930, tells the tale with just a slight bit of wavering. Goldberg takes pride in his source of the story, Harry Von Tilzer, music publisher and composer of maybe more than three thousand songs (most likely by his own account), including such million-plus sellers as “A Bird In A Gilded Cage,” “Wait Till The Sun Shines, Nellie,” and “I Want A Girl Just Like The Girl That Married Dear Old Dad.” Yet Goldberg suspects what others knew—that Von Tilzer, on top of being a successful songwriter, was a shameless self-promoter. So Goldberg hedges his bets: “It is probably [my emphasis] in his office, early in the 1900’s, that Tin Pan Alley received its name. Here is the story as I received it from Harry himself” (Goldberg 173). Still, as we shall see, Goldberg lent more credence to the self-promoting Von Tilzer’s tale than he probably should have.

According to “Harry,” “It was Von Tilzer’s custom, when playing the piano in his office, to achieve a queer effect by weaving strips of newspaper through the strings of his upright piano. It was not a musical effect; it is wispy, sometimes mandolin-like, and blurs the music just enough to accentuate the rhythms” (173). In the Von Tilzer/Goldberg rendition, a frequent visitor to Von Tilzer’s office was Monroe H. Rosenfeld, also a songwriter as well as newspaperman. To let Goldberg tell the rest in his own words, one time Rosenfeld “had just finished an article upon the music business—perhaps for the Herald, on which he worked for a number of years—and was casting about for a title. Harry happened to sit down and strum a tune, when Rosenfeld, catching the thin, ‘panny’ effect, bounced up with the exclamation ‘I have it!’ It was another ‘Eureka!’ ‘There’s my name! exclaimed Rosenfeld. Your Kindler and Collins [piano] sounds exactly like a Tin Pan. I’ll call the article Tin Pan Alley!’” (173).

Now, gentle reader, if you believe all of Goldberg’s story and I tell you Harry Von Tilzer opened his own music publishing firm at 42 West 28th Street only as late as 1902, perhaps you’ll allow me to sell you a certain Brooklyn Bridge, considering the fact that the 1903 New York World article makes it clear that by that year, the term “Tin Pan Alley” was already in common usage for that block of publishers’ offices on West 28th Street. Of course Rosenfeld could have frequented Von Tilzer’s office when Harry was still a partner in the firm of Shapiro, Bernstein & Von Tilzer from 1900 to 1902, but it’s doubtful the two respectable, established former gentlemen would have wanted their young new partner tinkering with his studio’s piano so that odd sounds wafted from it to the possible chagrin of their clientele. Also, the subject of Rosenfeld’s article was to be the popular music business being established on West 28th Street and, as such, was a phenomenon that had begun only in 1900 when both Shapiro & Bernstein and Leo Feist moved onto the street. So if Rosenfeld did write such an article—and in all likelihood he did—it had to have been in 1900, or at the very latest 1901, well before Von Tilzer set up shop on his own.

Isaac Goldberg seems to back off the whole matter slightly in his concluding remarks about the naming of Tin Pan Alley: “There are those who doubt Rosenfeld’s invention. The pianos of the professional parlors in those days, they will assure you, sounded so unmistakably like tin pans that the metaphor must have occurred to hundreds of listeners simultaneously. Yet, to those whose curiosity has extended to Rosenfeld’s articles and verses, and to inferences as to his peculiar personality, it is easily credible that he was just the kind of man to name Tin Pan Alley” (173–74). Perhaps Rosenfeld was, but not necessarily under just the circumstance Goldberg narrated, planting the original seed of the naming myth. Other variations seem more plausible, or further call into question Goldberg’s account.

