Michael Kantor: Irving Berlin’s childhood on the Lower East Side, give me a sense of it and how did Berlin see it later in his life?
Philip Furia: Irving Berlin had an extremely hard childhood, but he never tried to romanticize it, never looked back and talked about how tough it was. He always said that he never knew anything else but poverty, and when that’s all you know, that’s your home, your family, and you feel perfectly comfortable in it. He said we always had hot tea, there was always bread and butter to eat, and he knew nothing else. Uh, he, uh, felt that, uh… He had a close family, very attached to his mother. His father died when he was very young, so that was hard on him. But he had not an idyllic childhood, but a perfectly happy one.
Michael Kantor: What about that later on he says everyone ought to have a lower, give me that line and why did he feel that way?
Philip Furia: Irving Berlin said everybody ought to have a Lower East Side in their lives, to have to come up from the very bottom of the world and appreciate how tough it is, a climb to come up, from poverty and to have to learn how to make it on your own. He said that he used to sleep better in a flop house as a kid than he did when he was wealthy and had an extremely comfortable bed. Knowing the bottom of life meant a lot to him once he reached the top.
Michael Kantor: Why did he leave home? What did he think he was gonna do? Where did he stay? What was that like?
Philip Furia: Irving Berlin was the youngest child in a family that was very poor. All of his brothers and sisters worked in sweatshops. They found ways to make money and bring money home every day. Irving Berlin, the older he got, felt that he was not contributing to the family. He always had the fewest coins to drop in his mother’s lap when he came home compared to his brothers and sisters. He was an adolescent, and you know how kids think. He thought maybe the best way he could help his family was to run away and try to make money at the one thing he knew he could do, which was sing. He ran away from home. At this point in Irving Berlin’s life, he was still Israel Balin, the name that his family had given him when he was born in Russia. His nickname was Izzy in the family. And he tried to contribute to the family income by selling newspapers. And he found that sometimes if he sang, well, sang songs, popular songs of the day while he sold newspapers, people not only bought newspapers but gave him a few extra coins. And that was his first sense of you can earn money by singing popular songs. He would bring those coins home, drop them in his mother’s lap along with the contributions that his brothers and sisters brought. And it must have been that sense that there was a little bit of money to be made by singing songs that gave him the sense that there was some kind of career out there for him. Uh… Selling new
Michael Kantor: What kind of songs would he sing?
Philip Furia: He would sing those awful sob ballads, as he later called them, the 1890s songs about broken hearts and young girls who went to the city and became corrupted and whose picture was turned to the wall. And they were the kind of songs that if you sang them in saloons, the most tough-nosed and hardened people would start crying in their beer. They were real heartbreaking songs. And they’re very popular in the 1890’s. And Irving Berlin, he was such a little boy with such a high sweet voice, could really melt the tears and the money out of the people who hurt them.
Michael Kantor: So what age is he at this point, when he actually leaves home for good, and how does that go?
Philip Furia: He leaves home at around the age of 13. And at first, it’s extremely rough. I mean, if you think about a 13-year-old out on the streets of the worst part of New York, down in the Bowery and in Chinatown, he was essentially a street person. He would sleep on park benches. If he made enough money from singing songs, he might get a room in a flop house or a cubby hole or just a chalked out square on the floor where he could sleep and hope no one stole his pants when he woke up the next morning. It was a terribly rough life for a kid. Meal to meal depended on how many songs he could sing that would get people to toss money at him. He was a busker, the kind of person we see still on the streets of New York, trying to earn a few coins by singing a song, playing an instrument.
Michael Kantor: Turn that floor with? Who’s he singing to? Who are the people contributing to that?
Philip Furia: When Irving Berlin started out living on the streets and singing, he was living in the areas of the Lower East Side where lots of immigrants lived. So that these were the teeming streets of immigrant New York, Irish, Italian, Jews, all scrambling for some kind of life in this melting pot of New York society. He’s singing songs sometimes to people who can’t even understand English. So he really has to learn how to put a song over. It’s an area of New York where it’s unimaginable for us today how many people are crowded in there. And most of their entertainment is pretty rough and ready entertainment. It’s saloons, prostitution, Chinatown has opium dens. It’s a rough area for him to grow up. And to try to learn to please the lowest common denominator of humanity by his singing.
Michael Kantor: And what did he actually do there?
Philip Furia: Irving Berlin’s dream as a kid singing in the streets of New York was to get a permanent job as a singing waiter in a saloon. You can imagine how this would have horrified his mother. His father was a cantor in a synagogue, and for her son to use his beautiful voice as a way to sell beer in a salon would have just appalled her. But of course Irving was on his own, Izzy, as he was known then, was on own, and didn’t know what he was doing. Uh, his dream was to be a singing waiter in a saloon in Chinatown. He finally got a job in a salon called the Pelham Café. And what he would do was to deliver beer or to deliver whiskey to the patrons. And as he carried his tray, he would sing popular songs of the day. And his specialty was to sing dirty lyrics. And you know, kids always do that. I can remember singing songs like, instead of I’m in the mood for love, I’m the nude for love. Kids naturally take a popular song of the day and give its lyrics a dirty twist. And Irving Berlin, partly because he was such a sweet faced little kid with such a beautiful high voice, to hear him sing what must have been terribly risque lyrics to popular songs of the days got him even more tips. And what people would do is after he sang a song, remember he’s moving around a very crowded saloon. They would throw coins at his feet, but he’s got a tray of beer, and he’s singing. And he’s gotta kick the coins over into a corner as he sings very carefully, so it doesn’t distract him from the rest of And he gets his coins over in the corner, and then after he puts the beer down, he goes over and the song’s over and picks up his coins, pockets them, goes and gets some more beer, sings another song, gets another little stash of money.
Michael Kantor: So put us on, put us, you know, back in 1890, you know, help us to imagine.
Philip Furia: If we think back to the 1890s, when millions of immigrants are coming into America, and they’re different kinds of immigrants now, they’re not the Northern European, the English, and the Scots coming. But they’re immigrants from a very different part of Europe, from Eastern Europe, from Southern Europe. They’re more darkly complexioned. They’re Catholics. They’re Jews. They’re foods different from the rest of America. Their customs are different. They don’t go settling across the country, but they live in the big cities, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. And they live crowded, tenement neighborhoods where they really develop a kind of new immigrant culture in America. But they’re all trying to do the same thing, and that is assimilate to American culture. You can imagine in 1893, a little boy arriving from Russia, Izzy Boleyn, knowing no English. He said, we look so strange there at Ellis Island in what he called our Jew clothes. You know, completely out of place in this world. For him to have entered America, to grow up in it, and very quickly realize that dream of assimilation, to become so American in the way he talked, in the way he acted, the way that he could feel the pulse of the rest of the people, and then to be able to put all of that into song so that this little kid would grow up to write. The second anthem of his country, and God Bless America, to take for a Jewish kid the holidays of Christmas and Easter, and write songs like White Christmas and Easter that secularize those holidays so that all Americans can enjoy and celebrate them in the same way. To enter into the most public of all forms of American life in the theater, and then to write an anthem to his own profession, and there’s no business like show business. It really shows how that dream of assimilation can be realized, probably more so than the life of any other immigrant.
