Piano rolls

George Gershwin’s own piano recording of his song, “Swanee”

The aspiring songwriter wrote a song called “Swanee” and recorded it on a piano roll. This song was a take off on Stephen Foster’s 1850s song, “Old Folks at Home” or “Way Down upon the Swanee.” It had sold hundreds of thousands of copies in its time. Gershwin’s 1919 song was written in just twelve minutes with lyricist Irving Caesar at Gershwin’s apartment where a ruckus card game was going on. Sixty young women dancing with electric lights in their shoes tapped along with the song at a Capitol Theater revue called Demi-Tasse in October of that year but it got no notice. Though Foster’s song and this one has since raised haunting racial issues, Foster’s intended meaning was no matter how far we may travel or what sadness comes to us in the world, our hearts yearn for the best memories of childhood and the security of family, parents and home. Gershwin’s song made allusions to the “old folks at home” and “down by the Swanee.” But if home is where the heart is, then perhaps there’s likely to be a life-giving river nearby too.

A few weeks after the song’s revue flop, Gershwin played the song at a piano sing along at a party and Al Jolson was there. He put it in his stage show, Sinbad, and recorded it for Columbia. The song sold a million music copies and a million records. Gershwin was just 20 years old.

And so,  though possessing a potentially negative pedigree in his early life—a first generation American, the son of two immigrants, new homes in different parts of town, a high school dropout—George Gershwin’s ascent began. He was a piano accompanist-song demonstrator on Tin Pan Alley; he wrote songs of his own; he collaborated with aspiring lyricists to bring a fuller form to his songs than simple pianistic versions; he was taken into the service of the Standard Music Roll Company and the Aeolian Company to make player piano rolls; he was a part of the technical innovations in recording when the Aeolian, Ampico, and Welte-Mignon companies introduced their unique reproducing systems; he created arrangements for two and four hands, adding all kinds of inner voices, obbligato counterpoints and codas to embellish simple songs; he became a rehearsal pianist on Broadway; he wrote the musical, La, La, Lucille, that ran for 104 nights; and we already know that other singers sang his songs, (Al Jolson).

But there was one society in which he was not popular—perhaps only because of a financial-legal agreement that prevented its coming into existence. This hugely gifted young person wanted to write an opera called The Dybbuk, based on a Yiddish play by S. Ansky which documents some of the folk beliefs and stories of Hassidic Jews. However, when Gershwin found that the rights to the play were owned by the Italian composer, Lodovico Rocca, he gave up. This echoed another situation earlier in his life in the time when he was an admirer of the music of Joseph Rumshisky, one of the main composers in the Yiddish Theater scene on Second Avenue on the Lower East Side. Boris Thomashevsky, then the biggest star of this theater, invited Gershwin and to Sholem Secunda collaborate on a Yiddish operetta. Secunda, however, refused to work with an “unproven” song-plugger.

And yet his passion for music (arranging, composing, transcribing, recording) was profound. When he held forth upon stride and ragtime styles, upon the varied harmonies Chopin and Liszt or Debussy had structured; and about what violinist Jascha Heifitz might accomplish, no doubt he created for Vernon Duke—then, a new immigrant to New York—that atmosphere of hope and ardent curiosity, spiced with sound learning that serves to spur the imagination of a young composer-pianist. So it might have been how Vernon saw him (narrator’s creation):

George was the happy of happiest men, and

I, a looker-on of this fusion of angelic and hellish New Country sounds,

An admirer, noting his ardent interest in each situation where

He and music met each other.

Musicians need such “lookers-on”; someone who discriminates from a watch-tower above the battle, who warns, who foresees. It must have been pleasurable for Duke to listen as Gershwin talked and then to cease to listen, to let the insistent, confident voice run on, while he slipped from theory to practice and improvised a few riffs of his own making in his head. But the looker-on may sit too long and hold forth too curiously and domineeringly for his own health. He may make his theories fit too tightly to accommodate the formlessness of life. So when Gershwin ceased to theorize and commandingly began to play in twenty different “American” styles, sight reading this and that, changing keys easily, instantly, there issued forth ceaseless variations of Russian, German, French, English-Irish and Latin and African musical syntaxes from all corners of the world, forging this new American musical language.

He had achieved being a song plugger as he had achieved being a songwriter and collaborator, as he had achieved being a piano roll recording artist and a Broadway composer, as he achieved, it might seem, in everything he undertook. And he had won the friendship of Vernon Duke and the undying devotion of his elder brother, Ira Gershwin.

But you may say, we asked you to speak about Vernon Duke’s, “I Can’t Get Started”—what has that got to do with Tin Pan Alley’s sheet music sales, pianolas, song pluggers and early Yiddish musical theater? I will try to explain. I am going to do what I can to show you how I arrived at this opinion and about that certain kind of exchange between one who knows and one who does not, otherwise known as the teacher and the student. Here, this interdependent relationship is represented by George Gershwin and Vernon Duke.

