In Which Tin Pan Alley Comes Up With A Foolproof Plan For Writing Hits: Make It A Tear-Jerker!
“After The Ball” had set the bar
high for emotional drama and sentimentality. A high bar Charles Harris would
spend much of the rest of his career striving to eclipse with his epic tales of melodrama piled on top of melodrama.
He quite frequently succeeded. “Creep Baby Creep”, however – about a baby’s first steps - was not one of those successes.
Whilst “Creep Baby Creep” was cute, and certainly sentimental, being
cute and sentimental was not enough. To really capture the attention of the
American public you needed something that would bring on the waterworks. That
would jerk the tears. You needed a tearjerker.*
For a tearjerker to be
sufficiently affective, you needed a death, and few deaths were as dramatic -
as melodramatic – as the one in “Break The News To Mother.”
“Break The News To Mother”
features a hero. In earlier versions the hero is a fireman. In latter versions
– such as the rendition that George J Gaskin inevitably recorded – he’s a
soldier. The choice of a soldier was purely commercial. Charles wanted to
capitalize on the Spanish-American War and the surge in patriotism that he
sensed all around him, a creative decision as cynical as it was hugely
successful. In both versions, the last words that the hero speaks are to
request that a message be passed on to his mother; that message being that he
loves her. Already, upon listening to this tale, 19th century tears
would have been flowing, but Charles felt we needed something a little bit more:
a plot-twist to really kick us in the guts.
In both the fireman version and
the soldier version, the hero is, at his moment of death, being cradled by his
father. In the case of the soldier version, that father was a General, who,
until his son carried out the heroic and “brave and noble deed” of saving a
flag that had fallen down in the middle of the battlefield, had not even been
aware that his son had joined the army. “I thought you safe a home” the General
father says. “Forgive me father, for I ran away,” his dying soldier son
replies.
Sad to say, George J Gaskin’s
recorded version doesn’t not capture the tragedy of this senseless death. Sadly,
for all of George’s “strident” and “piercing” vocal talents, a feel for
melodrama is not amongst them. You are more likely to get your tears jerked
from reading the lyric sheet than you are from his inappropriately cheerful
Irish brough (“Break The News To Mother” is a 2)
Given his flair for the
melodramatic whenever he picked up a pen, journalists often seemed a little
disappointed that he didn’t cut a more romantic figure in person. That he
appeared bristling with confidence, rather than crippled with melancholy. And
indeed, Charlies was living a contented life, using the royalties from “After
The Ball” to court a wife, a girl named Cora that he had met… at a ball!
Charles’ life seemed less like “After The Ball” and more like “The Band Played
On.”
It would take a few years, but
Charles would eventually come up with the perfect match… the cute little baby
of “Creep, Baby, Creep” combined with the traumatic death of “Break The News To
Mother,” and resulting in “Hello Central
Give Me Heaven,” the cute but still heartbreaking story of a little girl with
an adorably naïve understanding of how both death and telephones work.
The child is trying to call
Heaven, where they have angels and golden stairs, and also, more relevantly,
her mother. She may not understand death and telephones, but she’s aware that
her momma is gone and her pappa is sad and lonely, and that telephones can
connect people who are far away from each other. Which means that “Hello
Central Give Me Heaven” is not just a cute-child song and traumatic death song,
it’s also a wonder-of-the-modern-world song. There’ll be a lot of those going
forward.
The most popular version of
“Hello Central, Give Me Heaven” was by Byron G. Harlan, a portly gent from
Kansas, who had been trained as an opera singer, before pivoting to a career on
the minstrel circuit that far better suited his sensibilities. He wasn’t hugely
famous or anything, but he had his own minstrel company, he was touring up and
down the east coast, when he was one day hired to sing at one of Thomas
Edison’s dinner parties.