Michael Kantor: So, you know, again, give me a very quick recap of what he’d done before that. When does Irving Berlin think he’s writing American music and why? I mean, he says just after I was in the ragtime in 1915, I think, now I’m running American music. What is it about ragtime that…
Philip Furia: Irving Berlin starts writing songs about ethnic stereotypes. He writes German songs, Italian songs, Jewish songs. But when he hits ragtime and really has a big ragtime hit on Alexander’s ragtime band, I think he feels that this finally is genuinely American music. The rhythm is distinctively American. Ragtime is basically music where the rhythm is off the syncopation. And this is not something that you hear in European music. It’s ragtime also in the sense that it really uses American vernacular language. It doesn’t have that high poetic style of a lot of songs of the 1890s. It’s very slangy. It derives actually from a kind of song that was written around the turn of the century. In the parlance of the day, they were called coon songs because they were songs written in black dialect. Even songs that today we remember might not think of as coon songs like Hello My Baby, Hello My Ragtime Gal and Bill Bailey Won’t You Please Come Home. Those are basically songs written for caricatures of blacks. And Irving Berlin picked up this idiom, this very American vernacular slangy idiom and used it in songs like Alex Eddard’s Ragtime Band so that the combination of the lively rhythm, the syncopated rhythm and the American vernacular song really by 1910, 1911, had him writing fully in the vein of American music.
Michael Kantor: There was something about what was changing then in terms of horses giving way to engines and so on that Berlin just instinctively tapped into.
Philip Furia: Irving Berlin embraced ragtime, which, although we think of it now as very quaint music, back in 1910, ragtime was about as scandalous as rap music is today. People were thinking that this is the end of all American civilization, preachers were denouncing it from the pulpit, rag time was blamed for all sorts of crime and mischief society and Irving Berlin tapped into ragtime. He made it seem friendly and safe. Alexander’s Ragtime Band begins, come on in here. Come on in, here. Inviting you into the world of ragtime. As something new and modern, it wasn’t this terrifying new kind of music that suggested immigrants and blacks invading American culture. But it was a kind of introduction to a new world that, by 1910, most people were feeling, a world that that was industrial, that was filled with a new kind of life and throwing off the shackles of Victorian culture. And he had a wonderful sense of playing with ragtime, because he was one of the few composers who wrote both words and music. So what he would do is he would play the music against the words. He would say, they can play a buccal call like you never heard before, so natural. That you want to go to war and takes the word natural and distorts it so natural so that it rhymes with bugle call he had fun with ragtime he made ragtime seem much less threatening and more inviting to the american people
Michael Kantor: How does his first foray in the Broadway stage with Watch Your Step, how is that also inviting? And tell me what the impact of the castles were.
Philip Furia: 1914 was a really critical year for Broadway and for Irving Berlin. Irving Berlin, up until that time, had been a Tin Pan Alley pop songwriter. 1914, he had his first chance to step up from Tin Pan alley to Broadway. 1914 was also the year when Broadway was beginning to turn away from Viennese operetta. It was World War I. Things German and Viennis weren’t as popular as they had been. And Irving Berlin, who was king of ragtime, who was associated with the great ragtime craze, finally got an invitation to write a Broadway musical, his first score for Broadway musical entirely in ragtime. So it was this wonderful intersection of Broadway and 10 Pan Alley, of rag time with what had been European operetta, in a musical called What’s Your Step, that starred the leaders of the dance craze. Which was also going on at the same time. We had the ragtime craze. All of America was dancing. It doesn’t seem strange to us now, but before 1910, people only danced in the privacy of their own homes. Dancing in public was scandalous. So that to bring the dance craze and the ragtime craze together in 1914 with the leaders of the dance craze, Vernon and Irene Castle, made for a spectacular musical, Watch Your Step, in 1914 that really, I think, Americanized the Broadway musical as it had never been before. The Broadway musical begins in imitation of European operetta. The first big Broadway musicals are derived from things like The Merry Widow. You have Victor Herbert writing operetta music, very, very high poetic lyrics, ah, sweet mystery of life. The trick is to get that Broadway musical infused with American energy. And the first person who tried to do that was George M. Cohen in the early years of the 20th century. Musicals like Little Johnny Jones and songs distinctively American. Not only in subject, you’re a grand old flag or I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy, but American in musical style, deriving from ragtime, and also with very vernacular lyrics. You’re a Grand Old Flag. Originally, the line was you’re grand old rag. And they had to change that because that was pushing a too far. That sense of slangy, colloquial lyrics was something that George M. Cohen fought to introduce into the Broadway musical.
Michael Kantor: And what do you think Berlin owes to Cohan? Is there a link between those two guys or no?
Philip Furia: Oh yeah, Berlin carried George M. Cohen’s picture on his wall in his office alongside Stephen Foster’s. Foster and Cohen were his two real leaders in terms of inspiration, both trying to write American music. And Berlin actually carried on George M Cohen’s tradition. Cohen lived for many years and did shows and performed in them, but really his great work is in the first decade. And it’s Irving Berlin who picks up on it. And beginning with his musical Watch Your Step in 1914 really carries on that tradition of trying to Americanize this very heavy Viennese import of operetta.
Michael Kantor: When you think of the Broadway musical just over the course of the century, what are some of the adjectives that spring to mind? I know it changes in different ways, but if someone’s, you know, from another planet, how would you describe it? Is it grassy? You know, what, what other ways that you think about just waiting on the sound?
Philip Furia: Oh good, give me a chance to think.
Michael Kantor: Just throw some out.
Philip Furia: I think of the Broadway musical as almost synonymous with New York, rhythm, energy, loudness, attention-grabbing, very aware of itself, very smart, very slick, very sophisticated, urbane, but not urbane in the sense of New York penthouse and all elegance, but from penthouse really down into the street. There’s a kind of grittiness. A vernacular city smart about the Broadway musical that I think has characterized it from George M. Cohan on.
