They’re the songs everybody wants to sing. Not only Frank and Ella and Louis and Sarah and Bing and Billie and Cleo, but ageing pop stars like Rod Stewart and Linda Ronstadt. They are the Great American Songbook, the several hundred songs written between, roughly, 1920 and 1950, mostly by New York Jews – songs whose enduring charm and singability have made them an indelible part of the popular canon.

Wilfrid Sheed’s The House That George Built is a highly entertaining anecdotal rehearsal of the Songbook and its creators. Not quite following in the footsteps of his friend Alex Wilder – whose American Popular Song: The great innovators, 1900–1950 remains indispensable – Sheed offers nevertheless a freshness of response sustained over sixty years in a series of intelligent and perceptive essays about American songwriting and the fertile polyglot culture of New York in the first half of the twentieth century. Sheed links his songwriting Pantheon (Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern and Richard Rodgers) to an American cultural flowering comparable – and the comparison does not seem forced – to those of Renaissance England or Periclean Athens. Alert to the technological aspects of that flowering, Sheed is particularly good on how the advent of microphones, and then radio, as well as sheet music, vinyl recordings and the coming of talkies, made song, and singing, “brisker and less operatic”, more intimate and, of course, jazzier.

Sheed’s pantheon rests on the plinth of “more than fifty tunes that are still popular enough over fifty years later for most cocktail lounge pianists to have a rough idea of them”. His gods of song are circled by demigods such as Harold Arlen, Harry Warren, Hoagy Carmichael and the less easily classified Duke Ellington, who occupies a pantheon of his own a couple of blocks further down Broadway. Aside from the Indiana-born Porter, the five gods were all Jews; and even Porter spoke frequently about “writing Jewish” – for Sheed “all minor keys and innate melancholy”. Like their kinsmen in the film industry, they more or less created American popular culture through an outsider’s lens. Sheed writes of Tin Pan Alley as a “sort of particle collider drawing on the shared Jewish and Black experiences of Exodus, slavery and racial hate”.

If the Father for these outsiders was the musically untutored and reclusive Irving Berlin, who out-gentiled the Gentiles in patriotic fervour and secular reverence for holidays (he wrote both “God Bless America” and “White Christmas”), the Son was surely the sophisticated George Gershwin. For a time, Gershwin’s New York digs became jazz central for songwriters old and new, but since all the greats who followed him are, in Sheed’s view, his dependants, he is the book’s touchstone. Gershwin’s jazzy sophistication (“Fascinating Rhythm”, “Someone to Watch Over Me”) transformed Tin Pan Alley from the iterative monotony of songs such as “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” to the syncopated beats of Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” and Porter’s “Night and Day”. And his resistance to the snobs who chided him for slumming with jazz when he could be writing classical music, or even operetta, endears him even further to the author. A similar, hard-edged quality defines the sketches of the taciturn Rodgers, whose sentimentality was at first held in check by Hart and then unleashed by Oscar Hammerstein; the imperious Kern, who learned to swing only when Fred Astaire pronounced his songs for a film undanceable; and Porter who, like Berlin, wrote both melody and lyrics, but was wittier, more complex, less predictable.

I have two small criticisms. There is a whiff of fogeyism in Steed’s unresponsiveness to popular music since the 1950s: the Beatles, folk music, soul, Springsteen. And I think that he undervalues the lyric as something sung. The great Johnny Mercer (“That Old Black Magic”, “Laura”) is the only lyricist who gets his own chapter, and one feels that Sheed is breaking his own rule to allow him in. It may be true, as he claims, that Cole Porter could have extended the clever lyrics of “You’re the Top” (“You’re the top! / You’re a Waldorf salad. / You’re the top! / You’re a Berlin ballad.”) almost indefinitely. And it’s also arguably true that some other lyrics stripped of melody are on the trite or inane side. But when we think of these great songs, we think of their great interpreters as well. One of the reasons for their longevity is that Ella Fitzgerald, perhaps the greatest of all jazz singers, recorded their various songbooks for Verve between 1956 and 1964.

Wilfrid Sheed
THE HOUSE THAT GEORGE BUILT
With a little help from Irving, Cole, and a crew of about fifty
368pp. Random House. $29.95.
978 1 4000 6105 1

Martin Levin is books editor of The Globe and Mail, Toronto.

Explore The TLS

• TLS Selections

• TLS Archives

• TLS Arguments

• TLS Writers

• TLS Letters

• Poem of the Week

• Then & Now