Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Irving Berlin
Speaker 1: is really, to me amazing example of the kind of
Speaker 1: story that the United States likes to tell about itself
Speaker 1: as a nation. So the whole idea of being a
Speaker 1: melting pot and a land of opportunity and a place
Speaker 1: where immigrants can make a better life for themselves. And
Speaker 1: also he's simultaneously an amazing example of just how complicated
Speaker 1: and imperfect and incomplete that very idealized story can be,
Speaker 1: because he was a Jewish immigrant from Russia who went
Speaker 1: on to become a colossally famous songwriter and an enormous
Speaker 1: contributor to what's own is the Great American Songbook. So
Speaker 1: that's a loosely defined collection of jazz standards and popular
Speaker 1: songs from the early twentieth century that have just had
Speaker 1: a really enduring appeal and are still being sung decades later.
Speaker 1: So just a few of Irving Berlin's contributions to the
Speaker 1: Great American Songbook, or the songs White Christmas, God Bless America,
Speaker 1: putting on the Ritz, Easter Parade and anything you can
Speaker 1: Do I can do better from the Broadway musical any
Speaker 1: Get Your Gun. I found working on this really challenging
Speaker 1: because I kept stopping what I was doing to go
Speaker 1: watch YouTube videos of people singing these songs, including watching
Speaker 1: a video of Laura Austiness and Sentino Fontana singing anything
Speaker 1: you Can Do, which I did in the middle literally
Speaker 1: of writing this paragraph. And if you're like Tracy, why
Speaker 1: why that version in particular one, I'd never seen it
Speaker 1: before too. I miss Crazy Ex Girlfriend, which which Santino
Speaker 1: Fontana was on. But in addition to all those things
Speaker 1: that I just said, Irving Berlin also worked in an
Speaker 1: industry that discriminated against people of color, while also drawing
Speaker 1: inspiration from and even appropriating musical styles and traditions that
Speaker 1: were developed by those same people, and also writing and
Speaker 1: performing musical numbers that could be really offensive to them.
Speaker 1: So while I originally envisioned this as a winter holiday
Speaker 1: slash Christmas episode thanks to the song White Christmas and
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifty film by the same name, this instead
Speaker 1: turned into a two parter that's not really about Christmas
Speaker 1: that much at all. It's more about the musical and
Speaker 1: cultural context of Irving Berlin's work. So today we are
Speaker 1: going to talk about his life and work through World
Speaker 1: War One, and then in part two we will pick
Speaker 1: up in the years between the two World Wars and
Speaker 1: go through the rest of his career. Irving Berlin's family
Speaker 1: immigrated to the U s. In eighte from Tolequin in
Speaker 1: what's now Belarus, which at the time was part of
Speaker 1: the Russian Empire. There are some variations in the spelling
Speaker 1: and pronunciation of their name. It would have been written
Speaker 1: using either the Hebrew alphabet or Cyrillic script, so English
Speaker 1: speaking officials creating things like ship manifests and immigration records,
Speaker 1: we're basically making their best guests at writing down the
Speaker 1: name that they heard in English. When talking to journalists
Speaker 1: and biographers. Berlin's descendants have also used two slightly different
Speaker 1: pronunciations of the family's last name, Balin and Baleine. Yes,
Speaker 1: they're very similar, but just different enough to go wait,
Speaker 1: subble accents shift. Yeah, So we don't know much detail
Speaker 1: about their lives before they immigrated. Irving Berlin was born
Speaker 1: Israel Bilin, also known as Izzy, on May eleven, eight
Speaker 1: and some accounts give his place of birth as a
Speaker 1: stuttle in Siberia. He was the youngest of eight children
Speaker 1: born to Leah and Moses Bullim. Moses was a canceler
Speaker 1: and also worked as part of the kosher butchering process.
Speaker 1: Sources contradict about exactly what his role was in that process,
Speaker 1: whether he actually conducted the slaughtering or whether he was
Speaker 1: inspecting and certifying that this process had been carried out
Speaker 1: according to Jewish law. The family moved to the US
Speaker 1: because they were trying to escape widespread programs and other
Speaker 1: anti Semitic persecution. Czar Alexander the Second had been assassinated
Speaker 1: in eight and although his assassin was not Jewish, rumors
Speaker 1: had spread that Jews were responsible for it. Massive anti
Speaker 1: Semitic violence followed, and the Bailin family left when it
Speaker 1: was still at its peak. They arrived in New York
Speaker 1: City aboard the s s Rhineland on September when Izzy five.
