Review of Irving Berlin: Songs from the Melting Pot: The Formative Years, 1907-1914, by Charles Hamm

David Carson Berry, Review of Irving Berlin: Songs from the Melting Pot: The Formative Years, 1907–1914, by Charles Hamm,

Contemporary Music Review 19/1 (2000): 157–66.

NB: Contemporary Music Review, vol. 19, part 1 (2000) is a theme issue, titled “Traditions, Institutions, and American Popular Music,” ed. by John Covach and Walter Everett.

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A Review of Irving Berlin: Songs from the Melting Pot:The Formative Years, 1907-1914, by Charles HammDavid Carson Berry 157

*In this section we bring together reviews, miscellaneous articles, and responses from readersto subjects and particular articles published in previous issues. Short pieces on all mattersconcerned with contemporary music will be welcomed, especially those that may stimulatefurther discussion or provide the basis for a future issue.

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A Review of Irving Berlin: Songs fromthe Melting Pot: The Formative Years,1907-1914, by Charles Hamm

David Carson Berry

The 1990s are proving to be propitious years for publications about IrvingBerlin and his music. Recent biographies include those by L"aurence Bergreen (1990); Berlin's eldest daughter, novelist Mary Ellin Barrett (1994);and Edward Jablonski (in press). Musical analyses of a half-dozen Berlinsongs occupy a chapter of Allen Forte's 1995 study of the popUlar-balladrepertory, and an examination of songs spanning Berlin's career is forthcoming from Philip Furia, who already considered some of these in his1990 book on Tin Pan Alley lyricists. A complete edition of Berlin's published and unpublished lyrics is under preparation by Robert Kimballand Berlin's youngest daughter, Linda Emmet. Multiple historiographicand musical engagements with Berlin's initial years have issued fromCharles Hamm, including various articles (1993b, 1994a, and 1996), a threevolume critical edition of his early songs with an extensive introductoryessay (1994b), and the book currently under re:view, Irving Berlin: Songsfrom the Melting Pot (1997).

It is probably no coincidence that this new constellation of texts beganappearing after the songwriter's death - at age 101 - in 1989. Berlinowned the rights to his songs, and was notorious for withholding permission for their inclusion in critical studies and other publications. For thisvery reason, the chapter on Berlin in Wilder 1972 was the only one devoidof musi<;al examples, and an earlier proposed anthology of his lyrics nevercame about due to the pUblisher's inability to meet his excessive monetarydemands (Bergreen 1990,571). Even daughter Barrett has admitted that (tosome, at least) the Berlin of later years could appear to be U a disagreeable,out-of-touch old man who said no and guarded the use of his songs ...

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158 David Carson Berry

beyond reason" (Barrett 1994, 294). Ironically, were it not for his passing,we might not have the wealth of information and insight that is currentlyunfolding.

Mu.ch of this insight has come from Hamm, a past president of theAmerican Musicological Society and a preeminent scholar of Americanpopular music who is well-known for Yesterdays: Popular Song in America(1979), a standard survey text in the discipline. His meticulous researchon and acumen about Berlin's songs offer a welcome relief from themusically vapid writings usually devoted to pop-music celebrities thatsometimes display little regard for historical fact.1 A songwriter of Berlin's stature and talents deserves a higher level of discourse, and this iswhat Hamm provides. Songs from the Melting Pot (hereafter SMP) represents the culmination of his intensive Berlin research, subsuming his earlier writings on the topic and focusing on music composed during theperiod covered by his Early Songs edition: 1907-1914. The book and theanthology are essentially companion volumes, and readers of SMP willwant Early Songs nearby for frequent consultation.

If the roughly seven years Hamm canvasses seem all too brief considering the length of Berlin's prodigious career, it should be emphasized thatthese were the formative years of his professional life, spanning from hisfirst published song to his first full-length musical show; the songs written during this time are thus worthy of special attention. This was also aperiod in which Berlin concentrated his efforts on uindividual" songs, asopposed to those tailored for complete shows, thus placing the materialin a somewhat different category; indeed, these songs are even differentmusically: the use of "melodic sequence and other devices common tonineteenth-century classical music and light opera" increased towardthe end of this time, and the musical and lyrical representations of ethnicity, formerly common in his novelty songs, disappeared (221). Finally,considering that in this seemingly meager time span Berlin wrote themusic and/ or lyrics to nearly 300 published and unpublished songs, onemust realize that to expand the years of inquiry would be to dilute theeffort by drastically decreasing the percentage of songs that could beexamined.

