Product Description

From Irving Berlin to Cy Coleman, from “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” to “Big Spender,” from Tin Pan Alley to the MGM soundstages, the Golden Age of the American song embodied all that was cool, sexy, and sophisticated in popular culture. For four glittering decades, geniuses like Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Harold Arlen ran their fingers over piano keys, enticing unforgettable melodies out of thin air. Critically acclaimed writer Wilfrid Sheed uncovered the legends, mingled with the greats, and gossiped with the insiders. Now he’s crafted a dazzling, authoritative history of the era that “tripled the world’s total supply of singable tunes.”

It began when immigrants in New York’s Lower East Side heard black jazz and blues–and it surged into an artistic torrent nothing short of miraculous. Broke but eager, Izzy Baline transformed himself into Irving Berlin, married an heiress, and embarked on a string of hits from “Always” to “Cheek to Cheek.” Berlin’s spiritual godson George Gershwin, in his brief but incandescent career, straddled Tin Pan Alley and Carnegie Hall, charming everyone in his orbit. Possessed of a world-class ego, Gershwin was also generous, exciting, and utterly original. Half a century later, Gershwin love songs like “Someone to Watch Over Me,” “The Man I Love,” and “Love Is Here to Stay” are as tender and moving as ever.
Sheed also illuminates the unique gifts of the great jazz songsters Hoagy Carmichael and Duke Ellington, conjuring up the circumstances of their creativity and bringing back the thrill of what it was like to hear “Georgia on My Mind” or “Mood Indigo” for the first time. The Golden Age of song sparked creative breakthroughs in both Broadway musicals and splashy Hollywood extravaganzas. Sheed vividly recounts how Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern, and Johnny Mercer spread the melodic wealth to stage and screen.

Popular music was, writes Sheed, “far and away our greatest contribution to the world’s art supply in the so-called American Century.” Sheed hung out with some of the great artists while they were still writing–and better than anyone, he knows great music, its shimmer, bite, and exuberance. Sparkling with wit, insight, and the grace notes of wonderful songs, The House That George Built is a heartfelt, intensely personal portrait of an unforgettable era.

A delightfully charming, funny, and most illuminating portrait of songwriters and the Golden Age of American Popular Song. Mr. Sheed’s carefully chosen depictions and anecdotes recapture that amazingly creative period, a moment in time in which I was so fortunate to be surrounded by all that magic.”
–Margaret Whiting


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #23440 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-13
• Released on: 2008-05-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Sheed (Office Politics), who won a 1987 Grammy Award for Best Album Notes (for Sinatra's The Voice), spoke over the decades with many of these Great American Songbook creators and their families. In this book, he employs an informal, anecdotal approach as he looks back at the top tunesmiths of Tin Pan Alley, Broadway and Hollywood. Composer Arthur Schwartz recalled that he dashed off the tune in 20 minutes after lyricist Howard Dietz casually remarked, What is life but dancing in the dark? Beginning with Gershwin and Irving Berlin, Sheed quotes numerous lyrics throughout his lilting, witty profiles (of Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington, Frank Loesser, Johnny Mercer, Richard Rodgers and others), plus brief comments on 57 more. Since Hurricane Katrina, Louis Alter's Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? has served as a national anthem, so the curt dismissal of Alter (more a swinging musician than a songwriter proper) is curious amid the many choruses of praise. Sheed soars on the wings of song with scintillating, lyrical writing. (July 3)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

In December 1952, Fred Astaire joined an all-star jazz group led by the pianist Oscar Peterson to record more than three dozen songs associated with the great dancer during his long career on Broadway and in Hollywood.

In the notes he wrote for the album, which he called "a sequence in song starting around 1926 and carrying on to about 1944," Astaire said: "It was my good fortune that Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Arthur Schwartz, Howard Dietz, and others, supplied the music for these various films and stage shows. . . . Yes indeed, that was a fine lot of material to fall into one's lap."

Which of course is sublime understatement, that being no surprise, since sublime understatement was Astaire's stock-in-trade. No performer, Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland included, has had so many brilliant songs written especially for him or her as did Fred Astaire, and into the bargain he reached his peak at the moment when what we now think of as classic American popular song was reaching its own peak. As Wilfrid Sheed puts it in his exuberant tour d'horizon of "this musical Mount Rushmore," Astaire "was of course a phenomenon unto himself. Every writer did his best work for Fred, because, among other reasons, he asked for it." The results were, and are, simply astonishing. From Berlin: "Puttin' on the Ritz," "Cheek to Cheek," "Steppin' Out With My Baby," "Top Hat, White Tie and Tails." From

Gershwin: " 'S Wonderful," "Nice Work If You Can Get It," "They Can't Take That Away From Me," "A Foggy Day." From Porter: "I Concentrate on You,"

"Night and Day," "So Near and Yet So Far." From Kern: "The Way You Look Tonight," "I Won't Dance," "A Fine Romance." From Schwartz and Dietz: "Dancing in the Dark," "New Sun in the Sky," "I Love Louisa."