Speaker 1: While the US would have been physically safer for a
Speaker 1: Jewish family than the Russian Empire was at that point,
Speaker 1: the nation was also in the middle of an economic crisis.
Speaker 1: Multiple factors had fed into the Panic of eighteen ninety three,
Speaker 1: which started months before the family's arrival and continued until
Speaker 1: eight This economic depression affected virtually every industry and people
Speaker 1: lost all their money as stock prices collapsed and banks failed.
Speaker 1: So after arriving in the US, Izzie's father struggled to
Speaker 1: find work, like literally any work. Eight members of the
Speaker 1: family wound up living together in a window lists three
Speaker 1: room tenement with no running water. That's not three bedrooms,
Speaker 1: to be clear, that is three total rooms, and they
Speaker 1: all tried to make ends meet however they could, including
Speaker 1: renting out their beds to night shift workers so they
Speaker 1: could sleep there during the day. By the age of eight,
Speaker 1: is he was doing his part by selling newspapers. Beyond that,
Speaker 1: we really don't know very much about his childhood. We
Speaker 1: know that his first language was Yiddish and that he
Speaker 1: didn't have a lot of formal education. As an adult,
Speaker 1: he tended to tell the same very few stories about
Speaker 1: his early years, including that he learned about Christmas from
Speaker 1: Irish neighbors whose tiny, very scraggly Christmas tree seemed just
Speaker 1: magical to him. A lot of articles described this as
Speaker 1: like the Charlie Brown Christmas tree. I think that's probably
Speaker 1: what most of us envisioned. As you were saying, they're
Speaker 1: already difficult. Financial situation actually got even worse in nineteen
Speaker 1: o one, when Izzie's father died at the age of
Speaker 1: fifty three. Izzie had just turned thirteen, and soon he
Speaker 1: left home. Some accounts attribute this to his feeling that
Speaker 1: as a growing teen, he had become a liability to
Speaker 1: his family. He also described it as a challenge to
Speaker 1: be the only boy in a home that was otherwise
Speaker 1: over crowded with women and girls. Soon he was trying
Speaker 1: to earn a living by busking, including singing in saloons,
Speaker 1: and he was living mostly in low rent boarding houses.
Speaker 1: As I got some musical experience, he started trying to
Speaker 1: find work in tin Pan Alley, which was a place
Speaker 1: and an umbrella term for the music that was broadly
Speaker 1: popular in the US and the late nineteenth and early
Speaker 1: twentieth centuries, and a name for the composers and performers
Speaker 1: and publishers and others who were all part of making
Speaker 1: that music. The exact place shifted somewhat over the decades,
Speaker 1: but it started out on West twenty Street. Today West
Speaker 1: twenty between Broadway and sixth Avenue is known as tin
Speaker 1: Pan Alley. The source of that name is also a
Speaker 1: little bit vague. One popular theory is that it came
Speaker 1: from the sheer cacophony of different songs being played simultaneously
Speaker 1: on multiple upright pianos. Some were played by aspiring songwriters
Speaker 1: hoping to find a publisher for their work, and some
Speaker 1: by people employed as song pluggers, who were basically musical demonstrators,
Speaker 1: playing songs to try to entice people to buy the
Speaker 1: sheet music from them. I can imagine what this sounded
Speaker 1: like in my head and why people might have equated
Speaker 1: it to the sound of tin pans being banged around.