“Hello Central, Give Me Heaven”
has Byron G. hollering in an almost operatic fashion, and also a moment where
he pauses so that the little girl has time to operate the telephone, thereby
showing admirable attention to detail. (“Hello Central, Give Me Heaven” is a 3)
Charles Harris may have started
in Wisconsin, but by 1895 he had made the inevitable move to New York. Everybody,
it seems, ended up in New York. The lure of fame and fortune was too strong to
resist. Young men – barely even men, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old,
children basically – living in small towns, dreaming of adventure, dreaming of
seeing the world, dreaming of not living in a small town anymore. Young men
with stories that were all strikingly similar. Young men running off to join a
circus, or a medicine or a minstrel show. Young men who would, step by step,
via all manner of convoluted routes, end up in New York.
Such was the story of Paul Dresser, a giant on the Tin Pan Alley scene. Literally.
A Christmas pudding in
a top hat who weighed in at 300 pounds, Paul was a man with a voracious
appetite. An appetite for food, an appetite for drink, an appetite for women,
an appetite for life. He needed to write a constant stream of hits to fund his
extravagant partying lifestyle and his sampling of virtually every brothel in
New York City. Whenever he found himself running out of money and facing
mounting debts, he would just write another song, sell it, and head straight to
the nearest brothel to get drunk. He may have been the first major pop figure
to commit himself fully to a rock star lifestyle. If not for his songwriter
talent he’d probably have ended his life booking into a 15c hotel room in the
Bowery and gassing himself to death, like a character in his brother, Theodore
Dreiser’s, hit novel “Sister Carrie”, in which an 18-year-old-girl leaves home
to make it in the big city. Instead of being punished for such impertinence as
was the norm in popular fiction – and popular song - at the time, Carrie ends
up becoming a big Broadway star. This was considered highly immoral at the time,
and it would be years before anyone would be allowed to read it.
Theodore’s New York is a vicious
world, a brutal game of snakes and ladders where a handful of good or bad
decisions determined whether you lived in a hotel penthouse - handed out for
free to rising Broadway stars so that the hotel can boast of having a celebrity
in residence – or are one of the ragged skeletons sleeping on a park bench in
the depths of winter. Carrie is one of the former. Her ex-lover becomes one of
the latter. Given that he had pretty much kidnapped Carrie earlier in the
novel, you can’t say he didn’t have it coming to him, and nobody’s really that
sad when he gasses himself to death in that 15c hotel room.***
Paul Dresser had been heading
that way himself – evicted from his lavish hotel room and forced to live with
his sister - when he died of a brain haemorrhage in 1905. Only a handful of years
after the height of his fame, Paul had run out of hits, run out of money, and
was sinking into the depression that comes with the realisation that the
combination of his rotund figure and lack of ready-cash to pay prostitutes with,
meant that he might never sleep with a woman again.
Paul’s fortunes had certainly
plummeted from just a few years earlier when not only was he writing hits but
owned a song publishing business to publish those hits, as well as a monthly
magazine – titled “Ev’Ry Month: The Woman’s Magazine Of Literature And Music”, edited
by brother Theodore – to promote them. Even with all those revenue streams,
Paul was unable to pay for all the prostitutes he partied with.
Paul may have been the first pop
figure to fully embrace the partying lifestyle – and the subsequent,
inevitable, tragic fall - but his songs did not make this immediately obvious. They
did not document his partying. Such songs would not sell. Sure, they’d probably
do well on the bawdier side of vaudeville, but that wasn’t where the money was.
The money was in sheet music, and for sheet music to sell it needed to appeal to
a target demographic of young middle-class women learning to play the piano;
not a demographic known for its preference for songs about partying with
prostitutes.
Instead of writing about the life
he knew, Paul needed to write nostalgic laments about the quiet country life he
would have lived had he never been lured away by the bright lights of the big
city. Paul needed to write “On The Banks of the Wabash, Far Away,” With the
money from the sheet-music sales of “On The Banks Of The Wabash, Far Away”,
Paul could afford to party with many prostitutes.