Michael Kantor: What are the Broadway musicals?
Philip Furia: When I think of the Broadway musical as representing an American character, I think obviously of individual songs, but a song like I Can Do That, a song about American ability, the individual’s power to, on the basis of grit and talent and energy and hard work, to find success. So many of the Broadway musicals are about Broadway musical. About putting on a show, about finding success in theater, about if you have the talent and you work hard, you can do it. It’s nice work if you can get it, and you can’t get it if you try. And that’s about as American a philosophy goes right back to Ben Franklin and the first great American success story. In fact, there ought to be a musical about Ben Franklin. It would make a great story of I can do that.
Michael Kantor: Just thought about anything you can do
Philip Furia: Anything you can do, I can do better. Yeah, and what an American attitude that is. I can that too.
Michael Kantor: I shouldn’t miss that answer. Let’s try it. What about, I’m thinking, anything you can do and you’re the top. There’s a whole bunch of songs that way.
Philip Furia: Yeah, there’s songs about individual ability and the power of the individual through hard work, through imitation, through seeing somebody do something. And whereas in Europe, you might defer to them, in America, you would try to compete with them and beat them at their own game.
Michael Kantor: Okay, just just give us the some tuck some other titles songs like
Philip Furia: Anything you can do, I can do better. What an American attitude that would be, as opposed to a European attitude that will defer to whatever you can do, the American spirit is to be competitive.
Michael Kantor: How important would you say that Broadway musical and the popular songs that were part and parcel of it were had been to our culture across this century?
Philip Furia: I think that the great era of the Broadway musical was the 20s, the 30s, and the 40s because at that time, popular song and the Broadway Musical were virtually the same. Most of the songs that became popular became popular out of Broadway shows. This lasted into the 1950s, but I think what’s happened is that in the last decades of the 20th century, the Broadway Music has moved so far away from popular songs that nowadays it’s almost unheard of. For a Broadway show to produce a top 40 hit. And I think that’s sad because I think in this great era when Broadway musicals were producing the popular songs that we were listening to, you had a kind of sophistication and wit and elegance in American popular song that stemmed from the fact that they were originally written for Broadway audiences. They had a kind of… Theatricality to them, they evoke senses of character and dramatic situation, that were really a rich reflection of American culture. Now I think the popular music scene, and I’m not an expert in that, but it seems to have diverged into a lot of little pockets of music for these people, music for this people, whereas Broadway, when it was producing our popular songs, was really producing songs for all of America.
Michael Kantor: Um What’s the myth?
Philip Furia: The myth of Broadway is, on the one hand, yesterday they told you you would not go far that night you open and there you are next day on your dressing room they’ve hung a star. It’s individual success, that’s part of it. But it’s also working with the group, doing what’s good for the group. In most musicals, about putting on musicals you usually have a star whose fame has onto her head. And who has to learn to do what’s good for the group. You know, she usually breaks her ankle and the kid has to go on in her place. And there’s a sense of, yeah, individual glory and individual talent, but also that need to work within the theatrical community. So it’s a good American myth in the sense that it celebrates individuality, but it also celebrates the need to working in the group
Michael Kantor: Let’s talk about Tin Pan Alley. What was Tin Panalley? What’s its relationship to the Broadway musical?
Philip Furia: Tin Pan Alley was a sheet music publishing industry that was based in New York on a street that was nicknamed Tin Pan Alley, and they produced most of the popular songs that America listened to for the first 20 years of the 20th century. Remember, this is before CD players, before home videos, before MTV. This was songs published in sheet music for the player piano that sat in everybody’s parlor. And the family would gather around and sing those songs. Tin Pan Alley would not only produce the songs, but they would try to get performers to use them. Performers in Vaudeville to popularize a song that a sheet music publisher had done, but also performers on Broadway. So that for a lot of the early history of Broadway in the 20th century, they were using songs in Broadway shows that were produced by Tin Pan Alleys sheet music publishers. So that there was this wonderful connection between the Broadway musical and the popular song industry. And songs that were sung in shows were built on the same model of the songs that were coming out for the popular market so that they could go on from the show to become independently popular on radio or in record sales.
Michael Kantor: Just give me a quick list of some of those, who are the Tin Pan Alley people that feed into Broadway?
Philip Furia: Tin Pan Alley brought along such talents as Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart. We think of these now as Broadway composers, but they all started in Tin Panalley. They learned the bone, simple formulas of a Tin Pan Alley love song. You’ve got to say, I love you in 32 bars of music in 50 to 75 words. Very, very simple. But these very talented people, like the Gershuins and Berlin and Cole Porter, well, they cut their teeth on Tin Pan Alley. When they went on to Broadway, they brought a new sophistication to those musical formulas and a new wit and literate intelligence to the lyrics so that Broadway songs are basically Tin Pan Alley songs that have been passed through a new mill of elegance and sophistication.
Michael Kantor: Let’s go back to the minstrel show and help me understand how the minestrel show which is usually performed by whites filter into Coon songs and vaudeville and then Broadway with you know people like the Sophie Tuckers and Cohan’s and Al Jolson’s Give me a very quick sort of Understanding of how that minstral show feeds into the Broadway musical through vaude. Okay
Philip Furia: The minstrel show was a very popular form of 19th century entertainment. Basically, you had whites in blackface sitting on stage in an ensemble, and they would perform songs. They would do comedy routines. But it was always very much the ensemble performing, the group performing. Even though individuals would get up, they’d go back to their chairs, gentlemen be seated. It produced songs that had a ragtime feel to them, syncopation songs, songs that were comic. That used the vernacular, used the American slang. Minstrel shows by the end of the century were being displaced by vaudeville, which was a similar kind of entertainment, but where minstrel show were ensemble based with everybody on stage at the same time. Vaudeville was very much the individual performer and the individual act. You came on, you did your song, you did your juggling act, your dog act, your family act, whatever. But it was the focus on the individual performer. And for those performers, the sheet music industry of Ten Pan Alley provided songs. And what you’d try to do is to get the vaudeville performer to sing your song and then carry it on what was called the circuit, which is a series of Broadway theaters all around America. So that if you could get your song to a vaudevil performer, that performer would publicize it coast to coast and make it a national hit. When vaudeville finally got into the Broadway musical, it carried this tradition of the individual popular song with it as vaudevill performers got roles in Broadway musicals or Broadway reviews, which were much more like vaudevil. They were a loose collection of skits rather than a book show where you had a story with continuing characters.
