In Which Tin Pan Alley – The Magical Land From Which All Pop Hits Are Born – Is Invented, And The Whole Hit-Making Infrastructure Worked Out
America needed songs.
All those vaudeville acts,
travelling all the way from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine, they needed
songs, and they weren’t the only ones. At any one time in America, half a
million Americans were taking piano lessons. All those piano students, they
needed songs as well.
Most of those songs were coming
out of New York. For New York was where pop music – the very concept of pop
music, as well as the business practices and marketing strategies that would
make it a viable commercial proposition – was being invented.
But of course it was New
York where pop music was being invented. New York – where Americans took the
pursuit of happiness both seriously and literally - was where everything
was happening.
The denizens of London, or Paris,
might think they were living at the centre of the world - and perhaps
for a few more years they could make a convincing argument - but New York was where
it was at. New York was a city so big - a city of two million, from all
over the world, all crammed together - on an island so small that they
were forced to build buildings so tall that a whole new word was needed
to describe them: “skyscraper.”
Did London have skyscrapers? Did
Paris? No, they most certainly did not!
New York also had the Brooklyn
Bridge, the largest suspension bridge in the world, a bridge so big that people
said that building it would be impossible. But New York did it anyway! New York
was a place where things that people said couldn’t happen, very frequently did.
New Yorkers could gape at a
skyscraper, or gaze at the Brooklyn Bridge, and truly believe that they were
living in a city where anything was possible. And so they came, from all over
the world, speaking a multitude of languages, speaking in thick, often
incomprehensible accents, to escape from the poverty and oppression of the Old
World and hitch a ride on the New.
Sadly, for many of them, those
dreams would not come true. Thousands upon thousands of New Yorkers never
lived in a mansion, never lived anywhere better than under a bridge, in a
cellar, or in a house that they built themselves out of whatever they found in
the dump. New York was a metropolis where the successful shone brighter than
anywhere else on Earth, and the failures gassed themselves to death in cheap
hotel rooms. But still they continued to come, over the seas, to follow their
dreams.
New York wasn’t only sucking
people in from over the oceans, but also from across the land. Every ambitious
and talented youngster from every small town in America - every circus
performer, every vaudeville entertainer, every medicine man or con artist,
every minstrel show comedian - ultimately found their way to New York to get
sucked into the bottomless hovel of brothels and boxing rings hiding in the
alleyways behind Broadway. And not just behind Broadway; a mind bogglingly high
number of New Yorkers were squeezed into the Lower East Side. Some said it was the
most crowded neighbourhood on Earth.
But it was Broadway, and the
alleys behind Broadway, where the real action was. If you wanted to make it in showbiz,
this is where you had to be. If you wanted to make in prostitution, this is
also where you had to be. For most of the back-alley theatres were brothels on
the side. Such as the Haymarket, a 3-storey dance hall that offered
opportunities for both styles of dancing, either virtual or horizontal. They
also offered both male and female prostitutes.
There was Koster and Bial's Music Hall where
they offered vaudeville in the front, and sex in the “cork rooms” – so called
because the walls were full of the corks from popped champagne bottles – in the
back. They were constantly struggling to stay open because the Lord Mayor
wasn’t too keen on having beer and music at the same venue. There was a law
that if you served alcohol, you couldn’t have music, and if you had music, you
couldn’t serve alcohol, for the mixture of the two would surely lead to orgies.
If Koster and Bial’s Music Hall was any indication, he wasn’t entirely wrong. The
German community was particularly prone to grumbling about this law: who ever
heard of drinking beer without music?
Broadway itself was being lit up.
With white lights. They called it The Great White Way. Soon a whole lot of
entertainment districts around America would be referred to – quite ambitiously
sometimes, almost deludedly others; you’re not fooling anyone Scranton,
Pennsylvania – as The Great White Way. At least Old Orchard Beach, Maine was
modest enough to simply call their entertainment district The White Way. They
knew not to aim too high.
Most theatre goers still lived downtown, where
the best entertainment was the increasingly stodgy theatres of Union Square.
New York was so crowded it was impossible to go any further afield. Sometimes
it took as much as half an hour to cross the street. Everything changed once
they built the elevated train track – “the el” they called it – which dropped a
steady stream of customers right into the middle of Broadway, a neighbourhood
designed for pleasure. Broadway featured such attractions as the Casino Theatre
with its roof top bar that looked like a village fair, or the Olympia, built by
Oscar Hammerstein, which was initially supposed to include 3 theatres, a roof
garden, cafes, restaurants, everything… but they ran out of money before it got
finished. Nonetheless, there was still a lot there for the patrons to do.*
The songs performed on Broadway came
from the backstreets behind. From just a handful of buildings in fact, along West
28th Street. It was there, amongst the brothels and boxing rings,
the dancing girls and circus freaks, that three brothers by the name of Witmark
– Isidore, Julius and Jay – set up a shop. A shop to sell songs. A business
they had gotten into, a couple of years earlier, when they had won a toy
printing press at school.