“On The Banks Of The Wabash, Far
Away” – or “Wabash” for short - was the ultimate “mother and home” song**, a
genre that was up there with “tearjerkers” as the most popular style of song
amongst the sheet-music buying public. In “Wabash” Paul feels nostalgic
for the simple life in Indiana. He recalls the image of his mother standing in
the doorway. He remembers walking arm in arm with his sweetheart called Mary.
Both are now dead. Their graves Paul seems unable to visit – they are simply so
far away – except in his thoughts.
“Wabash” is a song oozing with
the yearnings of a man constantly thinking about home but never feeling sure he
can return. Paul had disappointed his father too many times. He had failed to
make his father’s dreams – that he become a Catholic priest – come true. Paul
had already been thrown out of a seminary – twice! - both times in order to run
off and join the circus. He’d later turn to a life of crime, also not a
lifestyle choice that his father approved of.
“Wabash” was just one of many
songs based on a trope that could be found throughout the popular culture of
the 1890s; that of a young, ambitious, small-town lad going off to the bustling
big city to make his fortune, before coming back to marry his childhood
sweetheart, having discovered that he didn’t care for all those smart,
confident girls in the city.*** All the small-town lad wanted was a sweet,
innocent, naïve country lass, of the kind that you could only find back home.
The main difference being of course that most of those songs were not “tearjerkers”
involving the deaths of the supporting cast. In “Wabash”, Paul was able to
check off the boxes of two of the most popular song styles of the era.
Naturally it became a huge hit. And George J. Gaskin recorded a cylinder of it,
sounding-like-a-“strident”-bulldozer who has never missed a mother, a wife, nor
the banks of any river in his life. (The George J. Gaskin version of “On
The Banks Of The Wabash” is a 2)
Paul Dresser’s proclivity for
writing nostalgic laments likely came from a realisation that he could never go
back. His feelings about New York can also be seen in “Just Tell Them That You
Saw Me”, in which Paul bumps into a girl from home. She’s in New York and
things are not going so well for her. Paul notices, for example, that she is
pale and thin. He doesn’t give any details, leaving the listener to fill in the
blanks and assume that she’s working at a brothel. Paul’s feelings about his
partying lifestyle appear to have been extremely conflicted.****
Brothels played a surprisingly
central role in the popular culture of the turn of the century. Such houses of
ill repute may not have been a regular feature on the lyric sheets, but rare
was the tunesmith who didn’t spend their nights in the company of a lady of the
night. Since few other women – and certainly no respectable women – were
permitted in a pub, prostitution filled a gap in the market.
And what a market it was! There
were reputed to be 109 brothels within “sight or gunshot” of the White House.
To be fair this was partially because it was also the location of a
particularly notorious army camp. An army led by a General Joe Hooker**** – the
jokes write themselves - whose headquarters were described as a combination of
“bar-room and brothel.” The same could be said for much of the rest of the
country. It is estimated that New York in 1869 had between 20,000 and 25,000
prostitutes, as much as 10% of the female population! So when you hear a story
about so-and-so Tin Pan Alley tunesmith having some drinks in a brothel, all
that simply means is that he was having a night out.
Harry von Tilzer also enjoyed having
a night out. With prostitutes. It was one of his favourite activities, along
with anything to do with showbusiness and the money and glamour that came along
with it. He loved the money and glamour so much that he added “von” to his name
to make himself sound more intriguing. It was not an immediately successful
scam, and after a short time in New York – where he had arrived so short of
money he'd worked as a groom for horses on the train in, in order to not arrive
utterly penniless – he was back touring the backroads of America in a
travelling medicine show. But eventually things began to work out for him,
which is why one night he found himself at, not just any old New York brothel,
but in The House Of All Nations, one of the most glamorous brothels in town,
where the high-class prostitutes were costumed in all manner of “ethnic dress.”
Which is why he found himself sitting at a piano, playing the prostitutes a new
song he had written, a song that brought these
heart-hardened-high-class-prostitutes to tears.
What sort of song might make a
hardened prostitute cry?
