NEW YORK CITY’S TWENTY-EIGHTH STREET between Fifth and Sixth Avenues is the legendary Tin Pan Alley, the center of American popular music at the turn of the century. (That old turn, not the recent one). There are tidbits galore associated with Tin Pan Alley; here are my favorites.
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Image by Ben Sutherland; cropped by Beyond My Ken; from Wikipedia.
Etymology. Nate Wooley’s “The History of Tin Pan Alley” says, “The history of the name, Tin Pan Alley, is a mystery… although there is an apocryphal story that the term was coined by Monroe H. Rosenfeld of the New York Herald comparing the constant sound of multiple pianos with questionable intonation on the block to children banging on tin pans.”
Wikipedia cites the Online Etymology Dictionary, “‘tin pan’ was slang for ‘a decrepit piano’ (1882), and the term came to mean a ‘hit song writing business’ by 1907.”
Plenty of Home Pianos. Nate Wooley writes, “In a period before recorded music, the family parlor was the center of musical activity, and it was the amateur musician that kept instrument shops—and especially music publishers—in business. In the years after the Civil War, Americans were buying more than 25,000 pianos a year and about half a million people were learning piano by 1887. Based on a rough statistical record from the year, this meant about one in 29 households, nationwide, contained someone learning to play music at home. American music publishing in the late 19th century was fast becoming a viable industry.”
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Above, buildings of Tin Pan Alley, 1910. Below, the same buildings, 2011, image by Beyond My Ken. Images from Wikipedia.
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Creating the Music. Wooley continues, “The end date of the Tin Pan Alley era is ambiguous, but most agree that 1885 marked the beginning of the era when Willis Witmark, founder of one of the first publishing houses to concentrate on popular over religious or classical sheet music, moved to the 28th street location from Manhattan’s entertainment district, then located about 14 blocks south near Union Square.”
Recognizing a Hit. It was no mean feat identifying a hit amidst all that piano cacophony. There was, however, the Old Grey Whistle Test. According to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, 20th Edition, “In Tin Pan Alley, songwriters used to play their compositions to the ‘old greys,’ the elderly doorkeepers and other employees in the offices of the music publishers. If the ‘old greys’ were still whistling the tunes after a week or so, then they were worth publishing.”
Pluggers. Wikipedia notes, “The song publishers who created Tin Pan Alley frequently had backgrounds as salesmen. Isadore Witmark previously sold water filters and Leo Feist had sold corsets. Joe Stern and Edward B. Marks had sold neckties and buttons, respectively. The music houses in lower Manhattan were lively places, with a steady stream of songwriters, vaudeville, and Broadway performers, musicians, and “song pluggers” coming and going.”
Wikipedia continues, “‘Song pluggers’ were pianists and singers who represented the music publishers, making their living demonstrating songs to promote sales of sheet music. Most music stores had song pluggers on staff. Other pluggers were employed by the publishers to travel and familiarize the public with their new publications. Among the ranks of song pluggers were George Gershwin, Harry Warren, Vincent Youmans and Al Sherman.”
And Boomers. Wikipedia says, “A more aggressive form of song plugging was known as ‘booming’: It meant buying dozens of tickets for shows, infiltrating the audience and then singing the song to be plugged. At Shapiro Bernstein, Louis Bernstein recalled taking his plugging crew to cycle races at Madison Square Garden: ‘They had 20,000 people there, we had a pianist and a singer with a large horn. We’d sing a song to them thirty times a night. They’d cheer and yell, and we kept pounding away at them. When people walked out, they’d be singing the song. They couldn’t help it.’ ”
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It’s now a landmark! Image from The Tin Pan Alley American Popular Music Project.
Ephemeral Glory. Tin Pan Alley hits continue as part of American’s popular music. Wikipedia lists more than 50, including “A Bird in a Gilded Cage,” “By the Light of the Silvery Moon,” “Give My Regards to Broadway,” “God Bless America,” “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” (World War I’s classic) “Over There,” “Stardust,” “There’s Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” and “Yes, We Have No Bananas.”
Radio and movies lessened the importance of home entertainment, and the music industry scattered away from Tin Pan Alley.
A Remembrance. The movie Tin Pan Alley, 1940, starred Alice Faye and Betty Grable (their only film together) and John Payne and Jack Oakie as songwriters in the years before World War I.
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I’ve never seen this flick, though I note it might hold a record for the briefest Wikipedia Plot: “Katie and Lily Blaine are a singing—sister act playing the vaudeville circuit. Songwriters Skeets Harrigan and Harry Calhoun see star potential in the sister act.”
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Betty Grable in the film.
Geez, Wikipedia, you gave five paragraphs totaling 650 words to Gone with the Wind. I guess Sic transit gloria mundi. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2023