The Witmark Brothers were hugely
successful; the songs they published performed upon the vaudeville stages,
played (badly) in the music parlour, and whistled on the street**, in every
city, from coast to coast. Soon others, similarly minded businesspeople, joined
them. Before too long this small neighbourhood, packed with the racket of a
hundred out-of-tune pianos making a noise like tin pans, became known as Tin
Pan Alley.
The Witmark Brothers didn’t
invent music publishing. The marketing and printing and selling of sheet music
had been going on for decades. But nobody had figured out how to do it right. Nobody
had figured out how to make a lot of money out of it. It was not for nothing
that Stephen Foster – probably the most popular song writer of the entire 19th
century - had died with only 37 cents in his pocket. There were already a bunch
of music publishers down in Union Square, every one of which could be described
as “stodgy”, every single one of them doing it wrong. The Witmark Brothers had
set up their first office down in Union Square, where they’d been able to see
what-not-to-do firsthand. Down there all anybody seemed to want to
publish was the same old classical and church music they always had. No-one was
writing their own songs or even publishing anything new. It was so boring. Being
young the Witmark Brothers couldn’t stand boring. That’s why they moved to
their new premises. The back alleys behind Broadway would never be boring.
In the back alleys behind
Broadway the brothers were at the epicentre of American showbusiness. Whether
it was the respectable theatres on Broadway, or the rather less respectable
“concert saloons” - those entertainment megaplexes that featured everything
from boxing in the front room, to a brothel in the back – they were right on
the doorstep of hundreds of businesses with an unquenchable demand for new
tunes. Quenching that demand would be their mission statement.
The actual writing of those songs
however… that was something the Witmark Brothers weren’t so good at. They wrote
very few hit songs themselves, and the first one they did, was written entirely
out of opportunism. Rumours were abounding that the President – Grover
Cleveland – was going to get married, but it wasn’t official yet. So Isidore
dashed off a march called "President Cleveland's Wedding March", and
as soon as the wedding was announced, and marching bands needed something
suitable to commemorate the occasion, The Witmark Brothers had a tune ready to
go!
This was the kind of go-getting
shamelessness that would lead the Witmark Brothers to come up with the perfect
business model for turning songs into hits, for turning those hits into sheet
music, and turning that sheet music into money. Whilst Isidore may have come up
with their first hit, but the real brains of the operation – not to mention the
mouth – was Julius. He knew how to turn songs into hits.
This is how it worked.
Plan A: Do whatever it takes
to get a big Broadway star to sing the song.
Something of a z-list vaudeville
performer himself, Julius understood showbusiness people. He knew how to get
their attention. He knew how to get Witmark songs into their hands, out of
their mouths, and thus, into the ears of the buying public. He was not subtle
about it. Neither was he shy. Like everything else associated with the Witmark
Brothers, and their way of doing business, he was utterly shameless.
Julius spent every night in the
backrooms of Broadway, doing whatever it took, saying whatever it took, to get
into a Broadway star’s dressing room, where he would convince them to sing the
latest song that he thought was “just perfect for them”. Or, failing that, stalking
them to a restaurant, disguising himself as a waiter (probably) and singing the
song at their table. This wasn’t necessarily a great way to make friends, but
it did make hits. It was probably the easiest way to make a hit. For the
alternative required far more effort. And infrastructure.
Plan B: Do whatever it takes
to get the song into the ears of as many people as possible, to make the song
utterly inescapable.
There were a variety of ways of
achieving this. Street-pianos were quite effective. The Witmark Brothers would set
up a network of street-pianos - many, if not most of which, were out of tune – at
busy intersections, pounding out their tunes whilst workers passed by on their
commutes, thereby ensuring that they would be humming or whistling that tune
all day long.
No piano? No problem! You didn’t
really need one. You just needed a voice, and not necessarily even a good one.
Just a loud one. With good elocution. Standing on a street corner, or other
public place, singing the same song all day long. The Witmark Brothers had
basically invented a whole new career: the Song Plugger. For a song to become a
hit, the Witmark Brothers had to employ a whole lot of them.