Hamm's approach to the material is not so much one of "analysis" (asassociated with the discipline of music theory) as it is of ucriticism" in thesense promulgated by Joseph Kerman, which may be summarized as "abroadly based interpretive strategy that, while not eschewing analysisaltogether, appropriates it only in association with a historically and culturally fthick' description of the work in question," a description that"take[s] into account the life and possible intent of the composer, theintended audience, [and] the cultural and aesthetic norms and semiotictraditions for the communication of meaning at a given time and place"

A Review afIrving Berlin 159

(McCreless 1997, 20-21). Something of this approach is conveyed even bythe book's titular term "melting pot," which of course refers to the mythical notion that cultural differences disappear as immigrants such as Berlin,who departed Western Siberia and arrived in New York City at age 5,become"Americanized." For Hamm the term is precise and significant, andrefers to the three stages by which immigrants adapt to a new and aliencultural climate: contact, accommodation, and assimilation. In successivechapters of his book, he tracks these stages in Berlin's early songs by "(1)identifying and describing the song repertories with which he came intocontact during his formative years; (2) discussing ways in which theserepertories represented an accommodation to a 'mainstream' Americanmusic; and (3) tracing Berlin's own assimilation of various of these stylistic elements into what became a mainstream popular style itself" (x).

The feature of Hamm's study that most distinctively shows how interpretation is influenced by the social domain is his taxonomy of musicalgeme. The songs Berlin wrote between 1907-1914 are, in some ways, ahomogenous group: they are virtually identical in terms of their published piano / vocal format; they tend toward major keys and moderatetempi; and most follow early-century Tin Pan Alley formal models. Yetaudiences of the time perceived these songs as fitting within variousgemes, and publishers often advertised them in such a manner. Hammargues that discerning these original "meanings" requires examiningmore than just the sheet music. True, in the popular music of this tim·~

(unlike in the later rock era) the piano/vocal score was chronologicallyprior to performances and recordings, but it cannot serve as aliunequivocal Urtext as does notated music of the classical tradition. Inpopular music, performers have greater input in (re-)shaping a work, andtherefore Hamm proposes that the "contemporary perception of thegeme of a song, and hence its meaning, was shaped most importantly byits performance and by the venue in which this performance took place.Conversely, stylistic differences written into these pieces were more amatter of the songwriter's sense of who would perform a given song andwhere than of any abstract ideas about geme" (19). For the repertoryHamm investigates, geme is defined both by stylistic features of themusic and lyrics, and by contemporary cultural conventions, the modeand occasion of performance, and (perhaps especially) the perceivedidentity of the song's protagonist. In short, geme results from the intersection of text and context, and consequently the projection and perception of geme can change from performance to performance.2

Any number of Hamm's examples illustrate this view, but let us· consider "That Mesmerizing Mendelssohn Tune" (1909). The song features aprotagonist who becomes obsessed with Mendelssohn's "Spring Song"(Sechs Lieder ohne Worte, Ope 62, no. 6) and wants to be "loved" and


"squeezed" to its music; Berlin's chorus begins with a quotation ofits famous opening melody. As the dialect of the lyrics would have suggested to contemporary audiences, the protagonist is an African American;this identity is confirmed by the stereotypical vocal delivery_ in a periodrecording by Arthur Collins and Byron Harlan. Thus the intended meaning of the song revolved around this particular protagonist's "elitist"pretensions. The song's humor was predicated on the audience apprehending the dichotomy between the protagonist's culture and the societythat spawned Mendelssohn and his melody. Accordingly, the genre asreceived by early-twentieth century listeners would have been that of a"coon" song (an offensive term in common usage at the time): that is, anethnic / novelty song that features a stereotypical black protagonist tocomic or satirical effect. However, one today might perform the song quitedifferently, evoking "white" performing traditions and omitting "racist"elements (as did Joan Morris and William Bolcolm in a 1985 recording).So performed, the Mendelssohn quotation might suggest the refinementof a protagonist who is the "true" heir to the song's cultural tradition (notmerely a poseur), and thus the song might be interpreted as a high-classromantic ballad. Through the drastic change in performance mode, thevery genre of the song is altered.