Speaker 1: At this point, sheet music was really at the heart
Speaker 1: of the economic model for the music business in the
Speaker 1: United States. The phonograph had been invented in the nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: and Thomas Edison had unveiled his version in eighteen seventy seven,
Speaker 1: so by the early nineteen hundreds this was still a
Speaker 1: really new and still developing technology. Phonographs themselves could be expensive,
Speaker 1: and the wax cylinders they played can only hold a
Speaker 1: couple of minutes of sound at first. The cylinders also
Speaker 1: had to be recorded one at a time, so musicians
Speaker 1: had to play the same thing over and over, and
Speaker 1: that meant the finished product was also expensive. Even as
Speaker 1: mass production techniques improved, they still just did not sound
Speaker 1: very good. Meanwhile, pianos were seen as almost a requirement
Speaker 1: for middle class families. They had become a marker of
Speaker 1: both social status and respectability. Many boarding houses had a
Speaker 1: piano in a common area, so did community gathering places
Speaker 1: like churches, schools, and hotels. So a lot of people
Speaker 1: bought sheet music so they could play and sing popular
Speaker 1: music for themselves. Often that sheet music was printed with
Speaker 1: a colorful, illustrated cover and a list of other music
Speaker 1: available from the same publisher on the back, and from
Speaker 1: a lot of publishers. It wasn't just the notes on
Speaker 1: the page that you're buying. It was sort of this
Speaker 1: nice thinges kind of so. Fourteen year old Izzy Bailen
Speaker 1: got his start in this industry as a song plugger,
Speaker 1: hired by songwriter and music publisher Harry von Tilzer in
Speaker 1: nine two. This was a job that Izzy pursued for
Speaker 1: himself in spite of the fact that he did not
Speaker 1: know how to read music or play a piano. He sang.
Speaker 1: He performed fon tills or songs to the public, and
Speaker 1: two people in the music industry and for this he
Speaker 1: was paid five dollars a week. A couple of years later,
Speaker 1: he was hired as a singing waiter at Mike Salter's
Speaker 1: Pelham Cafe in Chinatown. The venue in its proprietor both
Speaker 1: had a nickname that included a racist slur, because while
Speaker 1: Salter was of Russian Jewish descent, he also had dark skin.
Speaker 1: At Pelham Cafe is he made seven dollars a week
Speaker 1: plus tips. This was an overnight job. The cafe was
Speaker 1: open from eight pm until six am, which seems to
Speaker 1: have set the stage for Irving Berlin's lifelong habits as
Speaker 1: a night owl and his chronic insomnia. Unsurprisingly, given this
Speaker 1: establishments hours, the crowd tended to be on the courser side.
Speaker 1: They were often inebriated and loud. The waiters were nicknamed
Speaker 1: nickel kickers because those tips that they got came in
Speaker 1: the form of throne coins, which the waiters had to
Speaker 1: chase after as they rolled across the floor. Is He
Speaker 1: had already figured out that he had a knack for
Speaker 1: writing lyrics during his early years as a busker. He
Speaker 1: had found ways to put his own twist on songs
Speaker 1: that he was singing, and when he improvised. His lyrics
Speaker 1: were usually clever or funny, and then that usually got
Speaker 1: him bigger tips. And he also seemed to have an
Speaker 1: instinct for picking out a good melody, one that was
Speaker 1: simple and memorable and often already felt familiar to people,
Speaker 1: so something that was grounded and established tunes and patterns,
Speaker 1: but also which he managed to turn into something new.
Speaker 1: So he started trying to write new songs of his own. Again,
Speaker 1: he had no formal musical training. He probably would have
Speaker 1: been exposed to music at home, but he had not
Speaker 1: been formally taught anything. He didn't know how to read
Speaker 1: or write music. He did not know how to play
Speaker 1: the piano. He would hear a melody in his head
Speaker 1: and then pick it out in the key of F
Speaker 1: sharp major, which on a piano F sharp major scale
Speaker 1: is played almost exclusively on the black keys of the piano.
Speaker 1: This required a lot of trial and error and a
Speaker 1: lot of craftsmanship and revision, and for the rest of
Speaker 1: his professional life he would talk about working on songs
Speaker 1: through the night to get them exactly right. On May seven,
Speaker 1: a couple of days before his nineteenth birthday, is He
Speaker 1: Bilin published his first song, Marie from sunny Italy. This
Speaker 1: was certainly not his greatest work as a lyricist. Some
Speaker 1: of his later work features delightfully clever phrasing that doesn't
Speaker 1: quite rhyme, but in this song it's more like, please
Speaker 1: come out tonight, my queen. Can't you hear my mandolin?