A Song Plugger spent their days
and nights following crowds and singing to them. Or more accurately, at
them. Even better than a crowd was a captive audience that stayed in one place
and couldn’t escape. The best such crowds were found as baseball games, and
Song Pluggers would soon be found there too, sent up into the grandstands to
sing to sporting fans who had no choice but to listen to them.
The Witmark Brothers weren’t the
only ones in the business of turning songs into hits. All the way over in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, Charles Harris was formulating similar ideas. A decade earlier he
had hung up a sign outside his shop in Wisconsin, advertising his services as a
banjo player and as a writer of “songs written to order.” And then for a decade
he toiled in obscurity. One time he even sent one of his songs to the Witmark
Brothers, but it did not become a hit. It may have even been the least successful
song the brothers ever published.*** But he got the gist of what the brothers
were trying to do. And then – once he’d finally written the song that would
take him to the top – he did it better.
“After The Ball” was that song, a
heart breaker of a tune in which a little girl asks his uncle why he is single?
Why does he have no babies? A sad, presumptuous – and even impertinent - question,
to which the uncle has an equally sad response. He once had a sweetheart, he
tells the girl, but he broke her heart. He’d taken her to a ball, and they’d
danced all night. Clearly this is thirsty work, since as the ball was ending,
she asks for a glass of water, which he faithfully fetches. She, however, is
not so faithful, and he catches her kissing another man!
“Down fell the glass dear,
broken, that's all,
Just as my heart was after the ball.”
This is quite a sad story
already, but naturally it gets sadder. For you will never guess who the man was
that he caught her kissing. Or maybe you already have. It was, of course, her
brother.
And when does he find out that it
was her brother? After she has died, and her brother writes a letter informing
him.
So sad. And so frustrating. He’d
ruined his life, missed his one chance at happiness, because of a silly
misunderstanding. A silly misunderstanding compounded by a stubborn incapacity
for communication. As a tragic story, it was virtually perfect. People needed
to hear it. Charles made certain that they would. He decided to use Witmark Brothers Plan A: Do whatever it takes
to get a big Broadway star to sing the song.
Being based in Wisconsin, Charles
didn’t have access to any actual big Broadway stars. But he did have access to
big star vaudevillian performers, the most famous of which was James Aldrich
Libbey and his big bushy moustache, both of whom happened to be touring America
with a production of “A Trip To Chinatown.”
“A Trip To Chinatown” was the
biggest hit on Broadway that year. A bunch of youngsters tell their guardian
they are going to see the sights of Chinatown but they have a night out on the
town instead. The town in this case was San Francisco, possibly the only city
that might challenge New York for the title of the most happening town in
America. Also the most dangerous. The guardian had very good reason to be
worried****
Charles’ approach was extremely straightforward.
He offered James cash - $500 to be precise - to sing “After The Ball” as part
of “A Trip To Chinatown.” The inconvenient fact that the plot of “After The
Ball” and the plot of “A Trip To Chinatown” have nothing in common with each
other does not appear to have been an issue. Or if it was, it was an issue that
James – what with $500 in his pocket - was prepared to overlook. And thus the
tragic tale of “After The Ball” began to be heard all over America.
“After The Ball” became such a hit that it
made James even more famous and popular than he already was; his photo appearing
on the cover of the sheet music, thereby further adding to his exposure. It was
a win-win strategy that would be adopted and replicated time and time again. Charles
was already replicating it, paying other, slightly less famous vaudevillians to
sing, “After The Ball”. They weren’t as successful with it as James was, but it
all helped to make it a hit. Within a year Charles was earning around $1,000 a
day, a good return on his initial $500 investment.
James would replicate it himself.
He’d already thrown away a career in opera because there wasn’t a lot of money
in it. Now he threw himself into the business of making songs popular. He even
began his own publishing company in 1895. By the turn of the century, James was
recording some of the hits that his company published. Everything seemed to
turn out quite well for everyone involved. But they were about to get even
better.
It was about this time that Chicago – just down the road from Wisconsin - held a World Fair! Or to give it it’s proper name, the Columbia Exhibition, to celebrate the 400th Anniversary of Columbus “discovering” America.
Organizing such a party turned out to be quite a job - they basically built an entire new city for it, in neo-Classicism style - which is why it ended up opening a year late, but it was worth the wait.
All the wonders of the world had come to Chicago! People came from all over America to see people from all over the world! There were snake charmers and belly-dancers! There was 600-kilogram replica of the Venus de Milo made of chocolate! There was an Eskimo village containing not a single igloo!
