Player Pianos

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

But let us follow ten year old George to his friend, Max Rosen, at his violin recital in case we can pick up there something authentic and genuine, without a scratchy 78 rmp sound, that will make this Tin Pan Alley-pre-Follies epoc more familiar to us. George seemed to have been enthralled by Max’s playing and the music itself. Perhaps in his neighbor’s house, there was another instrument—a player piano. During the first decade or so it seems that 2.5 million player pianos were sold and sitting in the living rooms of the American people. The player piano was the equivalent to the home theater and karaoke machines in bars and restaurants of today.

George began to teach himself the piano by slowly pumping the foot pedals that pulled the paper roll with holes in it, causing the piano keys to go down. George slowed the roll down and imitated the movements of the keys with his fingers. His very first memory, at the age of 6, of a player piano appears to be in relation to Anton Rubenstein’s composition, Melody in F. Here by the great good fortune of Artis Wodehouse’s deep scholarship, we have George Gershwin’s actual words:

“I stood outside a penny arcade listening to an automatic piano leaping through [Anton] Rubenstein’s Melody in F. The peculiar jumps in the music held me rooted. To this very day, I can’t hear the tune without picturing myself outside the arcade on 125th Street, standing there in barefoot and overalls, drinking it all in avidly.”

Piano rolls were made at this time to help the sale of the booming sheet music industry. Rosters included performances of classical music giants like Anton Rubenstein, Gustav Mahler, Edvard Grieg, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Claude Debussy, Sergei Prokofieff, Paderewski, Josef Lhevinne, Josef Hoffman and Vladimir Horowitz as well as the vaudeville-Tin Pan Alley-composers: Scott Joplin, Richard Rogers, Cole Porter, Eubie Blake. Because, too, the newly arrived eastern European immigration population was so large, special “world music” collections were produced of Hungarian, Polish and Yiddish melodies.

Artis Wodehouse not only gave us some of George’s actual words but she first hand re-created for the digital recording age George Gershwin’s actual playing recorded on the piano rolls called Gershwin Plays Gershwin: The Piano Rolls. Below is a video from YouTube of George Gershwin’s song, “Kickin’ the Clouds Away” from Wodehouse’s amazing work.

“Kickin’ the clouds Away” on Weber Duo- Art Pianola