In all four other published versions, Monroe Rosenfeld was consistently the star performer, with Harry Von Tilzer getting into the act only as a secondary player in three of them. Looking at those involving both men, one of the most impossible was an online teaching tool I bumped into when I was doing my initial research for my Dixie tunes project. A website called “Music 273: Survey of American Popular Music” contained the course syllabus for a class by that name at the Richmond campus of Eastern Kentucky University, taught by one Larry Nelson sometime in the early to mid-1990s. Only a skeleton of the site now remains, but when I found it I captured the whole outline for the discussion of Tin Pan Alley, where it noted, among other things, “In 1899 the New York Herald hired Monroe Rosenfeld (also a part-time composer) to write a series of articles on the flourishing business.… Rosenfeld visited the offices of Harry von Tilzer, one of the publishers located on West 28th St. He compared the sound of so many pianos banging out tunes to tin pans and coined the phrase ‘Tin Pan Alley’ to describe West 28th St., the home of so many music publishers.” The syllabus deserves at least a B for pointing out that the Herald specifically hired or commissioned songwriter Rosenfeld to write such an article, as opposed to Goldberg’s contention that he had been a staff member of the paper for a number of years, for which there is no evidence at all; and maybe even an A—for suggesting it wasn’t Von Tilzer’s wacky piano but the cacophony of tinny uprights in many studios that inspired Rosenfeld to come up with the sobriquet “Tin Pan Alley” for the block. However, and it’s a mighty big however, the events couldn’t have played out as Instructor Nelson states they did. The Herald couldn’t have asked Rosenfeld for a piece on 28th Street publishers in 1899 since as of that year there were none there, least of all Harry Von Tilzer, who didn’t become a partner with Shapiro and Bernstein until 1900 or open his own firm until 1902. For this impossible dating of the Alley’s naming, I give the syllabus an F.

Conversely, except for a single gaffe, one of the more plausible renditions of the story is one of the more recent, appearing in the Introduction to David A. Jasen’s Tin Pan Alley: An Encyclopedia of the Golden Age of American Song (2003). Jasen wisely begins with the phrase “According to legend” before stating, “The naming of Tin Pan Alley came at the turn of the twentieth century, when Monroe Rosenfeld, a prolific composer-lyricist, wrote a series of articles for the New York Herald on the new and energetic popular-music business. For research, he visited the office of Harry Von Tilzer, located at 42 West Twenty-eighth Street, between Broadway and Sixth Avenue” (ix). Usually a careful recorder of the dates when publishers opened their offices, Jasen should have looked back at what he had written. Von Tilzer set up shop in 1902, two years after the turn of the century, depending on how literally Jasen meant “at the turn of the century.” Ignoring Von Tilzer’s oddball piano, Jasen notes, “Rosenfeld heard the din of competing pianists as he left Von Tilzer’s office, and he recorded that this street, with dozens of demonstrators working at the same time, sounded like a bunch of tin pans clanging. He characterized the street where all of this activity was taking place as ‘Tin Pan Alley.’”

Finally, Kenneth Aaron Kanter in The Jews on Tin Pan Alley (1982) more or less subscribes to the Goldberg variation but with a few original twists, one of which truly damns Von Tilzer as the self-promoter that he was. For Kanter, Rosenfeld was describing publishers’ row in a magazine piece, not a newspaper article or series of articles, but still visited Von Tilzer, where Harry “had wound pieces of paper over the strings of a piano to make it give off a tinny sound that he was fond of.… Rosenfeld heard the piano, which gave him the title for his article, ‘Tin Pan Alley’” (24). Kanter points out, and rightly so, “From that time on, the area, and eventually the American music business in general, was known as ‘Tin Pan Alley.’” And since it was known as that with no tone of disparagement, Kanter finally notes, “Later on, Von Tilzer claimed that he had coined the name”—a self-promoter to the end.