Et cetera. But, great as the songs tailored for Astaire were, they were only a tiny percentage of the writers' output. A good case can be made that this music, combined with its symbiotic partner, jazz, was the great American cultural achievement of the 20th century, a body of work, as Sheed says, "about the whole country, concerning which [these songs] provide maybe the most trustworthy record we have." It is music that reflects America as vividly and truly as anything the country has created, yet the irony is that it was largely produced by members of two groups of outsiders, Jews and blacks. "The standards have actually been referred to as a Jewish response to black music," Sheed writes, "but this definition is a loaded compliment that neither party has rushed to claim." He continues:

"Music is not produced by whole groups, but by one genius at a time, and it may be significant that the two families that gave us Irving Berlin and George Gershwin both fled Russia on the same great wave of czarist pogroms, only to find American black people not only singing about a similar experience, but using the Hebrew Bible as their text."

The one certainty is that all of these people had to come to America in order to write this music. No other place inspired anything remotely similar, as a quick survey of the (mostly feeble) British musical comedy makes plain. In no composer's career is this more evident than in that of Irving Berlin, nee Israel Baline, the son of the impoverished Lower East Side who spent his entire, astonishingly long career capturing in music the essence of the country to which his parents immigrated in 1893, when he was

5 years old. Berlin, who lived to be 101 and became rich many times over, never lost his wonder at what a poor boy could do here or his gratitude that so much had been given to him. Like it or not (and musical snobs don't), he wrote the real national anthem, "God Bless America," and the Norman Rockwell-esque "White Christmas," and a zillion other tokens of his love.

But to see Berlin through the prism of his two most famous songs is to grasp only a minuscule part of him. Sheed: "At least a part of Irving Berlin was an intuitive jazzman who had once heard the sounds of Harlem as clearly as those of Hester Street and had, so to speak, finally hatched out the embryonic sounds of his early rags into the swinging majesty of 'Cheek to Cheek.' " He wrote what may well be America's most famous love song, "Always," and then he wrote what is almost certainly its best, "How Deep Is the Ocean." He wrote "Blue Skies" and "Easter Parade" (talk about

Americana!) and "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm" and, speaking of Americana, the entire score of "Annie Get Your Gun." Inasmuch as he was the first of these composers, and his work influenced each and every one of them, it's something of a mystery that Sheed ascribes the construction of this "house" of American music to Gershwin. Yes, probably Gershwin was the greater musician, but it was Berlin who laid the foundation and put up the frame, as in fact Sheed acknowledges when he says that "if there had been no Irving Berlin, there would have been nothing, for instance, quite like Harold Arlen either, or Jimmy Van Heusen, or even Cole Porter in quite the same form."

Certainly, this isn't to disparage Gershwin, whose only real rival within this pantheon for breadth and depth of accomplishment is Duke Ellington, but to make the point that if we're going to use the image of house construction, let's get the foundation right. On the subject of Gershwin, Sheed is especially good because he emphasizes his singular generosity to other composers and musicians, and because he eloquently defends Gershwin against his highbrow critics: "George did not consider Tin Pan Alley a curse at all, but a gold mine into which one could probably invest all one's time and talent, including one's classical talent, in hopes of finding a genuine new American art. So he went his serene way, alternately writing songs and concert pieces that ran together into a single sound that could be played in a pinch by a jazz band or a symphony orchestra, or by some fusion of both that didn't yet exist."

Okay. If Gershwin isn't the foundation, he's all the outer walls, within which reside Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Johnny Mercer, Frank Loesser, all of whom -- along with heaven knows how many others -- contributed to this incredible outpouring of distinctly, irrefutably American music. The one person about whom Sheed writes who doesn't really fit into this house is Ellington. A favorite phrase of his own, "beyond category," is the most apt description of Ellington himself, and it suggests the difficulty of trying to fit him into this songwriting club that Sheed has assembled. One reason, as Sheed in so many words acknowledges, is that Ellington wasn't a songwriter in the received sense of the word. Not to put on airs or anything, but he was a composer. People came along to attach words to some of his best compositions -- "Mood Indigo," "Sophisticated Lady," "I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good," "I'm Beginning to See the Light" -- but almost all of them seem like afterthoughts, and Ellington himself seemed to regard them as such.