These two men were both composers, pianists and song-writers of Russian heritage. Their paths crossed in New York City in the year 1921 when George Gershwin was twenty-three years old, shortly after the huge success of his song, “Swanee.” Vernon Duke, just eighteen, had also played piano in Constantinople cafes though he had studied piano and composition at the Kiev Conservatory under Reinhold Gliere. George encouraged “Vladimir Dukelsky” to continue writing classical music but to explore popular songs in the American style, saying, “Don’t be scared about going low-brow” and to change his name to “Vernon Duke.”

But how, we ask, as we type “George Gershwin” and “Vernon Duke” into the search field at YouTube, can we even hope to come to grips with these early Broadway-Follies composers? And then opening, downloading, fast forwarding and scanning the videos, something emerges from the grainy moving images—the outline of a man, the shadowy portrait of somebody who is not “Tin Pan Alley” or “Ragtime” or “not quite classical,” but an interesting, complex and individual human being. We know him through his brother, Ira, who refused a new piano. We see him hanging on Max Rosen’s coattails at the player piano, learning piano roll versions of perhaps, “The Old Folks at Home” and “After the Ball.” We watch his parents sending him off to be trained in European classical music with Charles Hambitzer. We observe with irony as he spends one year in high school studying accounting in order to help with the family’s restaurant business only to drop out and go to work as the youngest ever song plugger at Jerome H. Remick and Company, one of Tin Pan Alley’s sheet music publishers. Here he earns $15 a week, the average salary of Americans at the time.

The song plugger is sitting in a booth at a piano and playing Remick’s own songs for the vaudeville performers that come in looking for new material. Sometimes he is out bantering with singers, orchestra leaders, dancers and comedians to use the songs. (It is even said that the “v” in “Gershvin” became “Gershwin” at this point because he had been so impressed by comedian Ed Wynn.) Soon he is recording piano rolls because Mr. Remick wants the recordings to help the sales of the sheet music. This 16 year old George Gershwin is in the right place at the right time.

George Gershwin would go on to record one hundred and forty player piano rolls over a ten year period. Below is a video of a piano roll recording of his first instrumental published composition, “Rialto Ripples Rag.”

Gershwin recorded “Rialto Ripples Rag” on a piano roll for player piano

Yet, however stimulating it is to think that we are beginning to hear the actual playing of Jacob Gershovitz, the ten year old George Gershwin, at Max Rosen’s (Maxie Rosenzweig’s?) pianola—starting, stopping, starting again—in the year 1908, it has to be admitted that to listen to these early piano rolls of the five, ten, fifteen years of Gershwin’s recording career, is a bit funny, fun, strange and portentous all at the same time. The pounding, driving rhythms of the ragtime inflected melodies seem to dance with happy-go-luck-insistence until we demand an explanation, some benevolence of meaning to seal them for us. It comes in the form of song, of course, but a song that came before George himself. And before that particular method of preserving song for posterity, the piano roll. Sheet music only boomed after 1892 when Charles K. Harris published a happy and sad waltz called “After the Ball.” This song sold over two million copies of sheet music within the first few years it was released in the Tin Pan Alley era. Unprecedented in American musical culture, songs, sheet music, and those who could play the songs to showcase them—the song pluggers—were in business.

Scholars like Mark Booth in his book, The Experience of Songs, can expound upon the details of why this song is the forerunner of all American pop songs in such elements: the story, the story-within-a-song, sad story with happy melody, the way the melody emphasizes the lyric and unforgettable expertise of the chorus. Just reciting the refrain out loud with no melody easily reveals that some of those facts:

After the ball is over
After the break of morn

After the dancers’ leaving
After the stars are gone

Many a heart is aching
If you could read them all

Many the hopes that have vanished
After the ball

The verse continues 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, its um pah pah pulse accompanying the story of a man who accuses his girlfriend of kissing another man at a dance, when in fact it was her brother. This man, now elderly, only finds out the truth upon her death. Our character’s massive false projection would become a subliminal soundtrack to many American family outings in the park years later where John Phillip Sousa bands lightly played it as background music.

This song and American music publishing houses set the imagination of the public singing and dancing everywhere, in homes, in theaters, in saloons, in parks, just about everywhere a song could be sung. “Tin Pan Alley” was a phrase that described the din of ten thousand pianos clashing like garbage can cymbal-lids in one New York City neighborhood. Every door had a song to sell.

Here below is a video of Charles K. Harris singing this song many years later, probably in the late 1920s, perhaps just at the time when George Gershwin was finishing his piano roll career.

Charles K. Harris - “After The Ball”