One version of the Alley’s naming keeps Von Tilzer out and is simple, direct, and plausible in everything including the date. It appears early in Philip Furia’s The Poets of Tin Pan Alley and is brief enough to bear quoting in full:

In 1900 songwriter Monroe H. Rosenfeld was commissioned by the New York Herald to do a story on the new sheet music publishing industry that had emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. Rosenfeld went to the tiny stretch of West 28th Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, where most of these publishers had their offices. There, out of the windows of the closely packed buildings, came the din of dozens of upright pianos —a din made even more tinny by weaving strips of newspaper among the piano strings to muffle the sound. The racket, so the story goes, reminded Rosenfeld of rattling pans and inspired him to christen the street “Tin Pan Alley.” (19)

Could anything possibly be simpler than that to explain the origin of “Tin Pan Alley”? Yes, in fact. There is a simpler explanation, and one that very likely may still put Monroe Rosenfeld center stage as the perpetrator of the name, but with the setting for the deed not West 28th Street at all, but in the quiet of his own sitting room (or anyplace else) as he was writing his commissioned piece for the Herald. Rosenfeld didn’t need to hear the cacophony of publishers’ pianos to remind him of tin pans clattering. Remember Rosenfeld was both a sometime journalist and, first and foremost, a prolific writer of popular songs, both lyrics and music. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (second edition), “tin pan” had been current American slang for “a cheap ‘tinny’ piano” at least as far back as 1882. As such, the expression may have been in Rosenfeld’s active vocabulary and ready for him to incorporate in the body of his article or use as his title without a trip to West 28th Street at all. Yet since “tin pan” for a tinny-sounding, cheap piano had been in the air for at least eighteen years before popular music publishers began moving into the brownstones on West 28th Street, it is also possible that the nickname for the block just evolved over time, not attributable to any one person.

But if Rosenfeld wrote his Tin Pan Alley article, why has no one discovered and discussed it? I can’t speak for previous writers on Tin Pan Alley’s history who may have not cared enough or have been too lazy to look for it. But I can at least offer my own mea culpa for not following the lead until I cornered my prey or finally backed off with only negative results—my usual modus operandi. When I decided to undertake my Dixie tunes project, I was no longer affiliated with any institutional library where I had interlibrary loan privileges, nor was I within convenient and reasonably inexpensive striking distance of a library that had either the paper copy or a microfilm of the 1900 Herald I could peruse from one year’s end to the other at my leisure for what is, in the last analysis, little more than a footnote to this study of Dixie tunes. So I leave that adventure to some other interested party.

More to the point of the publishing of all those Dixie tunes, West 28th Street may have been the New York hub of the popular music trade early in the twentieth century, but it wasn’t too long until Tin Pan Alley became a long and winding thoroughfare. There were successful publishing houses in such far-flung cities as Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Kansas City, and distant San Francisco. In time some firms moved to New York (Jerome H. Remick from Detroit and Sam Fox from Cleveland, to name but two), but others, like Chicago’s Harold Rossiter, Kansas City’s J. W. Jenkins & Sons, and San Francisco’s Sherman, Clay & Co., stayed put and stayed afloat in a ruthlessly competitive business that grew more and more Manhattan-centered with each passing year, at least until the 1930s when some Hollywood motion picture studios began to buy up New York publishers, after which popular music publishing became somewhat bicoastal. But even then most studios’ publishing operations remained in New York.

The Numbers Game

It is demonstrable that between the early 1920s and late 1960s, roughly 90 percent of the lyricists, composers, and, to a slightly lesser extent, book (i.e., script) writers for Broadway musicals were Jewish, meaning ethnically Jewish, not necessarily observant Jews in their religious practices (see Jones, Our Musicals 205). Over the years a virtual myth blossomed that Jewish songwriters also dominated or even monopolized popular songwriting in Tin Pan Alley. Well, the one-word reply to that belief or myth, as the hard numbers will show, is simply “Wrong!” This erroneous belief has not just been “in the air,” but has affected the thinking and writing of otherwise careful scholars. Stephen J. Whitfield, author of “Is It True What They Sing About Dixie?,” is Jewish, as am I despite my WASP-like name (for its roots, see Jones, “Contradictions” 143–44). Yet Whitfield falls into the trap of the myth at the end of an otherwise flawless description of the Alley just after the turn of the century: “The populace of Tin Pan Alley—the owners of the music publishing houses, the creators of the record companies, the song pluggers and writers—were overwhelmingly Jewish immigrants” (Whitfield 9). Up to “and writers” Whitfield is right on the money (pun intended) in saying that the business end of the Alley was almost solidly in Jewish hands. Other than a few non-Jewish holdovers from the nineteenth century such as Howley, Haviland and Co., and T. B. Harms (taken over by Jewish Max Dreyfus in 1904), the publishing houses that ruled the Alley from 1900 on were the Jewish-owned firms of Leo Feist; Shapiro, Bernstein & Co.; Jerome H. Remick and Co.; M. Witmark and Sons; Harry Von Tilzer; Sam Fox; Joseph W. Stern (succeeded by his partner Edward B. Marks); Waterson, Berlin & Snyder; Broadway Music Corp. (owned by Will Von Tilzer, one of Harry’s brothers); York Music (founded by two more Von Tilzers, Albert and Jack); and, starting later than the others in 1922, Robbins Music Corp.

