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MUSIC: THE POP CENTURY BEGINS

American Original

If any art had come into its own as a purely "American" form by the turn of the century, it was popular music, and popular music was a veritable medley. The rhythms of jazz, the sentimental strains of ballads, the syncopation of ragtime, the poignancy of the blues, the lively melodies of show tunes—all were sung, played, hummed, whistled, recorded, and enjoyed by Americans during the decade. American "popular song" was taking on a character of its own, distinct from the song of other countries. Music was also the basis of a rapidly expanding industry: sheet music, instruments, phonographs, and record cylinders or disks were spreading musical fads countrywide at an unprecedented rate. The ragtime number improvised in a Louisville honkytonk in 1900 was being played in an Omaha parlor by 1902; the catchy tune showcased in a Broadway musical one month was on the lips of the hometown barbershop quartet the next. American popular song and popular culture merged during the decade, and an upbeat tone was set for both.

Tin Pan Alley

The music publishing industry, which had been scattered in several large cities in the late 1800s, was by 1900 centered in New York City on Twenty-eighth Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue. In 1903 a reporter dubbed the area "Tin Pan Alley" because of the cacophony of sounds emanating from every open window as tune smiths pounded away at their upright pianos, producing popular songs at assembly-line rates. Musicians played songs for potential performers; arrangers helped composers put their melodies on paper; orchestrators adapted original compositions to numerous orchestrations; and lyricists worked with music writers to "put over" new popular numbers. The sale of sheet music was the goal, and between 1900 and 1909 nearly one hundred Tin Pan Alley songs each sold more than one million copies.

Theme Songs

Tin Pan Alley relied on marketing to the interests of the rapidly expanding national audience. Popular tunes celebrated current events, modern achievements, and popular pastimes: "Meet Me in St. Louis" (1904) and "In My Merry Oldsmobile" (1905) derived from the Saint Louis World's Fair and the increasingly common automobile (airplane, telephone, and telegraph songs were also popular); "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" (1908) remains the best-known baseball song in America. "Kid" songs, such as "School Days" (1907) and "Smarty, Smarty, Smarty" (1908), were favorite vehicles for vaudeville performers. There were temperance songs ("Good Bye Booze," 1901) and drinking songs ("Under the Anheuser Busch," 1904). Songs with women's names in them were especially popular after George M. Cohan wrote "Mary's A Grand Old Name" in 1905. Novelty songs and songs that played on words, such as "Cheyenne" ("shy Ann, shy Ann, hop on my pony," 1906) and "Why Did I Pick a Lemon in the Garden of Love" (1909) were respectable, while others were more salacious: "Be Good" (1907) advised, "If you can't be good, be careful," and "I'd Like to See a Little More of You" (1906) was quite suggestive for an era in which skirts still touched the floor.

Songs of and from African American Life

The enduring appeal in both white and black America of songs about African American life was responsible for the transition from one sort of musical stereotype, the "darky" song, to another, more explicitly racist sort, the "coon" song. Derived from black minstrelsy and composed by songwriters of both races, the "coon" song, commonly filled with references to chicken and watermelon, was further responsible for the extension of old minstrel stereotypes to Broadway and to Tin Pan Alley. On the other hand, show tunes and Tin Pan Alley-type songs by composers such as Bert Williams and George Walker and Bob Cole and the Johnson Brothers, were superb. "Voodoo Man" and "The Blackville Strutters' Ball" (1900), by Williams and Walker; and "My Castle on the Nile" (1901), "Under the Bamboo Tree" (1902), "Congo Love Song" (1903), and "Mandy" (1906), by Cole and the Johnsons, are among the popular songs of the decade that remained high in the public consciousness for decades to come.

Cole and the Johnsons

Bob Cole (1868-1911) began his early career performing with one of the first African American shows to break from the strict minstrel tradition, "The Creole Show." He then worked with opera singer Sisserietta Jones, whose tour of Europe had earned her comparisons to Italian diva Adelina Patti; hence "Black Patti's Troubadours" was the name of the American stage extravaganza that Cole helped write and produce. Cole's collaboration with James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) and J. Rosamond Johnson (1873-1954) began around 1900. Rosamond had studied at the New England Conservatory of Music; James, also a poet, had graduated from Atlanta University and had passed the Florida bar in preparation for a legal career. Both brothers' real interest was musical comedy, however, and in 1899 they moved to New York. Together, Cole and the Johnsons wrote more than two hundred songs during their seven-year association; in 1901 they produced a sophisticated vaudeville show and from there broke into Broadway musicals. "Under the Bamboo Tree,* one of their first song hits, sold over four hundred thousand copies. Cole died at an early age and Rosamond left show business in the 1930s; James Weldon Johnson became a respected literary figure and civil rights leader after his Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man appeared in 1912; together James and Rosamond wrote "Lift Every Voice and Sing" (1900), considered by many to be the African American national song.

Pluggers

Sheet music was available at music shops, dime stores, and department stores. But in the days before sound systems, there were few ways to assure that significant numbers of the buying public could hear and thus appreciate the new songs that were emerging from Tin Pan Alley. "Pluggers" were singers employed by music publishers not only for their vocal talents but also for their ingenuity, their sales ability, and their personal charm. Pluggers had been used by publishers since the 1890s to put songs over with vaudeville audiences (they would sing along with the vaudeville star and often get audiences to join in), but in the 1900s they invaded department and dime stores, performing for the clientele and persuading customers to purchase the sheet music to their songs. Pluggers also performed at sports events, company picnics, and political gatherings. They would sing from the backs of trucks in crowded neighborhoods. Indeed, any public gathering was a choice venue for these dogged songsters to ply their trade. Plugging became a sophisticated craft, and many pluggers, like Mose Gumble, who sang composer Jean Schwartz's "Bedelia" in 1903, created nationwide "song crazes." Others went on to become songwriters or headliners themselves.