Speaker 1: But just to say this started getting his name out there.
Speaker 1: The name he was getting out there was not Israel
Speaker 1: Bilin though. Instead the cover of this sheet music read
Speaker 1: words by I Berlin, music by M. Nicholson. M Nicholson
Speaker 1: was Mike Nicholson, pianist at Pelham Cafe. Some sources describe
Speaker 1: I Berlin as a printer's error, and others as more
Speaker 1: of a reflection of how people were pronouncing his last
Speaker 1: name by that point. Still others, though, say that he
Speaker 1: was looking for a name for himself that was less
Speaker 1: recognizably Jewish, and that, in addition to the shift from
Speaker 1: Berlin to Berlin, that he had been thinking about adopting
Speaker 1: the name Irving for a while. Regardless of exactly how
Speaker 1: the name change came about, soon is he Bylin was
Speaker 1: professionally known as Irving Berlin. And we'll talk more about
Speaker 1: that after we take a quick sponsor break. As Irving
Speaker 1: Berlin published his first song, the entertainment industry in New
Speaker 1: York City was growing and shifting. New York's first subway
Speaker 1: line opened on October n four, and one of the
Speaker 1: stations on that first line was at Times Square, by
Speaker 1: the intersection of Broadway and Fort Street. Soon the surrounding
Speaker 1: area was developing into a theater district. When Marie from
Speaker 1: Sunny Italy was published, Berlin was still working at Pelham Cafe,
Speaker 1: but he was fired from that job that year. Reportedly,
Speaker 1: he fell asleep while he was supposed to be tending
Speaker 1: the cash register and at the end of the night
Speaker 1: was missing from the till Berlin got another job pretty quickly, though,
Speaker 1: and it was a step up. It was at Jimmy
Speaker 1: Kelly's Folly, where his wages were a little better the
Speaker 1: clientele was a little more upscale. He earned enough money
Speaker 1: that he was able to afford to rent a place
Speaker 1: with his friend and colleague Max Winslow, rather than staying
Speaker 1: in low rent boarding houses. He started meeting and making
Speaker 1: more connections and friendships with other entertainers, including past podcast
Speaker 1: subject Fanny Bryce, and he kept trying to publish songs,
Speaker 1: often as the lyricist at that point with somebody else
Speaker 1: writing the music. If you look up music from this era,
Speaker 1: whether it's by Irving Berlin or by someone else, you're
Speaker 1: going to find a lot of stuff that's offensive or
Speaker 1: at the very least insensitive by today's standards. And there
Speaker 1: were people who pointed out its offensiveness at the time.
Speaker 1: For example, black face had become an established part of
Speaker 1: popular entertainment, with white actors wearing exaggerated black makeup and
Speaker 1: adopting a heavily stereotypical way of speaking and singing. Black
Speaker 1: Face has multiple roots, including white performers appropriating the music
Speaker 1: and dance styles of black communities and using them to
Speaker 1: make money, while also largely excluding black performers from the
Speaker 1: same industry. Black Face had become so widespread and popular
Speaker 1: that there were also black actors who performed in black face,
Speaker 1: although that of core added additional layers of nuance to
Speaker 1: their performances. By the time Irving Berlin started writing songs,
Speaker 1: people had been criticizing white performers use of black face
Speaker 1: for decades. For example, Frederick Douglas was a vocal critic
Speaker 1: as early as the eighteen forties, so like six decades
Speaker 1: worth of criticism. Yeah, and this is something that was
Speaker 1: always racist, but was incredibly normalized at this point. Some
Speaker 1: of the music that came out of Tin pan Alley
Speaker 1: was essentially audio blackface songs that were written and sung
Speaker 1: by white performers that leaned really heavily into racist stereotypes
Speaker 1: of how black people spoke and acted, and in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways, Tin pan Alley took a very similar
Speaker 1: approach to other racial and ethnic groups. Music and lyrics
Speaker 1: and the accents that were adopted to sing them reflect
Speaker 1: really stereotypical perceptions of immigrants from Italy and Ireland and particular,
Speaker 1: as well as perceptions of Jewish immigrants from various parts
Speaker 1: of Europe and of indigenous people in North America. Basically,
Speaker 1: if there is a group you can stereotype, there was
Speaker 1: music that played into those stereotypes. And feeding into all
Speaker 1: of this was a broad fascination with anything that white
Speaker 1: people thought of as exotic. Because entertainment was one of
Speaker 1: the industries that was open to Jewish immigrants, many of
Speaker 1: Tin Paney's songwriters and composers were Jewish immigrants themselves or
Speaker 1: were the children of Jewish immigrants. They knew that they
Speaker 1: could make money through these exotic sized depictions, whether they
Speaker 1: were of their own community or someone else's and as
Speaker 1: is the case today, another big money maker was sex,
Speaker 1: or at least innuendo, which means a lot of these
Speaker 1: songs could also lean into stereotypes around gender and relationships.