Michael Kantor: Who are those performers who move from vaudeville into Broadway reviews and do sort of blackface and other menstrual arrangements?
Philip Furia: Vaudeville performers who went into Broadway musicals, the premier one of course is Al Jolson, Sophie Tucker who early in her act performed in Blackface, Fanny Bryce started out in Vaudevill and then would go on to do reviews on Broadway. There were a series of performers that we don’t think of as acting in the Broadway story musical but coming on in a review like the Ziegfeld Follies, Eddie Cantor was another one. They would come out and do their individual act, just as they’d done in Vaudeville. But now this was for an elegant Broadway review like the Ziegfeld Follies.
Michael Kantor: Who was Berlin’s colleague or peer at the time?
Philip Furia: Well, along with Irving Berlin’s musical, Watch Your Step, which really Americanized the Broadway musical, Jerome Kern, another young composer, wrote a song for a Broadway musical called The Girl From Utah. And the song was called They Didn’t Believe Me. It was basically a Tin Pan Alley song. But Jerome Kern was a classically trained composer. And he handled the simple song formulas of Tin Pan Alley with a real sophistication and elegance. So much so that that song, They Didn’t Believe Me, became enormously popular in 1914. And supposedly, when George Gershwin, a young composer, heard it played at a wedding, he found out who wrote it, found out that it was from Broadway, and decided to quit his job on Tin Pan Alley, where he worked as a piano player, and to try his luck by writing songs for the Broadway theater.
Michael Kantor: Why are the princess shows important?
Philip Furia: The Princess Shows were shows written by Jerome Kern along with lyricist P.G. Wodehouse between 1915 and 1917. What they did was they took Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, which everybody in America loved, and showed that there was a way that you could Americanize them. You could have them deal with contemporary Americans in everyday situations, and you could write songs that had the wit. And the cleverness of Gilbert and Sullivan. But they were distinctively American songs. And one of the ways they were distinctively America is that they were written the way most Tin Pan Alley songs were written. The music was written first. In Gilbert and Solomon, it was always the words that were written first, Gilbert would write these wonderful, funny poems, and poor Sullivan had to find ways to set them to music. But in America, as P.G. Woodhouse learned when he was asked to write lyrics for Jerome Kern, it was the other way around. You wrote the music first And at first he shook his head and he said, well, you can’t write good lyrics during that. And then he tried it, and what he found was that in Gilbert and Sullivan, the lyrics are very witty, but they also sound too much like poetry.
Michael Kantor: Here’s why I’d love you to pick it up. Just, you know, with unlike in Gilbert and Sullivan.
Philip Furia: You don’t need me to recite the lyric again, though.
Michael Kantor: Well, no, but Curran’s partner in the princess shows was a British guy. I want to hear that, and then give me how he would start in the Princess.
Philip Furia: Jerome Kern’s partner, his lyricist for The Princess Shows, was a British writer, P.G. Woodhouse, and he had been trained in the Gilbert and Sullivan tradition. And he thought that you could not write good lyrics unless the lyrics were written first. But he found that when he began working on lyrics after Kern had written the music, he could do clever little things just as Gilbert had been able to do. But it came out sounding much more colloquial, much less regular and poetic. He could come up with a line that opened a song, Till the Clouds Roll By, with, what bad luck, it’s coming down in buckets. You almost not hear that rhyme, what bad, luck it’s, coming down and buckets. Now that’s something Gilbert would do, but it’d be much more flashy. Woodhouse could be as clever and as witty as Gilbert, but because the music was written first, the phrasing sounded much more colloquial. What bad luck it is coming down buckets.
Michael Kantor: How is Berlin’s work, and his Broadway work in particular, quintessentially American? How does what do I do speak to an American for an actor?
Philip Furia: What’ll I Do is so American a song that when it became popular in Britain, the British said, what is a wattle? Irving Berlin loved to use contractions. What’ll do I do? Not what will I do, but he found that contractions were perfectly suited to a musical form that he loved to use called the triplet, the three notes of a triplet. And he was very proud of the fact that he was the one American songwriter who could really, as he put it, musicalize the triplet. And he did it with contractions. Like, what’ll I do? It was a perfect fit between an American musical sounding form, the tripe with a kind of ragtime feel to it, and the American contractions that are so much a part of our vernacular.
Michael Kantor: What did, what did Ethel Waters do in his thousands of years?
Philip Furia: Ethel Waters did everything in S. Thousand’s cheer. If you can imagine, this was not a Broadway book musical. This was a review where there were lots of sketches and lots of songs. And that’s what Berlin liked. He was very suspicious of the book musical, or as he called it, the situation show. But give him a review with different songs and different skits. And he was in heaven, as he would say in his own song. Ethel waters, in one show, portrayed everything from an the exotic Caribbean dancer. Who started a heat wave by letting her seat wave, to a distraught southern woman, singing a lament called Supper Time after her husband has been lynched. You can imagine the range of that, dancing and singing in heat wave, and then singing the very moving song, Supper time, all in one show.
Michael Kantor: What about integrating a Broadway cast at that point? That kind of thing wasn’t done, was it?
Philip Furia: Using Ethel Waters in his thousands cheer, using a black star with all other white cast members was something that probably could not have been done had Irving Berlin not been his own producer as well as his own songwriter. And he could insist upon an integrated cast just as… This is the Army, a decade later. He insisted upon an integrated cast for that as well. It was the only integrated company in World War II.
Michael Kantor: My favorite story. How did Dorothy Fields introduce the idea of anti-Oakley to Bethlehem?