As this example suggests, period recordings provide an important supplement to the printed score, helping Hamm reconstruct the meanings ofBerlin's songs as projected by performers and received by audiences at thetime of their composition.3 Their consultation is especially useful indeducing the identity of a song's protagonist, .since accents and dialectswere usually exaggerated in performance. Hamm's genre conclusions arealso guided by a host of other factors, inclu9-ing depictions of the protagonist(s) by the sheet-music's cover art, and song descriptions given by company advertisements and show reviews. For those more familiar with thestudy of the classic repertory, where the notated score is taken to representthe ideal musical object, Hamm's use of seemingly"secondary" sources inthe determination of genre might seem suspect, but he frequently remindsus that the contemporary interpretation of a Berlin song was not a matterof "how it looked on paper, in musical notation, but how it sounded inperformance" (106). If this statement seems to open a Pandora's box of taxonomies, with multiple labels flying out and affixing themselves to eachand every song, it only serves to illustrate the fluidity of genre boundariesin the pop-music landscape. Nonetheless, Hamm is quite reasonable andprecise in determining genre; he considers only the interpretation(s) mostlikely, given the culture of the intended audience, and he always providesthe reader with the texts and contexts prompting his decisions.

Having explicated the critical apparatus guiding Hamm's work, weturn now to the book's organization, which is based on these very classi-


fications. In accordance with the view that the place of performance is animportant factor in a song's perception, three of the five chapters (I, 4and 5) "are organized around the early twentieth century's most important performance venues for popular songs: the vaudeville house, thehome circle, and the legitimate theater" (19). The remaining chapters, 2 .and 3, "discuss songs that make reference of one sort or another toAfrican Americans and their culture" (19), and so derive their contentfrom the identity of the protagonist; the first of these offers an extensionof the genre definitions begun in chapter 1, and the second provides adetailed history of "Alexander's Ragtime Band." A few examples willserve to illustrate the focus of these chapters.

Songs written for the vaudeville stage, which comprise the majority ofBerlin's early material, are usually "novelty songs." These have narrativelyrics that develop a comical, satirical, or suggestive scenario, and mostfeature protagonists of a specific ethnic group - particularly Italians,African-Americans, and Jews (a group to which Berlin himself belonged).Their content complemented the ethnic comedy prevalent in vaudevillehouses, with their largely working-class, multicultural audiences.

Songs featuring African-American protagonists range from noveltysongs to ragtime, but most distinctive are those "about black musicians": .first-person narratives in which an observer comments on African-American music-making in a positive manner (recall that "Alexander's Ragtime Band" is considered "the best band in the land"). The lyrics bear "notrace of caricature or condescension" and Hamm has found no othersongs of the era that so enthusiastically endorse the musicianship of blackperformers (79-80). Indeed, he even suggests that the recurring protagonist "Ephraham" might have been Berlin's alter ego.

Songs for the "home circle" refers to ballads (though many wereperformed professionally as well). Ballads became one of Berlin's mostacclaimed genres in later years, but were written infrequently at this time.The subgenre that Hamm argues to have been more Berlin's own creationthan any other was the "rhythmic ballad," which made references tomusic associated with African Americans, such as the cakewalk andragtime, yet featured "unequivocally white" protagonists - usuallywomen depicted as more sexually free than their counterparts in Victorian ballads. The heyday of the subgenre only came in the 1920s, as epitomized by non-Berlin songs such as "I'm Just Wild About Harry" and "IWanna Be Loved By You."

Songs for the "legitimate theater" were those used in shows thatmoved away from vaudeville toward the more respectable enterprises ofthe revue and musical comedy. Berlin's music became increasingly inter-:polated into such shows and Watch Your Step, his first full-length bookmusical, debuted in December 1914. This production marks the end of the


period surveyed by the book, and Hamm emphasizes the transformationof technique and orientation that transpired during this time, culminatingin the creation of the successful show.

The above summarizations of selected chapter content are greatlyabridged; they simply provide an inkling of the topics covered so thatthose unfamiliar with Hamm's text (and perhaps Berlin's songs) mayhave a few concrete examples of the range of material covered. However,in determining the success of a book, what one covers is ultimately subordinate to how one covers it; we tum now to Hamm's manner of introducing and explicating gemes and individual songs and his ability topresent the interaction of text and context he takes to impute meaning.

Not surprisingly, a primary strength of SMP is its exegesis of the socialcontexts within which these songs were created. For example, before discussing material written for vaudeville, Hamm provides an informativeoverview of the history, structure, and audiences of the shows, completewith descriptions of acts that might appear on a given bill and how theirplacement and content were coordinated. Encountering this preamble,the reader is likely to recall how many other books on early Tin PanAlley routinely evoke vaudeville without explaining its atmosphere andorganization in such detail. Likewise, in the chapter on the ballad repertory, Hamm's survey of the history and stylistic traits of both the Hhighclassll ballad of Victorian America and its pseudo-folk "popularll relativehelps ground our understanding of the not-so-virtuous protagonists inBerlin's "rhythmic ballads,1I as well as his later turn to more sophisticated fare. Hamm also challenges revisionist views when they conflictwith contemporary assessments of Berlin's music. For example, duringthe mid-century Ragtime Revival and afterward, ragtime became associated with only a small corpus of piano compositions; early "ragtimesongs" were precluded from the canon and the very term was viewed asan oxymoron. But Hamm reminds us that not only do these songs havemusical traits in common with ragtime, they were indeed IIaccepted asragtime by composers, performers, critics, and audiences in the first twodecades of the twentieth centuryll (81), and one must regard them inthese terms.4