Speaker 1: Irving Berlin's first really big money maker was My Wife's
Speaker 1: Gone to the country hooray hooray, and which hooray is
Speaker 1: spelled like hurrah in the sheet music, which I find
Speaker 1: kind of delightful. He co wrote this with George Whiting
Speaker 1: and Ted Snyder. Ted Snyder was a music publisher who
Speaker 1: also published the sheet music for this song. As that
Speaker 1: title suggests, this song is about a man whose wife
Speaker 1: says she can't stand the heat anymore, so she's taking
Speaker 1: the children out to the country. It's chorus goes, my
Speaker 1: wife's gone to the country, hooray, hooray. She thought it
Speaker 1: best I need a rest, That's why she went away.
Speaker 1: She took the children with her. Hooray, hooray. I don't
Speaker 1: care what becomes of me. My wife's gone away. This
Speaker 1: man is so excited that his wife and kids are
Speaker 1: gone that he puts an ad about it in the
Speaker 1: paper announcing it and also looks up a pretty girl
Speaker 1: he used to know named Molly if she listens to
Speaker 1: a recording of this song. It's generally recorded in a
Speaker 1: way that sounds exuberantly gleeful. Uh. And it was a
Speaker 1: huge hit. Three hundred thousand copies of the sheet music
Speaker 1: were sold, and Irving Berlin made a penny per copy
Speaker 1: that added up to three thousand dollars, which was more
Speaker 1: money than he had ever seen in his life. He
Speaker 1: used some of the proceeds to move his mother and
Speaker 1: one of his sisters out of their Lower East Side
Speaker 1: tenement to a place in the Bronx where he lived
Speaker 1: as well. He also bought his mother a rocking chair,
Speaker 1: and he bought a transposing piano, one that used a
Speaker 1: lever to change the key so he could keep picking
Speaker 1: out the melodies enough sharp major while then hearing what
Speaker 1: they sounded like in a different key. This is so
Speaker 1: fascinating to me. Yeah. Uh. In Irving Berlin became both
Speaker 1: a Freemason and a Shriner. The Shriners are connected to Freemasonry,
Speaker 1: and while not all Freemasons become Shriners, a man has
Speaker 1: to become a master Mason before becoming a Shriner. A
Speaker 1: year later, Berlin published what's often cited as his first
Speaker 1: international hit, Alexander's Ragtime Band. This definitely was not his
Speaker 1: first song to sell internationally, but in the course of
Speaker 1: a single year, more than two million copies of the
Speaker 1: sheet music were sold, earning Berlin roughly forty dollars. We
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier that Earling Berlin was a night owl, and
Speaker 1: in particular, he often talked about working through the night
Speaker 1: in just a grueling effort to finish a song, or
Speaker 1: sometimes more struggling to write a song until the very
Speaker 1: last minute, and then having to pack all that same
Speaker 1: effort into a very short window to hit a deadline.
Speaker 1: Alexander's Ragtime Band was an exception to that. It came
Speaker 1: together for him really quickly. Berlin biographer James Kaplan describes
Speaker 1: this song as quote a joyous tribute to African American
Speaker 1: musical genius, the first great and lasting one in American
Speaker 1: popular song from a Jewish American musical genius us. Kaplan
Speaker 1: also calls the song a celebration of America itself. There
Speaker 1: are some ironies involved in this song and its success.