Philip Furia: The idea for Annie Get Your Gun came from Dorothy Fields. She had heard a story during World War II of a young soldier who had gone to Coney Island and won all the Cupid dolls, all the statues, all of the presents at a shooting gallery. And after they gave him the presents, they looked on his chest and he had a sharpshooters medal on it. So clearly he was an Army sharpshooter and just went to Cony Island and cleaned them out. Dorothy Fields heard that. And two things came to her mind. One, a musical about a woman sharpshooter, Annie Oakley. And immediately the thought was Ethel Merman to play her. She took the idea to Rodgers and Hammerstein, who were producing musicals. And all she had to say was, a musical about Annie Oakly starring Ethel Merman. And Rodgers& Hammerstein said, we’ll do it. The trick was to get Ethel Merman do it, Ethel had just had a baby by cesarean. She was in the hospital. Sedation. Dorothy Fields, like Annie Oakley, muscled her way in, talked her way into the hospital room. Ethel Merman was half out of it, and she went over to her bed, leaned over and said, Merm, a musical about Annie Oakley. You’ll star. And Merman said, out of this fog. When Irving Berlin was working on Annie Get Your Gun with Rodgers and Hammerstein and director Josh Logan, they faced the same problem musicals always faced. There was a hole in Act Two. How do we fill it? And Irving Berlin overheard Josh Logan talking to Oscar Hammerstein saying, we need to put a song in Act two. And Berlin said, what kind of song? They said, well, it’s something between Annie and Frank Butler. They’re going to have a marksmanship contest. And Berlin said… Quarrel song, conference over, and he left the room. And so, Rodgson Hammerstein and Josh Logan said, well, I guess Irving’s going to go work on a quarrel song between Annie and Frank Butler. Josh Logan, said he got in a cab, went back to his apartment, and in 15 minutes, in the 15 minutes it took him to get back there, he walked through the door and the phone was ringing. He went over and picked up the phone. Josh, this is Irving. How’s this for the song we need? Anything you can do, I can do better. Logan said it was amazing. In 15 minutes, in a cab, Berlin had scrawled out the lyrics and music to Anything You Can Do.
Michael Kantor: Great. Tell me about what he was doing there, what kind of show it was very briefly, and how God Bless America really was one, along with Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning, which is a sort of personal theme song. How God Blessing America emerged from that as well.
Philip Furia: Irving Berlin was one of the most genuinely patriotic people I think I’ve ever read about. There was nothing fake about his love for America. During World War I, he was drafted into the Army, persuaded the general to allow him to put on an all-soldier review on Broadway, partly so that he could escape a Reveille, which Irving Berlin, who was a night owl, simply couldn’t stand, and performed that great song in. The all-soldier review, Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning himself. He was going to close the review with a very patriotic song. Remember, this is World War I. And he wanted something that would lift America’s spirits during the war. And he remembered something that his mother used to say when he was growing up. In Russian or Yiddish, she would use the expression, God bless America. God bless, America. As poor as they were, she still felt that love for her country. And he built a song around it, and this was 1917, called God Bless America. But it was so solemn a song at the end of an all-soldier review about World War I that he decided, as he said, it was gilding the lily. And he put it into his trunk. The trunk is where songwriters keep their unused songs. In 1938, he was in England when Prime Minister Chamberlain signed the pact with Hitler that allowed Germany to invade Czechoslovakia. And he felt that war was coming, but Berlin wanted to write what he said was a great peace song. And he couldn’t. He says, it’s very hard to write a song when you know exactly the kind of song you want to write. And he thought about that song from 1917, God Bless America. And he went back, looked at it, and said, this would be perfect. This is the kind a song America now needs in 1938. He changed the lyrics a little bit and then gave it to Kate Smith, who sang it on Armistice Day in 1938 and it became practically the second national anthem of America.
Michael Kantor: The song that his mother had written was a little too solemn for the end of the show, so where did he put it and when did it re-emerge?
Philip Furia: Irving Berlin put the song, God Bless America, aside in 1917. And 20 years later, in 1938, on the eve of World War II, he took it out again, gave it to Kate Smith, and she sang it on Armistice Day of 1938. And it became what in effect is, it’s now is America’s second national anthem. Dorothy Fields was not the first woman songwriter, but the women who wrote before her tended to write for Viennese operettas. Dorothy Donnelly, who wrote The Student Prince. Dorothy Fields, was the one woman who came out in the same group that the Gershwins, that Cole Porter, that Rodgers and Hart wrote with. She wrote in that slangy, vernacular, witty style that emanated from the Broadway theater, but then went on to become popular. I can’t give you anything but love, baby. That’s the only thing I have plenty of, baby.” Very ordinary American colloquial song style. And Dorothy Fields was the only songwriter who was a woman who worked in that same idiom as these other male songwriters did.
Michael Kantor: Help us, you know, introduce the players of the dream team of Annie Getchigan, who was on the team. It’s incredible.
Philip Furia: You can’t imagine a more wonderful group of people putting together a show than the dream team that put on Annie Get Your Gun.
Michael Kantor: I want more than wonderful, I want these and the stars and the constellations, I WANT THESE AND THE TITANS!
Philip Furia: Right. The dream team that put on Annie, Get Your Gun, were the titans of Broadway. The producers were Rodgers and Hammerstein, who of course were great songwriters themselves. And Hammerstein was a great book writer. But they also had Dorothy and Herbert Fields, who were some of the greatest book writers on Broadway, had been since the 1920s to do the libretto. Dorothy Fields was a lyricist herself, was originally supposed to write. The lyrics for Annie Get Your Gun with the composer Jerome Kern. But before production started, Kern died very suddenly. And if you can imagine calling in a substitute off the bench, they bring in Irving Berlin. And then they have Josh Logan, one of the great directors of the theater, and then after Berlin has written all of these great songs and the Fields have created this great character in Annie Get your Gun, they go to the top and they bring in what I think is the greatest voice. Broadway’s ever heard Ethel Merman to sing the songs.
Michael Kantor: Now, describe, if you would, the dynamic between Rogers and Hammerstein in curving Berlin. There’s some real competition there, isn’t there?
Philip Furia: One of the things that makes the songs of Annie Get Your Gun and all of those musicals from this era so good is that, yes, they were writing for the public. They were writing the American people, but they were also writing for each other. They would not only be working together, they would gather at George Gershwin’s apartment or Cole Porter’s place, and they would all share the songs that they were working on for their different musicals. And you can imagine that. You’re playing your songs, and Cole Porter is sitting The Gershwins are sitting there. You’re not going to play a bad note. You’re going to have a bad rhyme. They really were writing for the coterie of other songwriters. When Irving Berlin was invited by Rodgers and Hammerstein to write songs for Annie Get Your Gun, his first thought was, if it’s such a good project, why aren’t they writing it themselves? He was very skeptical, particularly because it was a musical that was set as Rodgers& Hammerstein’s Oklahoma had been. In a part of America that Berlin didn’t know very well, a part that was not New York. You know, the rest of the country. And Hammerstein said, well, Irving, just drop the G’s off words, like nothing and something, and that’ll make it American enough. And Berlin was still very, very skeptical, but he took the script home, worked one weekend, came back Monday morning, and said, how does this sound for a, what he called, hillbilly musical? You can’t get a man with a gun doing what comes naturally. And they say that falling in love is wonderful. Three songs in one weekend. And Royce and Hammerstein looked at it absolutely amazed and said, we think this will do very nicely, Irving.