But to return to the dominance of Tin Pan Alley by Jewish lyricists and composers, it just ain’t so. To the contrary, the figures reveal objectively that Jews represented quite a small minority in both categories of creative talent, at least among Alley writers of the words and music of Dixie tunes between 1898 and 1958. That was practically everybody who was anybody in the Alley during those years—especially through 1936, when the bulk of southern songs were written. As a Jew myself, I can spot Jewish or Jewish-sounding names with at least 95 percent reliability. But when I thought I found a Jewish writer but wasn’t entirely sure, I consulted one or more relatively reliable print sources, including the ASCAP Biographical Dictionary, biographical entries in Jasen’s Tin Pan Alley, and Internet websites for individual Alley writers.

Here, then, are the raw figures and percentages of Jewish lyricists and composers of the Alley’s Dixie tunes between 1898 and 1958: of 426 lyricists only 83, or a mere 19.5 percent, were Jewish; Jewish composers made a more respectable showing, with 119 among the 434 in all, or 27.4 percent.

Despite their tiny numbers compared to non-Jewish Alleymen, Jewish writers of Dixie tunes—both composers and lyricists—wrote more songs than their non-Jewish brethren and, of those, far more big moneymaking hits. Modifying this disparity a bit is the fact that the Alley was “ecumenical,” with a considerable number of songwriting teams, whether for a few songs or the long term, consisting of one Jew and one non-Jew. Also, throughout the history of the Alley, white and black lyricists and composers often teamed in racial and creative harmony, a topic to be treated more later on.

In rough chronological order, here are some of the prominent Jewish/non-Jewish collaborations. Jewish wordsmith Jack Yellen scored big with non-Jewish ragtime tunesmith George L. Cobb four times in three years with “All Aboard For Dixie Land” in 1913, followed by “Listen To That Dixie Band,” “Alabama Jubilee,” and “Are You From Dixie? (’Cause I’m From Dixie Too),” all in 1915; while Canadian-born Catholic lyricist Alfred Bryan wrote six songs idealizing Dixie with Hungarian-born Jewish composer Jean Schwartz, all in 1919, best typified by “You’re Living Right Next Door To Heaven When You Liv...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• DEDICATION
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• PROLOGUE: Why Dixie?
• 1. THE ALLEY AND ITS DENIZENS
• 2. WEEPY TIME DOWN SOUTH: Early Sentiment and Sentimentality
• 3. TYPECASTING—SOUTHERN SOCIAL AND ETHNIC, THAT IS
• 4. “Y’ALL COME”: Southern Hospitality, Conviviality, and Leisure-Time Fun
• 5. DIXIE IS FOR LOVERS
• 6. UNDERCUTTING THE IDYLLIC: Realism, Satire, and Parody
• 7. “ALL ABOARD FOR DIXIE LAND”: Homesickness, Traveling Home, and “Mammy Songs”
• 8. GLORIFYING DIXIE: Southern Myths and Southern Pride
• 9. MOONLIGHT AND MAGNOLIAS: The Alley and the Myth
• EPILOGUE: The Years They Drove Old Dixie Down
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• GENERAL INDEX
• INDEX OF SONG TITLES