Rag Composers

Ragtime, which first emerged from the Saint Louis, Missouri, area, was the most popular piano rhythm in the 1900s, and after the huge success of "Maple Leaf Rag," Scott Joplin (1868-1917) became the "Ragtime King." Joplin's best rags are known today because of a 1970s revival of interest in the form, but other composers, at least two of whom were Joplin's musical disciples, provided the nation with rags throughout the decade and after. James Scott (1886-1938), former handyman and song plugger, was "discovered" by the owner of the Carthage, Missouri, music store where he worked; among Scott's rags of the decade were "Frog Legs" (1906) and "Great Scott Rag" (1909). Joseph Lamb (1887-1960), a white northerner, began to compose ragtime in 1907 and shortly thereafter met Joplin, who listened to his "Sensation Rag," "Dynamite Rag," and "Old Home Rag" and promoted "Sensation Rag" for publication. Lamb and Scott are considered the two best ragtime composers next to Joplin. Harry von Tilzer (born Harry Gumm, 1872-1946) was a prolific composer in every genre of every Tin Pan Alley tune that had a "hit" sound and eventually became the owner of a music publishing business. Von Tilzer was typical of Tin Pan Alley composers who wrote rags along with the other popular material they churned out. His "Good Bye Eliza Jane" (1903) was an early rag that that helped introduce mainstream America to the syncopated beat.

Blues

The blues as an art form was becoming known in the early 1900s, although it had been developing since after the Civil War. The outgrowth of Mississippi Delta field hollers and sorrow songs, the distinctive twelve-bar blues melody, with its repeats and responses, expressed loneliness, woe, humor, and defiance. Although W. C. Handy (1873-1958) first published blues numbers (he wrote his first blues song in 1909), it was Ma Rainey who was considered the bearer of the blues to America through her minstrel performances. Born Gertrude Pridgett (1886-1930), she first appeared in minstrelsy at the age of fourteen; she met and married Will "Pa" Rainey four years later and from then on used the stage name by which she came to be known. She first heard a "strange and poignant" blues song between 1902 and 1904 and immediately reproduced it on the stage, earning the title "Mother of the Blues."

Jazz

It would not be called jazz for another fifteen years, and then the term would be coined in Chicago, but what is sometimes called "traditional" jazz had its beginnings in early-twentieth-century New Orleans. The improvisational instrumental form probably originated from parade and funeral music and in the first decade of the century was much indebted to blues and ragtime. Unlike blues and ragtime, however, jazz continued to develop significantly as the century progressed. Among the notable players and composers of the form in the early 1900s were Sidney Bechet, who played clarinet and soprano saxophone; Charles "Buddy" Bolden (1877-1931) and Joe "King" Oliver (1885-1938), both virtuosos on trumpet and cornet; Edward "Kid" Ord, trombonist; and Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton (1885-1942), pianist. Morton's rags and blues tunes incorporated the melodic inventions of Dixieland jazz, and his skillful variations and subtle, intellectual riffs made him one of the greatest piano jazz men in American musical history. Although many white critics remained scornful of jazz, it emerged by the 1920s as a significant American contribution to world music.

Records

Sheet music and player-piano rolls were the primary distribution methods for popular music during the decade, but after 1902, when opera singer Enrico Caruso recorded ten arias for the Gramophone and Typewriter Company of London, the American music industry suddenly realized the commercial possibilities of recorded music. The Victor Talking Machine Company of America bought out Gramophone in 1903, thus acquiring not only Caruso's recordings, but Caruso's contract as well. Thereafter, nearly every major concert and operatic performer made recordings. Singers of popular songs followed, and songs rapidly became identified with vocalists rather than with composers. Former minstrel Richard Jose recorded "Silver Threads Among the Gold" (written by E. E. Rexford and H. P. Danks) in 1903; Irish tenor Chauncey Olcott recorded "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" (by Olcott, George Graff Jr., and Ernest R. Ball) in 1906; and Broadway songstress Blanch Ring sang "I've Got Rings on My Fingers" (composed by the team of Weston and Barnes, with Maurice Scott) for the Victor Company in 1909. The recording industry quickly expanded; in the early 1900s the record and the record player ceased to be a novelty, becoming a necessity to those who produced American music and to those who wanted to hear it.

Art Music

Popular music became almost synonymous with America in the 1900s, but serious, or "art," music took much longer to find its American soul. Experimental composer Charles Ives (1874-1954), who was not recognized for his symphonies and art songs until after his death, did some of his most important work during the decade. Ives incorporated popular music, military marches, hymns, ragtime, and folk music into his compositions; one of his twenty-seven pieces for piano, written in 1908, is on the subject of baseball, called Some Southpaw Pitching. In 1902 British American composer Frederick Delius used American folk-song motifs in his composition Appalachia; his 1906 work, Sea Drift, was based on Walt Whitman's poems. Edward MacDowell (1860-1908) was considered by many to be the greatest composer of American art music during his lifetime, although much of his work draws from European models. He headed the newly formed music department at Columbia University in New York from its inception until 1904. MacDowell wrote his Norse Sonatas and Celtic Sonatas in 1900 and 1901. Scott Joplin also composed "serious" music: his opera A Guest of Honor was produced in 1903, and he worked on another operatic piece, Treemonisha, from around 1905 until his death. In 1905 L. A. Coernes's opera Zenobia was the first American opera produced in Europe. Victor Herbert's operettas were popular and critical successes. For the most part, however, American operatic and symphonic artists looked to Europe for their material in the early 1900s, and American orchestras preferred European masters to the works of native composers.