Michael Kantor: And Berlin had to know that, whereas he was Mr. Review and Mr. Song, Rogers and Hammerstein themselves had set a new sort of standard for Broadway with their work, hadn’t they?
Philip Furia: Rodgers and Hammerstein changed the character of the Broadway musical permanently in 1943 with the production of Oklahoma. There had been musicals before like Showboat where songs were very closely integrated into character and dramatic situation, but that had never set the standard. Throughout the 30s, a good show was just a show with a lot of good songs, and Irving Berlin who would write great songs was comfortable with a review format. Where there was no story to write songs to. But after Oklahoma, Broadway musicals had to have what was called integration between song and character and story. The song had to grow out of a situation. It had to define a character and be much more closely tied to the book of the musical. And lyricists like Oscar Hammerstein also began writing the book. So they began seeing on Broadway Marquis book and lyrics by… Instead of the way it was in the 20s and 30s where the book might be by George S. Kaufman, lyrics by Ira Gershwin. Now the lyricist also had to be the book writer and that enabled him to pull the song and the story together much more closely. Irving Berlin was very skeptical of this kind of show. He called them situation shows. He still believed that a good song would sell a show. The remarkable thing he managed to do in Annie Get Your Gun was to write. Perfectly integrated songs. Every one of those songs conjures up Annie doing what comes naturally. You can’t get a man with a gun. I got lost in his arms. You can hear those without thinking of her and her character and her romantic plight trying to fall in love and make Frank Butler fall in-love back with her. George Gershwin started out on Tin Pan Alley as a song plugger. That meant that he sat in an office of a music publisher all day long at the piano demonstrating his songs for any customer who would want to come in and buy sheet music. You can imagine what a dreary job that was to just play the same old Tin Pan Alley songs day in and day out. To move up in the world of Tin PanAlley, George Gershwin went to see Irving Berlin. I knew Irving Berlin was the great songwriter on Ten Pan Alley. But he also knew, as everybody did, that Irving Berlin could not read music and could only play the piano in one key, the key of F sharp, which is mostly the black keys. And he needed a musical secretary, someone who could listen to him play and then write the notes down. George Gershwin was a classically trained piano player. And so he could do this. He could be Irving Berlins secretary. To audition for the job, he took one of Irving Berlin’s songs, sat down at the piano, and said, Mr. Berlin, how does this sound? He played it dynamically. And Berlin, to his great credit, said to George Gershwin, what do you really want to be? And Gershun said, I want to a composer. And Berlin said, then don’t take this job. Don’t be my secretary, kid. Go out and write your own songs.
Michael Kantor: And how, when he begins working with his brother, does what he’s doing with language parallel what his brother’s doing music. Waiting on the truck.
Philip Furia: Ira Gershwin always said that a good song lyric ought to be conversation that you hear on the street that rhymes. He would pick up phrases and words and expressions literally out of the air from what he heard. The trick was to fit it into George Gershun’s music, which was very hard to do. Other composers like Jerome Kern or Richard Rogers would give their lyricists these great, big, long melodic lines where he could fit lots of words and lots of syllables in. George Gershwin, Ira Gershun always said, gave him very little room to turn around. They’re very short bursts. Da da da da, da da de da da. Ira said, how do you fit words to that? But the great thing was that when George gave him these tiny little musical spaces, it really brought out Ira’s creativity. You know, George would give him a long line. George would give him a long line. They all laughed at Christopher Columbus. Then another long line, when he said the world was round. Then another line. They all laugh when Edison recorded, and then give him one note. They all left when Edison record sound. And that was Ira’s magic, that he took those little tiny musical spaces and found the right phrase, the right syllable, the right little shard. I think it was kind of like working a crossword puzzle for him. You know, what is my brother gonna make me do today and what am I gonna fit in there?
Michael Kantor: Fascinating rhythm, why is it a groundbreaking song?
Philip Furia: Fascinating Rhythm was one of the most intricate rhythmical songs that anybody had written for a Broadway musical. It was written for Fred Astaire and his sister for Lady Be Good in 1924. It was the first time anything that jazzy had gotten into the Broadway musical, poor Ira when he heard George play the melody with very tricky irregular rhythms said, George, how can I set words to that? And his next thought was, still, it’s a fascinating rhythm. And he had his title, which is always the hardest part of a song to get, but he worked from there.
Michael Kantor: Why, well pick it up with Syncopated City, what is it about that song, once you introduce it, that reflects the 20s? Why would it be a good title for an episode?
Philip Furia: Syncopated City was the title that George and Ira Gershwin initially used for the song that became Fascinating Rhythm. It was for the first musical that they wrote together in 1924 called Lady Be Good, starring Fred Astaire. Syncopate City seemed to capture what George’s music captured, the energy of the jazz age, the feel of New York, because it was expanding into a big… Exciting, pulsating, rhythmic city, skyscrapers going up, traffic whizzing by, George’s music more than anybody else captured the feel of New York in the 1920s. And what Ira had to do as his lyricist was to find the American language, the jazzy, slangy, vernacular, colloquial American speech that would fit that very American rhythm. And although syncopated city was a great title. But when it came down to getting the actual phrases for the song, Ira Gershon went to fascinating rhythm.
Michael Kantor: Here’s something we talked about on the phone, which is just, why do you think, and I love your, why were so many of the composers and lyricists Jewish, what was it about the immigrant assimilation experience that prompted them to understand the power of language?
Philip Furia: Most of the great song writers in New York who wrote for Broadway were immigrants or the children of immigrants. If your parents don’t speak English well in a city like New York, you really come to appreciate the power of language. If you speak it better than your mother and father do, if you’re Ira Gershwin, and as a kid, you are the one who is sent as the family representative to the principal of the school where your little brother George keeps getting in trouble because your parents still speak English enough, you’ve really come appreciate. What a powerful tool the English language is. And as so many of these lyricists found, the English Language was at one of its most exciting stages. You could open a newspaper in New York and read the witty poetry of Dorothy Parker or Ogden Nash. They fell in love with Gilbert and Sullivan. And you can’t imagine more dazzling use of English than Gilbert and Sullivans lyrics. So that they grew up with an appreciation of the power of language, but also its intricacy. And like music, it was something you could learn to do. There was no club that you had to get into if you could handle music well, if you can handle language well. The theater was a place, and writing newspapers, the publishing industry, these were places for kids who could handle either of those art forms skillfully.
Michael Kantor: So just wrap that up for me. So it’s no wonder.