Be that as it may, all of this is in the realm of opinion, conjecture and taste. It baffles me, for example, that Sheed relegates Fats Waller to an appendix, that he discusses Cy Coleman yet ignores his lovely musical "I Love My Wife," and that he gives only a single aside to the incomparable Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who were chiefly lyricists and scriptwriters but whose influence on American music was huge. But in raising these objections I'm simply indulging my own prejudices, or preferences, just as Sheed is fully entitled to his own.

Sheed has been well known for more than four decades as literary critic, novelist, memoirist and baseball fan. His knowledge of classic American popular song came as news to me, but The House That George Built is written with authority and enthusiasm. It is "a labor of love, not of scholarship, which means that I have been researching it for most of my life without knowing it -- starting at the family piano, singing and memorizing Irving Berlin's ragtime spin-offs, and ending with the last phone conversation with the last fellow addict fifteen minutes ago." This music is, well, easy to love, but it's not so easy to write well about, which is just what Sheed does.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Although no musicologist, Wilfrid Sheed has been around the block. He has written acclaimed novels and nonfiction books, most notably on baseball and literature. Here, he displays a lifelong passion for jazz and recounts his interaction with some of the greats in this engaging, knowledgeable, opinionated, and occasionally-some of Sheed's more obscure references may lose the neophyte-aggravating look at the Golden Age of music in America. The House That George Built doesn't reach the status of, say, Alec Wilder's American Popular Song or Max Wilk's They're Playing Our Song, in part because it's not meant to be a coherent, formal history of the period. But Sheed's book is a testament to the rich work that comes from a lifetime of devotion.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

The House that George Built
It is amazing to think that there were people walking about the streets of Hollywood and Broadway with those fabulous songs ringing in their heads yearning to be written down for the first time. and Wilfred Sheed writes like a happy man expounding on a theme at a slightly tipsy dinner table late at night. I read the whole thing in two evenings.

I couldn't put it down (even under the worst of circumstances)
Lots of good insights in the reviews of this book. The writing style is circuitous, occas. redundant, but I think Mr. Sheed was just awash in so much information, so many memories & emotions, such affection for the music and the people who blessed the world with it, that I can forgive him.

Kathryn Atwood's 11/25/07 review is almost precisely what I'd have written if she hadn't already. I love her sentence, "Sheed's insights....will deliver many 'aha!' moments"--and they certainly did for me.

The book kept my interest enough to finish it in 5-to-20 minute increments over 3 miserable days/nights of the worst stomach virus of my life when every shred of my being just wanted to roll over and die, and that's quite a feat.

I'm probably prejudiced in Mr. Sheed's favor because he obviously shares my special affection for some of the comparatively less-well-known songs: Gershwin's "Soon", and Kern's "I'm Old-Fashioned", among others. He refers to them lovingly several times.

On the other hand, If he'd mentioned what just might be my absolute favorite song of the era, the 1936 Link/Marvell/Strachey masterpiece, "These Foolish Things", I'd probably have given him 5 stars. (Just kidding. The writers were all Brits and I guess he figured he had enough to deal with on this side of the Atlantic.)

(Have any of you, BTW, ever heard the Ella/Louis 7+ minute performance with all the exquisite verses?

First daffodils and long excited cables,
And candlelight on little corner tables..."

The sigh of midnight trains in empty stations
Silk stockings thrown aside, dance invitations...

The smile of Garbo and the scent of roses,
The waiters whistling as the last bar closes....

And still my heart has wings....)

What an era that was: what energy/synergy/symbiosis/serendipity! I can understand why anyone trying to chronicle the embarrassment of riches that gushed forth from so many sources in such a short time might have a hard time keeping their words from kinda tumbling over each other now and then.

Not quite the popular song primer it could have been
"The House That George Built" by Wilfred Sheed seems at first glance to be the perfect primer to the story of our greatest American songwriters. Not since composer Alec Wilder's groundbreaking reference guide "American Popular Song" has there been a comparable effort to tie together the compositional timelines of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern & Cole Porter, plus all of the lesser known songwriters they influenced. The main four were somewhat engaged in a friendly competition for top bragging rights as they wrote their greatest hits all about the same time- and for audiences as diverse as Broadway, Hollywood, and the fellow at the parlor piano just looking to learn the latest Tin Pan Alley hit.