Speaker 1: It introduced a lot of people to the idea of ragtime,
Speaker 1: like its musical successor, jazz, ragtime is a style of
Speaker 1: music initially developed by black musicians and performers before becoming
Speaker 1: popular among white performers and songwriters. The name ragtime comes
Speaker 1: from the syncopated rhythms and ragged rhymes that are hallmarks
Speaker 1: of the style. But even though Alexander's Ragtime Band included
Speaker 1: the word ragtime in the title and celebrated ragtime and
Speaker 1: in some ways introduced ragtime to a broader audience, it
Speaker 1: is not really a rag This song is often described
Speaker 1: really more as a march, and ragtime did have roots
Speaker 1: in marches, but it's a little bit different. Uh. Before long,
Speaker 1: rumors were also spreading that Berlin had stolen the work
Speaker 1: of a black musician in writing this song. Some people
Speaker 1: gave the credits to composer and songwriter Lukey Johnson, who
Speaker 1: said he didn't have anything to do with it and
Speaker 1: counter quote, I wish I had written that song. Decades later,
Speaker 1: Lottie Stokes Joplin, the widow of Scott Joplin, who was
Speaker 1: known as the King of Ragtime, said that Berlin had
Speaker 1: stolen the tune from her late husband, But scholars who
Speaker 1: have compared Alexander's Ragtime Band to various pieces of Joplin
Speaker 1: surviving work, have not found a clear example of like
Speaker 1: definite copying. Irving Berlin would face other accusations of plagiarism
Speaker 1: during his career, including accusations of plagiarizing the work of
Speaker 1: black performers. He vigorously denied these allegations, sometimes in a
Speaker 1: way that could sound really dismissive toward the performers or
Speaker 1: communities whose work he was allegedly copying. He absolutely drew
Speaker 1: influence from things like folk songs and commonlities as well
Speaker 1: as from other people's work, and some of his work
Speaker 1: can definitely be seen as appropriating other cultures and musical traditions.
Speaker 1: But there are not really clear cut examples of lifting
Speaker 1: other people's entire songs note for note. Most of the
Speaker 1: examples that have been brought up are sequences of four
Speaker 1: or five notes that are part of a longer piece. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I saw descriptions that were like, if people had heard
Speaker 1: this song before, they might recognize these four notes as
Speaker 1: the same as those four notes, which is not as
Speaker 1: obvious as something like taking the entire baseline of under
Speaker 1: pressure and using it to make ice ice baby, which
Speaker 1: is like a thing that jumps out to me, is
Speaker 1: like a clear example of musical copying. Well, that's considered
Speaker 1: a sampling though, isn't it. Yeah, But it wasn't acknowledged
Speaker 1: when it originally came out, I think, which was the problem, right,
Speaker 1: I mean that was when like the concept of sampling
Speaker 1: was still dead. Um. But like that's a more direct
Speaker 1: obvious this thing turned into this thing than most of
Speaker 1: the examples that people are like, what's It's more like, okay,
Speaker 1: they're the sequence of four notes is the same as
Speaker 1: this other sequence of four notes. In February of nineteen twelve,
Speaker 1: Irving Berlin married Dorothy Gets, and their marriage was tragically short.
Speaker 1: She died on July sevent of that same year. She
Speaker 1: likely died as a result of typhoid, which she contracted
Speaker 1: during their honeymoon in Cuba. Berlin wrote the ballad When
Speaker 1: I Lost You after her death, and that is a
Speaker 1: song that's often described as really the most personal one
Speaker 1: that he ever wrote. It took a while for Berlin
Speaker 1: to really start writing again after his wife's death, and
Speaker 1: when he did, his next career move was writing for Broadway.
Speaker 1: And we'll get into that after a sponsor break. As
Speaker 1: we said earlier, Irving Berlin started working for Ted Snyder
Speaker 1: in nineteen o nine. Into the nineteen teens, he became
Speaker 1: more involved with that business, with Ted Snyder, Henry Watterson,
Speaker 1: and Irving Berlin eventually coming together to become Waterson, Berlin
Speaker 1: and Snyder, which became one of the most prominent sheet
Speaker 1: music publishers in the US in the early twentieth century.
