Ragtime

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

Our last post began, “What, we ask, was the life of an ordinary man or woman in the time of Ira and George Gershwin?” And in attempting to answer that question, we find only another question. What was the life of an ordinary Russian Jewish immigrant in New York City at the turn of the twentieth century? Perhaps the letters of Moishe, Rosa, Ira or George would be of help? Now, being in the mountains of Southern Brazil with only an internet connection at hand, I could not find much after typing in Google, “letters of George Gershwin” and “letters of Ira Gershwin,” enter. My query only yielded the fact that Moishe and Rosa bought a piano for their first son, Ira (Israel). But it wasn’t Ira who had much interest in the piano. His younger brother, George (Jacob), began to tinker with it.

And why did Moishe and Rosa, ten years or so now in a new country after fleeing the dangers of revolution in Russia, buy a piano? Another Google search and we find that after the Civil War, twenty-five thousand new pianos were sold every year and that five hundred thousand children were studying the piano in 1887. Why this need for pianos? Tin Pan Alley. More than just a neighborhood in New York City, located on West 28^th Street, Tin Pan Alley was an era of songwriting in American Popular Music.

And East 28^th Street wasn’t the only source for songs in New York City, so was Manhattan’s Bowery and Second Avenue, the center of the Russian-Yiddish Theater. This professional theater started in 1876 in Eastern Europe and was re-established in New York when a wave of immigrants arrived in their new home after the assassination of Czar Alexander II. In 1892, the New York Yiddish Theater presented a Jewish version of King Lear to rave reviews.

American’s racial and religious melting pot was also a musical melting pot. Ragtime, stride and blues mixed with Bach and Beethoven along with Yiddish music. Though George Gershwin or Irving Berlin (Israel Baline) never composed for the Yiddish stage, Russian Yiddish melodies were a spring source for their compositions. Hollywood composer Bernard Hermann remembers a worried George Gershwin saying that his “Summertime,” the operatic centerpiece of Porgy and Bess, sounded “too Yiddish.” Jack Gottlieb in his book, Funny it Doesn’t Sound Jewish, finds powerful similarities in both the melody and lyrics between an old Yiddish lullaby, “Lu, Lu, Lulink” and “Summertime.”