Today I’m going to focus on the period of 1925 to 1942 – the period from (roughly) the first musical written by the Gershwin brothers, Lady Be Good, through the last collaboration of Rodgers & Hart, By Jupiter. The composers of this era were associated with Tin Pan Alley and the music of the Jazz Age.
(Lady Be Good actually premiered in 1924, but hey, it’s close enough for …. jazz.)
The influences of American musical theater have been attributed to the early days of vaudeville (which, in turn, came from British music hall) and the popularity of operetta (both German/Austrian and England’s Gilbert & Sullivan). These were popular for the first two decades of the twentieth century.
The Music of Tin Pan Alley
But by the 1920s, post WWI, America was ready for something new. American popular song started taking off in the late 1800s, with the songwriting companies based on 29th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues in New York City. The term “tin pan alley” came from the ruckus all the songwriters made from playing their pianos all day long, and goes back to an article in the Hampton Magazine entitled “Tin Pan Alley.”
Composers and lyricists working as songwriters and song pluggers on Tin Pan Alley included the aforementioned Gershwin brothers, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Fats Waller, Kay Swift, Ann Ronell, and Dorothy Fields.
The Jazz Age
In the 1920s, jazz became a huge influence on popular culture. Much like the rock and roll of the 1950s, jazz came from the Black culture (specifically New Orleans), was a symbol of youth’s rebellion against tradition, and was considered by the older generation as decadent and dangerous! (Obviously, my kind of music.) Composers like Gershwin, Kern, Porter and Rodgers drew inspiration from the genre, in addition to their experience in writing popular music for Tin Pan Alley.
Vocal Styles
The vocal styles of this time period are characterized by:
- Bright, forward placement
- Some holdover from the classical operetta style, but the belt is prominently featured (although it’s never that high)
- An emphasis on diction – very crisp, often fast, sometimes suggestive (think of the pre-Code, screwball comedy – or, if you haven’t seen any, the patter in The Gilmore Girls)
- Vibrato – mimics pop style; croony
- Phrasing & rhythm: back/front phrasing is used to create syncopation (occasionally this is written in but is often left up to the singer – much like Baroque ornamentation was expected of the singer to create based on their own abilities and knowledge)
Here is a playlist I created for the handout I gave at my workshop at the Maryland Thespians Festival. This covers music from Holiday Inn, Of Thee I Sing, Showboat, Pal Joey, Shuffle Along, and Anything Goes (most of the music is from recent revivals)
Plots
The stories were often not that memorable, with a few exceptions:
- Show Boat (1927) was a musical play, rather than a musical comedy, based on the Edna Ferber book of the same name, and dealt with racial prejudice, class discrimination, marital strife.
- The Gershwins’ political satire, Of Thee I Sing (1931) won the first Pulitzer Prize given to a musical.
- Rodgers’ and Hart’s Pal Joey (1940) told a story of a charming but unsympathetic antihero, a definite change from the standard musical comedy leading man (although how unlikeable could a character be when played by Gene Kelly?).
Anything Goes (1934), by Cole Porter, is still performed today, with well known revivals in 1987 with Patti Lupone and 2011 with Sutton Foster in the role of Reno Sweeney. It is also performed often in community and academic theatre. Not only was the original source material by Guy Bolton & P.G. Wodehouse significantly revised by the writing team of Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, the music has been altered over the years to incorporate other songs written for other shows by Cole Porter.
A different kind of jukebox musical?
The songs that were heard on Broadway in this era were the songs you would hear on the radio. It didn’t really matter if you’d seen the show or not. The songs were written by the songwriters of Tin Pan Alley, who knew what would sell. Many of the shows have not survived; but the music did. Sometimes the songs and the title of the show would be kept, but an entirely different story would be written around the music. (A sort of jukebox musical, which we’ll talk about later.)
An example would be Girl Crazy (1930) by the Gershwins, in which Ethel Merman made her debut and became famous of her rendition of “I got rhythm.” It was made into a movie in 1932 (with only three of the songs), in 1943 with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, and had a name change to When the Boys Meet the Girls in 1965, starring pop singer Connie Francis, and pop icons Herman’s Hermits, Louis Armstrong, and Liberace. Another stage version, Crazy for You, came out in 1992 and completely changed the plot, with success (winning the Tony for Best Musical in 1992, the Olivier in 1993, and the Olivier for its 2011 revival).
There’s so much more I could talk about, and I think I will in another post – specifically about how this era has impacted subsequent composers. More on that later.