Speaker 1: During these years, Berlin had also started working with his
Speaker 1: first musical secretary, Cliff Hess, who the Snyder Company hired
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirteen. Berlin and Hess worked together extensively over
Speaker 1: the next five years, with Hess even moving into Berlin's
Speaker 1: apartment to keep up with his work. Through the night
Speaker 1: writing habits. Berlin routinely woke up at noon, ate breakfast,
Speaker 1: and started working, going to bed at five o'clock the
Speaker 1: next morning, which I will just say sounds like a
Speaker 1: dream schedule, I think for him it was until life
Speaker 1: intervenes to make it deeply inconvenient to be on that schedule.
Speaker 1: Hess was the first of several musical secretaries and arrangers
Speaker 1: who Berlin worked with during his career, which really helped
Speaker 1: him compensate for the fact that he didn't know how
Speaker 1: to read or write music, or really to play the piano.
Speaker 1: These were skills that he only started to develop much later,
Speaker 1: and even then most accounts say he was never really
Speaker 1: proficient at them. Often Berlin would sing a melody or
Speaker 1: pick it out on his transposing piano, and his musical
Speaker 1: secretary would play it back, adding in the harmonies and
Speaker 1: other musical elements. People described Berlin as being able to
Speaker 1: point out spots where his secretary had used different notes
Speaker 1: or chords than what Berlin had intended, because while he
Speaker 1: could not read the notes on the page, he could
Speaker 1: hear them in his mind. He also had a sharp
Speaker 1: business sense, both for his own work and for the
Speaker 1: industry in en. He was one of the co founders
Speaker 1: of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers or
Speaker 1: as CAP, along with other prominent composers and publishers. As
Speaker 1: CAP has its own history that we are not going
Speaker 1: to get into, but at its founding, the purpose was
Speaker 1: to help members to copyright and license their music, making
Speaker 1: it easier to protect their work and earn money from it.
Speaker 1: Berlin's first full Broadway score was for Watch Your Step,
Speaker 1: which opened at the New Amsterdam Theater in Berlin wrote
Speaker 1: the music and the lyrics, and this was the first
Speaker 1: time that a tin pan alley composer made the move
Speaker 1: to Broadway. This drew a lot of influence from Ragtime,
Speaker 1: and one of its best remembered songs is the overlapping
Speaker 1: duet play, a simple melody which listeners of a certain
Speaker 1: age may remember from when Jane Stapleton and Fozzy Bear
Speaker 1: sang it on The Muppet Show. It is so charming,
Speaker 1: It's a very delightful song. In the seven years that
Speaker 1: had passed since his first song publication in seven Berlin
Speaker 1: had published roughly one ninety other songs as either a
Speaker 1: composer or a lyricist. While he had mostly been writing
Speaker 1: the lyrics for his first songs, over time that had
Speaker 1: shifted until he was almost always responsible for both of
Speaker 1: those nineties songs published over seven years, he had written
Speaker 1: both the music and lyrics to about two thirds of them.
Speaker 1: This was a lot part of his creative process involved
Speaker 1: just churning out a huge amount of material, knowing that
Speaker 1: only some of it would be really great. In one story,
Speaker 1: somebody complimented him at a party saying, no one has
Speaker 1: written as many hits as you have. His response was,
Speaker 1: I know there's no one who has written so many failures.
Speaker 1: During these years, Berlin had honed his songwriting style and craft.
Speaker 1: He was really focused on getting just the right melody,
Speaker 1: often a very simple melody, and just the right lyrics,
Speaker 1: which again were often really simple, but tucked in with
Speaker 1: that simplicity returns of phrase and patterns and rhymes they
Speaker 1: were very catchy and evocative. This work drew from a
Speaker 1: lot of musical influences, including ragtime and blues in the
Speaker 1: earliest years of jazz. As a musical style, his work
Speaker 1: was sometimes described as jazz. He definitely incorporated some elements
Speaker 1: that were really common in jazz, including the syncopated beats
Speaker 1: that were also part of ragtime, but he didn't really
Speaker 1: incorporate the more improvisational elements that are often found in jazz.