And there were rides, including the world’s very first Ferris Wheel!
And even more
exciting, The Zipper!! Not to mention it was the stage upon which two tasty
inventions made their public debut: Juicy Fruit chewing gum and The Chocolate
Brownie!
Millions of people came, making
it probably the largest captive audience ever assembled, anywhere! And by this
time “After The Ball” was so popular, they didn’t even need to employ an army
of song-pluggers. “After The Ball” was so popular that people wanted to
sing it! Marching bands wanted to play it! And one marching band in
particular, the biggest of them all…
SOUSA’S!!!!!
Sousa’s Marching Band reportedly
played it time and time again, all throughout the six months that the World
Fair ran. It was reported that “one has heard nothing else there.”
It was further reported that “the
bands have played it, the soloists have sung it, and even the Dahomeyans and
Nubians of the Midway who can’t speak a word of English and the dancing girls
of the Persian and Algerian theatres have learned to hum the tune.”
Meanwhile, back in New York, George
J Gaskin was singing on a cylinder of it.
George J was an Irish immigrant with
a phenomenal flick of hair perched atop his head, living in The Bowery, the
most crowded neighbourhood on the Lower East Side, and therefore, most likely,
the most crowded neighbourhood anywhere in the world! He was also a
member of a barbershop quartet - The Manhanset Quartette - in which his voice
stood out from the rest for possessing the qualities of being “piercing” and
“strident.”
“Piercing” and “strident” might
not be the qualities you personally desire in your vocalists –
“piercing” and “strident” are not qualities generally felt to be compatible
with an enjoyable listening experience – but “piercing” and “strident” were
exactly the qualities that record companies were looking for in the 1890s. A
“strident” voice recorded well. A “strident” voice “pierced” through all the
crackle and the hiss. Each George J record, the promotional material promised,
was “loud and ringing in tone, each word and syllable distinct.” And indeed,
all of this was true. It’s also true however George J.’s elocution entirely
annihilates any semblance of emotion. It was like listening to a wind-up doll
sing in a burly Irish accent and was only slightly less painful than Edison’s
experiments with singing dolls.
George J’s first hit – said to
have been recorded for the first time just a day after George W. recorded “The
Laughing Song” for the first time - was “Drill Ye Tarriers, Drill.” Whilst Len
Spencer was condensing an entire minstrel show onto a 2 or 3 minute cylinder, “Drill
Ye Tarriers, Drill” recreated the construction of railroads by Irish workers,
drilling holes in rocks, and blowing them up with dynamite, complete with the
sound of an explosion or two (not a convincing sound, but a sound nonetheless)
whilst George J both tells the story and plays the role of the boss giving
orders, the perfect role for a man with a voice both “strident” and “piercing.”
“Drill Ye Tarriers, Drill” was a huge hit amongst the patrons of the phonograph
parlours (it’s a 3) but his version of “After The Ball” was even more
popular; the most popular record of 1893, with another version by John Yorke
Atlee – aka that bird whistling guy - not far behind. George’s version is a
gutsy effort, with both George’s Irish bellow and the pounding piano behind
him, fighting to be heard; battling out to see who could be the most “piercing”
and “strident.” The result is only a little more sentimental than “Drill Ye
Tarriers, Drill.” George is also forced to omit the final plot-twist verse.
With cylinders only allowing songs two and a half minutes in length – two
minutes and twenty seconds once the announcer has said his bit at the start – we
miss out on the great big tearjerking finale. (George J’s version of “After The
Ball” is a 4)
George J. Gaskin he kept on using
his vocal talent to record an insane number of cylinders. By 1897, George J.
had 127 cylinders in the Columbia catalogue, almost an entire page. He also
recorded a similar number for Berliner. The only vocalist with more cylinders
in that Columbia catalogue was Dan Quinn, of which the customer had a choice of
138 titles!*****
Columbia found Dan Quinn singing
at a function. He wasn’t a professional entertainer. He was an ironworker. Although
not a characteristic one associates with iron workers, he was also a bit of a
dandy, vain enough that he refused to tell people his age. But he had “the
perfect voice.” A voice that – despite being born in New York and growing up in
San Francisco – had a thicker Irish brogue than many Irishmen. This was enough
for him to be promoted as “The King Of Comic Singers” with a “genial, jolly disposition”,
even though many of his big hits would be the same tear-jerkers – “Little Lost
Child”, “In The Baggage Coach Ahead” – that everyone was singing at the time.