Hamm's careful attention to the historical and musical facts of Berlin's own life is equally exceptional. Though SMP is not a biography perse, it reveals much about the songwriter's early history and workingmethods, not only within relevant portions of chapters but also in itspreface and lengthy introduction (both of which provide biographicaland ideological information essential to understanding the rest of thebook). Hamm's attention to historical accuracy is especially overt in hischapter on IIAlexander's Ragtime Band," the 1911 song that became IIanicon for the ragtime erall (102).5 Though devoting so much print to a


single song might seem to disrupt the flow of genre discourse that characterizes most of the book, it is certainly warranted. This song is of greatimportance to the history of American popular music, yet prior accounts have often included Ufactual mistakes and outright fabrications"(116), engineered as they were for the popular press by authors with apenchant for the journalistic uhook." Hamm systematically discreditscommon myths, clarifying issues of chronology, composition, andinitial reception.

The foregoing summarizes Hamm's success with contexts, but whatabout the texts - the songs themselves? A common reproach of criticalwriting on popular song is that it often relies too heavily on the verbaldimension, engaging the lyrics much mote than (or even to the detrimentof) the music. Given the priority of the protagonist in Hamm's definitionof genre, it is clear that he too privileges this component of a song. However, his advocacy of the dominance of words over notes is not only ideological; he holds that this relative weighting is appropriate for the syllabicsongs of the vaudeville stage and early musical comedy, in which "[t]hechief emphasis was on the text, as the performer sketched and developeda comic or satirical vignette, often in dialect; although the music mightcolor the lyric with hints of an appropriate ethnic style or develop acatchy refrain that would stick in the listener's memory, its most important function was to serve as a frame for the lyric" (181). Accordingly,when Hamm mentions the musical characteristics of such songs - theItalian insinuations of a tarantella-like meter and modal mixture in"Angelo" (1910); the use of moderate-tempo, Landler-like waltzes in songsabout Germans; the evocation of Jewishness via minor-key elements andmelodic augmented seconds in uYiddle, On Your Fiddle, Play Some Ragtime" (1909) ....:.- these comments are usually brief and clearly subordinateto his assessments of the lyrics.

Hamm does engage in purely musical considerations when the subjectwarrants. For example, in considering which version of "Alexander'sRagtime Band" came first, the song or the piano two-step, he expertlycontrasts the unorthodox harmonic/ sectional organization of the pianoscore with the standards for marches and rags, demonstrating the likelihood that the song came first and was only later adapted for piano. Butfor the most part such examinations are simply not the point of the book,and in fact Hamm is critical of the "completely text-based" (i.e., scorebased) analyses of Berlin's songs found in Forte 1995 (221-222). Hamm'spretermission may be the one attribute some readers (particularly thosein the music-theory community) will find disappointing. This is especially true as the chronology advances and, by Hamm's own assessment,Berlin's music incorporates additional "European" elements and becomesmore musically autonomous, making it amenable to precisely those


Schenkerian analytic techniques Forte applies. For example, Hammdescribes "Spanish Love" (1911) as Ucom[ing] as close to the style of European operetta as anything Berlin had written," and he mentions the effectiveness of its Usustained, legato vocal line" and "high-note climaxes"(195). If we were to examine the song from a Schenkerian perspective, wewould find in its chorus a middleground linear connection of two of thesehigh notes, d2 and f2, across 13 measures, comprising stepwise descentand register transfer. In other words, the legato line and the climaxesmentioned by Hamm are in fact ingeniously connected, showing Berlin'sgrowing attention to larger-scale melodic design as he refined his craft.Such observations, born of analysis, may not be included in Hamm'swork, but they certainly support his conclusions about Berlin's evolvingstyle.