Philip Furia: It should be no surprise that immigrant kids take to both the English language, which they practice so much better than their parents did, or that they take to a form like music and then go on to write songs for Tin Pan Alley, to write for Broadway, and then to go on and write for the Hollywood musical. It’s a natural evolution of what is an immigrant kid you would come to embrace. George Gershwin’s last words, last word to his brother Ira, was a name, Astaire, for Fred Astaire. They had been working in Hollywood on musicals for Fred Aster and Ginger Rogers. And I think they had reached the greatest point in their career as collaborators on song. George and Ira had been together since 1924, again on Broadway for a musical for Fred Astaire. But in 1936 and 1937, when they were writing for Astaire in Hollywood, they were a writing for a singer who embodied their style and really the whole Tin Pan Alley Broadway style of song. Sophisticated, elegant, urbane and yet very earthy, colloquial and casual. And the Gershwin brothers working together writing for Astair collaborated as they never had before. It wasn’t Ivor doing the words and George doing the music. It was Ira saying, George, give me two more notes in that phrase so I can write. The radio and the telephone and the movies that we know may just be passing fancies. And in time they go. And that kind of collaboration, they had never worked as intricately before. And on a simple word like and, it makes the magic of their last song together. Love is here to stay.
Michael Kantor: Ira was faced with a daunting challenge after George said that last word, wasn’t he? Just to finish that song. Tell me about what Ira must have felt.
Philip Furia: After you achieve the kind of close, intricate collaboration George and Ira had when George died in 1937, it’s almost impossible to imagine Ira ever working with anyone again. I mean, it had taken them 14 years to reach the point where they thought alike, and Ira said even their handwriting had begun to look alike. How do you move on then to work with somebody else? And at first, the answer for Ira was you don’t. He went into a terrible depression. And couldn’t work with anyone for several years. Fortunately, all these songwriters were friends with each other. They all lived near each other, they partied together, and gradually friends like Jerome Kern and Harold Arlen would come by the house and just say, all right, Ira, just for our own parties, would you work on a song with me? Would you add a lyric here? And then finally in 1940, Ira Gershwin got a call on New Year’s Day. From Moss Hart and Kurt Weill who had been working on a musical together that would become, I think, one of the great musicals of Broadway called Lady in the Dark. And they said, Ira, we need somebody to do lyrics. And Ira had reached the point finally where he felt he could work again. In fact, he’d been listening to some songs sung by Fred Astaire that they’d made a record of after George died. And as you listen to… Fred Astaire singing those great last songs they’d written together in Hollywood. He said he actually felt George’s presence in the room, saying it was all right to work again with somebody else. George and Ira Gershwin first began working together on a Broadway show in 1924 called Lady Be Good, starring Fred Astaire. And over the next dozen years, the Gershon brothers had become collaborators who worked more and more closely together, words and music meshing. In 1936 and 1937, they again worked with Fred Astair, but now it was out in Hollywood. Where Fred Astaire was starring in those great pictures for RKO and the Gershwin brothers wrote a score for him for Shall We Dance and then another musical film called Damsel in Distress. And at that point, their words and music had gelled almost completely. They had never enjoyed such a close collaboration and they were also writing songs that were so beautifully keyed to Astaire’s style of elegance and being casual. Those last songs the Gershwins wrote really embodied that Astaire style and it was sadly fitting that as George Gershon was dying in the hospital, the last word he said to his brother Ira was Fred Astaire’s name, Astaire.
Michael Kantor: Pepe, Manhattan, Statton, a surprise hit for Rogers in art. And how is, you know, at this point, lyrics beginning to really represent the American renegotia?
Philip Furia: The first big hit song for Rodgers and Hart was a song called Manhattan in 1925 in a Broadway review. No one was more surprised by the success of that song than the lyricist Larry Hart. He had always assumed that witty, clever lyrics never became popular on Tin Pan Alley, and had written in Manhattan one of the cleverest of all lyrics that had been written up to that point. We’ll have Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten, Island 2, and tell me what street compares with Mott Street in July. Sweet push carts gently glide. Ding, bye. It’s very intricate the way it works with Rodgers’s music. And he had just assumed that, well, the theater audience would like that. But it will never become a hit song. It became an enormous hit around the country. And people then began, for the first time, to listen to the lyrics in American Broadway musicals. The way they had always listened to them in Gilbert and Sullivan. It was a new age of lyrics in the Broadway musical inaugurated fittingly by the song Manhattan.
Michael Kantor: When do you think Broadway stopped writing like people were talking? You know, you mentioned from Oklahoma on, there’s a different feeling.
Philip Furia: Broadway changed with Oklahoma, and for a long time, I think, it changed for the better. It began producing songs that were tied to character, tied to situation, that reveled in the American language, and it became popular through cast album recordings and through film versions. But Oklahoma also began to move Broadway away from popular songs. Broadway songs became much more sophisticated, much more theatrical, less geared for the popular market. Now, this didn’t happen overnight. Well into the 1950s, a Broadway show like My Fair Lady still produced lots of hit songs. But Oklahoma marked the turn, I think, of Broadway toward a more operetta style of music that eventually resulted in the 60s and 70s into shows where songwriters were not writing with an eye on the popular market. If you took a songwriter like Stephen Sondheim today, he would never think of himself as a pop songwriter. And I think he’s probably only had one hit song, Send in the Clowns. He thinks of himself is a Broadway writer. And is very surprised that any of his songs would ever become popular. So Oklahoma, in a way, makes for a better kind of musical. But it also begins to turn the musical away from the popular song market.
Michael Kantor: Without going into a really yip story at all, just thinking about, buddy, can you spare a dime? What did it mean to the country at that time?
Philip Furia: Brother Can You Spare a Dime, written by Yip Harburg, has a lot of the qualities that make his and other songwriters’ love songs great. It’s not sentimental. In a good love song, Harburg said, you never say, I love you, dripping with sentiment. You always say it in a curve. And Brother Can you Spare A Dime is an unsentimental lament by a man who is not asking for pity, but is angry. And demanding, why should I be standing in line? Look at all I’ve done. I fought in the war. I built a railroad. So it captured the country’s sense of, yes, we’re being in a depression, but not in any modeling sense. There’s a kind of edge of anger to it. Why should I have to be in this position? And when he asked for the handout, it’s not begging. It’s almost threatening. Hey, buddy, can you spare a dime? That this situation is not right. Captured that sense of the injustice of the Depression, not any kind of sense of maudlin self-pity. Yip Harburg came from the Lower East Side, from a really dirt world of poverty. When he went to school, alphabetically, he was placed next to Ira Gershwin, Gershun Harburg. And the two boys in high school found they both loved light verse, witty poetry. And Yip Harburg confided in his friend Ira. He said, you know, my favorite poet is this guy called William Schwenk Gilbert. And he’d memorized many of Gilbert’s poetry. He’d memorized of Gilbert poems. And Ira Gershwin was such a sweet kid, he didn’t pull one upmanship, but he said to Yip, Yip do you know that those poems are really song lyrics? Yip said they are. Ira Gerschwin said, come on home with me. And the Gerschwins were a little further up the economic ladder. They had a Victrola. And Ira Gershwin took his friend Yip home and put on Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore. And Yip was dumbfounded. He realized that those poems he’d gotten to love were actually song lyrics. He was staggered. And he said from that day on, that’s what he wanted to be, a lyricist.