From the introductory chapter, Sheed speaks to the reader as if he's across from you at the dinner table with a brandy, ready to regale you with wonderful tales and little known tidbits. And for the most part throughout the book, a compendium of newly written material plus essays that first appeared in Esquire, the New York Times, Time magazine and other print media sources, Sheed delivers: for instance, we learn that the famous "Street Of Dreams" was the focal avenue of the jazz world, Manhattan's 52nd Street; "Laura", the gorgeous movie theme by David Raksin with lyrics by Johnny Mercer was the one song that Cole Porter had wished he had written himself; Burton Lane was discovered playing piano as a lad by Gershwin's mother and soon became a protégé of the master; and so on. But in order for us to understand our famous subjects, Sheed must get inside their private lives, and in most cases, inside their heads. He gets a lot of this interesting information thanks to help from friends and fellow musical aficionados like Wilder, Michael Feinstein, Ann Ronnell (composer of "Willow Weep For Me" and Gershwin's friend), Cy Coleman, Lane and many wives and offspring of his subjects. So we also learn that both Harold Arlen and Larry Hart (Richard Rodgers' first lyricist) were manic depressives; Jerome Kern had a penchant for risky gambling; Irving Berlin had low self-esteem; Rodgers became an uncontrollable alcoholic; and Cole Porter had a surprising religious side in his later years despite his long time penchant for a gay party lifestyle. Admittedly, some of this dishy stuff reads a bit like tabloid fodder, but Sheed offers it as matter-of-factly as possible, presenting to us the human side of these very creative but often tortured geniuses.

Sheed shows us how our four main protagonists (Berlin/Gershwin/Kern/Porter) fit into the transition from classical music into jazz, America's own music, through the intermingling of African, European and Jewish music traditions. The needs and demands of the public also dictated how and what each of these men would write, for Broadway songs would have different expectations next to songs written for Hollywood films. Sheed is right on target, but the slight drawback is that his chapters tend to make for slow reading. Yes, the psychological ramifications are interesting, but we do not really need to hear every detail about Kern's family or Porter's school life, and it often takes a bit of time to get to the stories we really want to hear about- the writing of these popular song masterpieces. After all, we expected this to be a book about music and its history.

The reader happens across an occasional lovely nugget of wisdom, such as Kern's analogy of songwriting being akin to fishing: "...you may feel twenty tugs on your line and only one of them will be a fish worth keeping, and it might sometimes take a while to know which one." But you'll often come across a tedious bit, like this run-on sentence about Rodgers: "From then on, his parents would magically cease to matter until they later showed up in the orchestra seats, warmly applauding their son- nice people, after all, in that context, who, rare among artists' parents, thoroughly approved of his chosen life: a life that he, perhaps in return, proceeded to keep as outwardly square as he possibly could, dressing and comporting himself like a banker, hiding any private sins in the best private manner, and eventually courting a full length a most suitable and ladylike young woman named Dorothy Feiner, to whom he tried vociferously to be faithful, for a while." Eek. This rambling type of prose gets difficult to sift through after a while, and is really more suited towards story `spinning' than delivering facts. Actually, with Garrison Keillor's warm praise for Sheed's book (front and center on the cover), it's easy to see a similarity between Keillor's Wobegon stories and Sheed's type of storytelling.

Sheed also has an annoying habit of overusing a literary device- a composer's own song titles as a reference to his own life situation. "By the end of it, Kern had learned, if nothing else, how to `let himself go'..." "Linda (Porter's wife) was still `nice to come home to' occasionally and `love' in one's fashion." I guess one could chalk this up to the material coming from different sources. The use of such a device wouldn't normally appear so often in a book, and it reads a bit too punny.

The book does have a well researched Appendix that cites numerous little known songs from the `two hit wonder' composers and songwriting teams of the period. Sheed sets a condition of two bonafide hits in order for these lesser known composers to be included in the listing. I found myself humming the tunes as I read the titles, forgotten gems like Isham Jones's "It Had To Be You", "Fools Rush In" by Rube Bloom, and Gene DePaul's "I'll Remember April".

To sum it all up: this book appears to be geared toward the intellectual set (most likely the type who get most of Porter's lyric double-entendres), and not the casual reader. For those who are musicians or interested in this particular genre, I do recommend giving the book a try. At the beginning I thought I would really love this book; by the end I realized I only liked and respected it. Despite the book's shortcomings, Sheed obviously has great love for these songs and the period from which they came. There is a lot of worthwhile material here- just be prepared that you'll have to dig for it.