A final and noteworthy attribute of the book is its appendices, whichlist all songs written by Berlin up to late 1914 and the many recordingsmade of these. Appendix 1 is devoted to the 190 published songs; whilesimilar lists exist, Hamm's is more accurate in its citation of collaborators,its precise chronology complete with copyright dates, and even in its songtitles (taken from the first page of the sheet music, not the less-reliablecover).6 Appendix 2 manages to track those somewhat-vaporous unpublished songs, some of which remain only as titles in Berlin's own songlists; these 100-plus entries are taken from a variety of sources, all ofwhich are documented. Appendix 3 provides Uthe first comprehensiveand professionally prepared discography of early recordings of B~rlin'ssongs" (xi); this was compiled not by Hamm but by Paul Charosh andprovides complete information about the discs (and cylinders) it lists over 500 total. The appendices do contain a few mistakes. For example,"Hey Wop" (1914) and "It Can't Be Did" (1910), cited in the main body of"the book as unpublished songs, are absent from Appendix 2, and "Angelo"(1910), another unpublished song, is mistakenly placed in Appendix 1.But a few errors, inevitable in comprehensive lists that have probablyseen countless drafts, should not distract from the usefulness and importance of these long-overdue inventories.

On the whole, SMP represents an outstanding contribution - one thatwill be embraced not only by advocates of Irving Berlin, but also by manystudents of American popular music in the early years of the twentiethcentury. Hamm provides the socio-cultural infrastructure necessary tosupport an understanding of songs created for specific audiences, but atthe same time he is always sensitive to musical styles and evolution; he isever mindful that these songs are not only "cultural artifacts" but music.Through his intimate understanding and expert navigation of both textand context, he has presented us with the single finest book on IrvingBerlin~ of whatever time period - yet published.

A Review aflrving Berlin 165

References

Barrett, Mary Ellin. 1994. Irving Berlin: A Daughter's Memoir. New York: Simon &Schuster.

Bergreen, Laurence. 1990. As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin. New York:Viking; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1996.

Forte, Allen. 1995. The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era, 1924-1950. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Furia, Philip. 1990. The Poets ofTin Pan Alley: A History ofAmerica's Great Lyricists.Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Furia, Philip, with Graham Wood. Forthcoming. Irving Berlin: A Life in Song. NewYork: Schirmer.

Hamm, Charles. 1979. Yesterdays: Popular Song in America. New York: W. W. Norton& Company.

Hamm, Charles. 1980. uThe Phonograph as Time-Machine," in The Phonograph andOur Musical Life: Proceedings of a Centennial Conference [7-10 December 1977], ed.H. Wiley Hitchcock, 61-64. Brooklyn, NY: Institute for Studies in American Music.

Hamm, Charles. 1992. uprivileging the Moment of Reception: Music and Radio inSouth Africa." In Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. Steven PaulScher, 21-37.Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Hamm, Charles. 1993a. U As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin [review],"American Music 11/2: 245-50.

Hamm, Charles. 1993b. UIrving Berlin's Early Songs as Biographical Documents,"Music;al Quarterly 77/1: 10-34.

Hamm, Charles. 1994a. uGeme, Performance and Ideology in the Early Songs ofIrving Berlin," Popular Music 13/2: 143-50.

Hamm, Charles. 1996. U Alexander and His Band," American Music 14/1: 65-102.

Hamm, Charles. 1997. Irving Berlin: Songs from the Melting Pot: The Formative Years,1907-1914. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hamm, Charles, ed. 1994b. Irving Berlin: Early Songs, 1907-1914, 3 vols. Music ofthe United States of America, vol. 2. Madison, WI: A~R Editions.

Jablonski, Edward. Forthcoming. Irving Berlin: American Troubadour. New York:Henry Holt & Co.

McCreless, Patrick. 1997. URethinking Contemporary Music Theory." In Keeping Score:Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, ed. David Schwarz, Anahid Kassabian, and Lawrence Siegel, 13-53. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia.

Wilder, Alec. 1972. American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950. NewYork: Oxford University Press.

Notes

1. See for example the review of Bergreen 1990 in Hamm 1993a; despite Bergreen's seemingly well-documented discourse (with copious Ifnotes on sources" appended at the


end), it is in fact quite deficient in terms of both musical understanding and generalscholarship.

2. The ideology of Ifprivileging the moment of reception" permeates much of Hamm'swork; see especially Hamm 1992.

3. This view of the phonograph as a musicological Iftime machine" was advanced byHamm two decades earlier as a way of gaining insight into Stephen Foster's music(Hamm 1980).

4. Hamm has long suggested looking at contemporary perceptions rather than revisionistdefinitions of styles; in Hamm 1979 he similarly reminds the reader that while currentjazz historians exclude Berlin and other popular songwriters from the category of jazzcomposers, the view from 1920s New York was quite different (333).

5. This chapter first appeared, with only occasional rewording, as Hamm 1996; the currentversion is distinguished primarily by the addition of a newly discovered letter from Berlin, appended at the end.

6. Those desiring even more detail about these songs may consult the critical notes inHamm 1994b.