Michael Kantor: Mr. Cole Porter, why is his work so representative of America in depression in the 30s?
Philip Furia: Cole Porter was different from so many other Broadway songwriters. He was not from New York, he was not Jewish, and he was from a poor family. He was from wealthy Midwestern Episcopalian family. He’d gone to Yale and Harvard. When he broke into songwriting, he found it very, very difficult because he was thought to be a dilettante, someone who was so wealthy he didn’t have to write songs. He didn’t really hit his stride until the 1930s. Part of the way he embodies the 1930s draws upon the elegant, sophisticated world that he came from. He wrote songs that were redolent of all the wealth and elegance of the 1930’s. All full of clever allusions and about life in Europe and life on cruise ships. And I think he captured what you also get in the 1930 in Fred Astaire, Ginger Roger’s movies and the Thin Man movies. That as poor as everybody was in the Depression, they could go to the movies or go to theater and see a world where men were in tuxedos and women were in gorgeous gowns and they were in penthouse apartments. They were dancing to Night and Day and shaking martinis and silver pitchers. For a dime, you could see that world, even though you went back to your own starving, you know, cold water flat, that it was very much the 30s, even though it was the Depression. Idealize that world of wealth and elegance, and Porter’s songs really captured it.
Michael Kantor: What are your favorite Cole Porter lyrics?
Philip Furia: I love Cole Porter’s list songs or catalog songs, the songs that come out of old Gilbert and Sullivan patter songs, where the lyric just consists of one funny illusion after another. You’re the top, you’re Inferno’s Dante, you are the nose on the great Durante. Mixes high culture Dante’s Inferno with Jimmy Durante’s Nose. And he can move between those worlds and have them clash together. Your Keats, your Shelly, your Botticelli, your Ovaltine. So he has a way of American pop culture and European high culture coming together in a song like You’re at the Top.
Michael Kantor: What about in you know capturing the depression you know when folks who can still ride give me that
Philip Furia: Yeah, in the wonderful song, Anything Goes, which is at once about anything goes morally. You can do anything, like you could in the 1920s, but also the realization that anything goes, including your wealth. When folks who once could ride in jitneys find out Vanderbilt’s and Whitney’s lacked baby clothes, then you know anything goes. And that’s very much the 30s.
Michael Kantor: What kind of music did Cole Porter aspire to write?
Philip Furia: Cole Porter once told Richard Rodgers that he had found the secret to writing great American popular songs. Now Cole Porter hadn’t had any popular songs up until that point. Richard Rodger had had many, so Rodgers wanted to know what the secret was. And Cole Porter, who was the only great songwriter from this period who was not Jewish, turned to Rodgers, sat down at the piano and said, I’m going to write Jewish music. Roch thought he was kidding, and then Cole Porter began to play. Rogers listened and he realized that Porter thought that since all the great songwriters were Jewish, if he wrote in a very minor keyed chromatic style musically that he would capture a Jewish sound that was the secret behind everybody else’s music. And the funny thing is that only Porter’s music has that sound. It’s the most Jewish sounding music of anything I think that came out of Broadway or Ten Pan Alley and he was the Episcopalian.
Michael Kantor: When someone says the word to you Broadway today, what do you think?
Philip Furia: When they say Broadway Today, I unfortunately think English musicals, that so much of what has set the standard has been not just English musicals but musicals from Europe, Les Mis and Andrew Lloyd Webber, that somehow the American musical has gotten out of American hands. And what I would like to see on Broadway Today or see of the great musicals of the Gershwins, Porter, Berlin, Rodgers and Hammerstein. Now I know there are people who want more original musicals, but I think we have to appreciate the classical repertory of the Broadway musical in order to reestablish its American character so that younger songwriters can build on that tradition and create and continue that tradition of the American musical.
Michael Kantor: Do you remember the first time you heard the word Broadway wherever it was you were growing up? What did Broadway epitomize to you then?
Philip Furia: The first time I heard the word Broadway, I was a kid growing up in a working class district in Pittsburgh, playing Broadway cast albums on my old Hi-Fi, these LP cast albums. And the first thing that astounded me was a lot of the songs from musicals like My Fair Lady were actually popular songs that I was hearing on the radio. And I had never made the connection with a song like I could have danced all night. Or if I were a bell, came from a Broadway musical. Until I got those cast albums, I never made the connection between the world of popular song, which in the 50s, still came by and large from Broadway, and the fact that these were Broadway musicals. So it was those original cast albums that first connected those two worlds for me.
Michael Kantor: In the shul from his father, from a minstrel on the side, and the Bowery Entertainment. And how does that somehow fuse into an American Broadway project in the mid-teens?
Philip Furia: Irving Berlin growing up in the streets of New York is going to hear a melting pot. They’re going to be songs coming out of the minstrel shows, songs with jazz and ragtime and blues flavors to them. They’re gonna be Irish songs that go back to the tradition of Stephen Foster. They’re are gonna be songs about all the immigrant groups and trying to capture a flavor of Marie from sunny Italy. What’s an Italian song sound like? A song like Sadie Salome Go Home with a Yiddish accent to it. Oh, how that German could love. So you’re getting this whole melting pot of musical traditions, not always authentic, but Tin Pan Alley’s idea of what black music sounds like, what German, Yiddish, Italian music sounds like, all of that coming together, as I said, in a kind of incredible melting pot. And Berlin, with that acute sensitivity to musical style and to the language of the streets that he hears around him, incorporating that into his lyrics, is going to be producing. Songs like Alexander’s Right Time Band and Everybody’s Doing It, with a kind of naughty edge to it as well, a song that almost got him in trouble. Everybody’s doing it and realizing, a few simple words can suggest a lot. And to pull all that together into a vernacular song tradition and then move it into Broadway, as he does in 1914, completes I think that process of Americanizing this Viennese European import called the operetta.