It was “A Bird In a Gilded Cage,”
a song set in a ballroom filled with fashion’s throng and shining like a
thousand lights. A stunning young woman - the brightest light of them all -
passes by and everyone stops and stares. Why do they stare? Partially it’s
because she’s so beautiful, but it’s also because they know her story. The story is why, once she’s passed by,
everyone sighs. They turn and shake their heads. For she is married to a rich
old man. She has wasted her life in search of riches. She should be off,
footloose and fancy free, with someone her own age but “her beauty was sold,
for an old man’s gold.”
And then she died, and the
prostitutes cried. Perhaps they were reflecting on the folly of their own
youth, sleeping with rich fat old men sporting moustaches and monocles. Perhaps
it all felt a little bit too close to home.
As soon as he saw the tears on
the tarts, Harry knew that he had a hit. One of the biggest, and arguably the
definitive, hits of The Gilded Age******. A tearjerker based on a pun! A pun
about an age and an America filled with captains of industry living in mansions,
surrounded by unimaginable wealth, whilst underneath all that glamour millions
were living in poverty. America was a bit like Harry von Tilzer himself, his
very name fake, a ruse to give himself class, and mask his travelling-medicine-show
roots.
This is one version of the story
anyway. Another has it that he played it to a group of high society girls, and
that they cried as well. It almost doesn’t matter whose eyes the tears sprang
from: whether prostitute or high-society princess, there were a lot of girls
out there who felt like birds in gilded cages.
The most popular recorded version
of “The Bird In A Gilded Cage” was by Steven Porter, and he, most certainly,
was not crying. Steve is enjoying himself way too much for a song which ends
with a death (because obviously “The Bird In A Gilded Cage” ends with her death,
although how, and when, is a little unclear). He’s having a ball holding those
long notes - “the ballroom was filled with fashions throng, it shone with a
thousand liiiiiiiiights”- and seems to be drawing even more pleasure
from the taste of delicious schadenfreude. There’s also a piano being played in
an equally inappropriately jaunty manner. Everybody is having far more fun than
that poor girl. (The Steve Porter version of “The Bird In A Gilded Cage” is a
3)
Everybody seemed to be having fun
writing songs about characters who were having no fun at all, and the tearjerker
boom continued. Many of which used “After The Ball” as the blueprint. Charles
Graham’s “Two Little Girls In Blue”, for example, begins almost identically; an
old man is looking sad, a youngster – in this case, his nephew – comes up and
asks why. The old man tells a story of how he used to be happy and have a girl,
but he suspected her – wrongfully - of cheating and thus she left.
“Two Little Girls In Blue” is
largely distinguished by the fact that the two little girls in blue were
sisters, one married to the narrator and the other to his brother. Charles
doesn’t provide a lot of detail, so we can only speculate about a scenario where
both the brothers and the sisters are twins, and thus it was a case of
double-mistaken identity. I’m not sure how this would work.
The most popular recorded version of “Two Little Girls In Blue” was by J.W. Myers, possessor of the least popstar sounding moniker in this book – it sounds as though he should have been the proud owner of a haberdashery - and also of a particularly luxuriant moustache, remarkable even in that amply moustached age (“Two Little Girls In Blue” is a 2)
Other tearjerkers used “Hello Central,
Give Me Heaven” as their template, relying heavily on the cuteness of children.
Case in point, the 1899 hit “Please Mr Conductor Don’t Put Me Off This Train,”
which – in case you can’t guess - involves a little boy, on a train, and the
lack of a ticket. The conductor gruffly demands his fare, but it turns out that
the little boy is visiting his dying mother, his best friend in the entire
world. A little girl feels sorry for him and passes a hat around.
Trains were a popular tearjerker
setting, as evidenced by “In The Baggage Coach Ahead”, which featured not only
a small child, but a crying infant being held by its father, on a busy
overnight train. Not being able to sleep, the other passengers start to berate
the father, until he informs them that his dead wife’s coffin is… in the
baggage coach ahead!! Everybody suddenly gains a sense of perspective.