But he also sang songs like “She Never Did The Same Thing Twice” helpfully
subtitled “An Up-To-Date Story Of An Up-To-Date Girl’, a story of a saucy
little lady who showed a little hose and never had the same hair twice etc, the
kind of fascination over thoroughly-modern lasses we’ll see a lot of going
forward (“She Never Did The Same Thing Twice” is a 2).
Thomas Edison loved Dan’s voice so much that would use him for experiments, as a sort of singing-guinea pig, in his tireless attempts to gradually improve the listenability of his recordings. Dan also recorded a hit version of “Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me A Bow Wow”, a song that, some might argue, is barely listenable at the best of times (““Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me A Bow Wow” is another 2) Not to mention “Daisy Bell (A Bicycle Built for Two)” a recording that sounds as though that bicycle would do with a squirt of two of oil. (“Daisy Bell (A Bicycle Built for Two)” is yet another 2) Recording technology had a loooonnnggg way to go.
The most popular of Dan Quinn’s
138 titles was undoubtably his rendition of “The Band Played On”, a story which
takes place, like “After The Ball” itself, at a ball. Unlike “After The Ball”
however, “The Band Played On” has a happy ending. In fact, the entire song, and
all the characters in it, seem to be overcome with joy, from Casey, the man who
started the social club that was the hottest place in town, all the way down to
the floor waxers who seem genuinely excited to be waxing the floor for their
more glamorous patrons.
Casey has good reason to be
overcome with joy, since – in addition to being the founder of the hottest
ticket in town – he spends the entire night kissing and dancing with “girl with
the strawberry curls.” Not only is Casey completely enraptured by this
strawberry blonde, but “his brain is loaded and nearly exploded.” No wonder
Casey doesn’t want the night to end. Fortunately for him, it doesn’t. They end
up getting married.
Such happiness is contagious, and
even Dan himself seems to get a little carried away with all the excitement.
That Dan genuinely sounds excited is quite an achievement itself. Remember, he
would have recorded “The Band Played On”, many, many, many times. It was hard
work being a phonograph “star” (Dan Quinn’s version – or at least the version
you are likely to find on the Internet, there naturally being hundreds of
slightly different versions - of “The Band Played On” is a 2)
“The Band Played On” was,
however, a bit of an anomaly. For if the pop hits of the 1890s possessed a
dominant theme, it was that if anything-could-go-wrong, it-would-go-wrong.
Maybe it was because the economic history of that decade was nothing but a
series of depressions and panics. Maybe it was the influence of “After The
Ball.” Whatever the reason, the bulk of songs in the 1890s were absolute and
utter downers. Let’s look at a few of them…
* Whilst the middle classes took
the train, the “beautiful people” took a horse and carriage, complete with
coachmen in tights and jackets. As the “beautiful people” alighted from their
carriage, they entered a magical neighbourhood where every door was manned by a
doorman with shiny brass buttons, a fashion parade of pretty ladies in frilly
dresses and dainty gloves, whilst men in top hats gazed with a mixture of
lechery and critical approval, a combination they liked to refer to as
“admiration.” The whole scene reeked of a potent mixture of perfume and the
horse poo, the inevitable by-product of so many horse-and-carriages.
**Whistling the latest songs in
the street appears to have been a popular leisure activity at the time as well.
Contemporary descriptions of life in the 1890s and 1900s regularly mention
people whistling tunes in the street. In the world before radio, overhearing
folk whistling a song in the street is how a lot of people learnt about new
songs.
***Charles earnt a grand total of
85 cents for that song; one cent for each copy sold. It was so unsuccessful
that it is said that the Witmark Brothers hung a copy of the sheet music on the
wall to remind them what failure looked like. Charles did the same thing to the
cheque he received, and for the same reason.
****This might not be much of a
plot, but it’s a hell of a lot more of a plot than virtually anything else on
Broadway at the time. Reviews constantly referred to the distinct lack of a
discernible plot in the average Broadway musical. Many musicals began
with a plot, but by the time the composer had their say – demanding more of
their songs be included – by the time the manager had demanded that the
production needed more showgirls… by the time, in short, that everyone had had
their say and gotten their way, the result was such a mess the audience didn’t
know what the hell was going on!
***** The whole Columbia
catalogue only went to 12 pages, featuring everything from a couple of pages of
marching bands, 53 Michael Casey comic monologues, 16 recordings of an
auctioneer called W. O. Beckanbaugh selling everything from “Christmas Dolls”,
“Household Furniture” to “Sale Of Slaves Befo’ de Wah”, a dog fight, a cock
fight, and a re-enactment of President McKinley’s Inaugural Address. Something,
as they say, for everyone.
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