\u201cThe B-Side\u201d by Ben Yagoda, which was published this year, reads like a detective story sniffing out a homicide, and the deceased is\u00a0Tin Pan Alley, New York\u2019s epicenter of songwriting and music publishing for decades. A surprising number of its authors and composers \u2013\u00a0George\u00a0and\u00a0Ira Gershwin,\u00a0Irving Berlin,\u00a0Jerome Kern,\u00a0Richard Rodgers,\u00a0Harold Arlen\u00a0\u2013 were Jewish. In fact, Yagoda points out, they were almost all the same age, raised in middle-class New York families and attended Columbia University.<\/p>\n
The golden era of songwriting ended as Columbia Records hitmaker\u00a0Mitch Miller\u00a0and other\u00a0A&R men\u00a0released crowd-pleasing\u00a0fluff like \u201cThe Doggie in the Window\u201d and \u201cMambo Italiano.\u201d Replacing the witty sophistication of Cole Porter\u2019s \u201cNight and Day\u201d and Sinatra\u2019s \u201cI Get a Kick Out of You,\u201d Yagoda laments, were \u201cnovelty numbers, lachrymose ballads, simplistic jingles, hillbilly hokum.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even Cole Porter, one of the few non-Jewish composers, recognized what was at the heart of Tin Pan Alley. When he met Rodgers, he confessed that the \u201csecret of writing hits\u201d was \u201cto write Jewish tunes.\u201d By\u00a0fusing Yiddish songs\u00a0with ragtime and jazz, a new music was born.<\/p>\n
(Avishay Artsy is a news reporter and producer at the Southern California public radio station KCRW, and a contributing writer for the Jewish Journal, where he writes about arts and culture through a Jewish lens. Follow him at @heyavishay.)<\/p>\n
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