The music for “In The Baggage Coach Ahead” was written by Gussie Davis, a Black man from Cincinnati. He wanted to go to college and study music but wasn’t permitted to enrol, so he became a janitor in exchange for lessons.
By the time he wrote the melody to
“In The Baggage Coach Ahead” those days were far behind him, and he was living
in New York, writing melancholy melodies for a series of miserable tunes,
including one called “The Fatal Wedding.”
Picture the scene; a winter
wedding. The bride and groom are inside the church about to take their vows. A
woman shows up, with a baby in her arms, but – being not on the guestlist –
she’s not permitted in. She’s told to wait in the snow. Following a lot of
pleading she and the baby are finally let inside, in time to hear the preacher
recite the line “If anyone knows reason why this couple should not wed... speak
now, or hold your peace forever.” The woman objects… for the groom is her
husband! And the baby… his baby!! And the baby… IS DEAD!!!!
The groom ends up killing himself
that night and is buried on the same day as his lifeless infant child.
And THAT my friends, is how you
write a tearjerker!
*Although these songs are often
referred to as tearjerkers now, they weren’t back then. The phrase does not
appear to have become popular until the 1910s, and even then, it didn’t become
commonplace until the 1930s, a decade in which there was a lot to write a
tearjerker about. “After The Ball” and other similar songs were referred to
instead as “ballads.”
.**Unlike the phrase “tearjerkers”
which had yet to be invented, “mother and home songs” was a recognized genre at
the turn of the century, possibly a reference to an 1875 tune “Friendless and Sad”,
which had included the chorus: “friendless and sad I am dreaming, weeping o’er
bliss that has flown, craving a heartfelt devotion, sighing for mother and
home.”
***There would also be an
absolute glut of songs in which Black folk yearn to return to their plantations
in The South, having become disillusioned with the bright lights and freedom of
The North. It feels as though the two might be related.
**** Paul Dresser wasn’t the only
Tin Pan Alley tunesmith spending a lot of time with prostitutes, documenting
their downfall whilst simultaneously contributing to it. William B. Gray, who
also had a sideline as a boxer, appears to have been a patron of the lower-class
brothels of The Bowery, where his hit “She’s More To Be Pitied, Than Censured” is
set, and in which a young lady, having fallen into shame, is being jeered at by
a group of young men. An old woman comes to her aid, reminding the young
fellows that whatever the young lady has done, there was doubtlessly a young
fellow involved. It wasn’t God who made Bowery-brothel angels.
*****But no, before you ask, this
isn’t where the term “hooker” originated from, although it may have helped
popularize it. The term originally came from the Corlear’s Hook neighbourhood, on
the Lower East Side, where it was a particularly common occupation in the
1820s. You will not be surprised to learn that the neighbourhood was popular
with sailors.
******The word “gilded” referring
to the process of painting a thin layer of gold onto something to make it look
far, far more impressive than it otherwise would’ve.
******* Steve seems to have
enjoyed making records so much that he threw himself into a whole bunch of
record-making projects, with varying levels of success. He launched the American
Phonograph Record Company of Brooklyn. Not a success. He went to India and set
up the local branch of a record company called Nicole Records in Calcutta and
became a bit of an A&R man for the Indian and Burmese market. Seemingly a
bit more of a success. By the time he finally got back to New York the
tearjerker boom was over – the world had moved on to songs about automobiles
and spooning – so he threw himself into a genre that was incredibly still going
strong, spoken word comic records in an Irish accent.
As for Harry von Tilzer, he
followed “A Bird In A Gilded Cage” with the similarly themed “The Mansion of
Aching Hearts”, in which a young man pines over a glamorous society girl, whose
- he is informed by a mysterious source – smile is a mask and who is often in
tears.
“The Mansion Of Aching Hearts”
would be recorded by Byron G. Harlan, a man who – at least early in his career,
before deciding to pivot to impersonating Black women for laughs and profit–
really went hard on the “tearjerker” market (Byron’s version of “The Mansion Of
Aching Hearts” is a 2)
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