Speaker 1: At the same time, as was the case with Alexander's
Speaker 1: Ragtime Band, introducing the idea of ragtime to a white
Speaker 1: audience without actually being a rag his jazz like work
Speaker 1: became an entry point for a lot of white audiences
Speaker 1: and in some cases even defined for those audiences what
Speaker 1: jazz was all about. World War One started in nineteen fourteen,
Speaker 1: following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and
Speaker 1: his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenburg. In the face of
Speaker 1: war and a growing sense of isolation and xenophobia in
Speaker 1: the US, Berlin started the process of becoming US citizen
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventeen. The United States became involved in World
Speaker 1: War One. In early nineteen eighteen, Irving Berlin took his
Speaker 1: oath of citizenship and he was also drafted at the
Speaker 1: age of thirty. He was almost too old to be drafted.
Speaker 1: The cutoff was thirty one, and he was really surprised
Speaker 1: that he passed. As physical. In addition to the chronic
Speaker 1: insomnia that we already talked about, he was also chronically
Speaker 1: ill with what's usually described as nervous indigestion, and that
Speaker 1: affected him for his whole life. There are some accounts
Speaker 1: of all this that make it sort of sound like
Speaker 1: he started his citizenship process in spite of the war,
Speaker 1: thinking that he wouldn't be drafted because of his health.
Speaker 1: But like the draft applied to people regardless of whether
Speaker 1: they were citizens or not, like it applied to all
Speaker 1: men living in the United States, so whether he was
Speaker 1: a citizen or not was not part of whether he
Speaker 1: was going to be drafted. In May of nineteen eighteen,
Speaker 1: Berlin became a private in the U. S Army and
Speaker 1: was stationed at Camp Upton in yap Hank, New York.
Speaker 1: Work he was intensely patriotic, and he seems to have
Speaker 1: really wanted to serve his adopted country, but he also
Speaker 1: found life in the army very difficult. In particular, he
Speaker 1: hated how early he had to get up, which really
Speaker 1: is not surprising given his tendency to go to bed
Speaker 1: at five in the morning and get up at noon.
Speaker 1: He described himself as hating revelie so much that he
Speaker 1: would lie awake at night thinking about it. I felt
Speaker 1: this so much in my bones, in my bones. He
Speaker 1: wrote a song about this, called Oh How I Hate
Speaker 1: to get up in the morning, and that song started
Speaker 1: to catch on around Camp Upton. Soon. Berlin proposed writing
Speaker 1: a musical about army life to be used to raise
Speaker 1: funds that would be sort of along the lines of
Speaker 1: George Cohen's song Over There, which came out in nineteen seventeen,
Speaker 1: as well as a musical review that the US Navy
Speaker 1: had staged the previous spring. Exactly how this all came
Speaker 1: about is a little bit fuzzy, but the result was
Speaker 1: Yip Yip Yap Hank, which was a review with a
Speaker 1: cast of army recruits. It was performed at Camp Upton
Speaker 1: before moving to the Century Theater in New York City
Speaker 1: and running for thirty two performances. This was a vaudeville
Speaker 1: style review with music and dance and acrobatics, and a
Speaker 1: black face number and a drag number. Berlin, who at
Speaker 1: this point had been promoted to sergeant, performed Oh How
Speaker 1: I Hate to Get up in the morning himself. After
Speaker 1: the end of World War One, Berlin looked back at
Speaker 1: his career and tried to figure out what his next
Speaker 1: step should be. While his name was still part of Waterson,
Speaker 1: Berlin and Snyder, he wasn't really working with that company anymore. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: he established his own publishing house, Irving Berlin, Inc. So
Speaker 1: he could control the copyrights and the royalties to his
Speaker 1: own music. Two years later, he wrote fourteen musical numbers
Speaker 1: for the Zigfield Follies. He went on to do various
Speaker 1: work with the Follies in the years that followed. In
Speaker 1: one he teamed up with Joseph M. Shank and Sam
Speaker 1: Harris to establish his own Broadway theater, The Music Box.
Speaker 1: This was a colossally expensive and difficult venture with technically
Speaker 1: complicated stage equipment, including an elevator. His work and his
Speaker 1: name recognition continued to grow in the early nineteen twenties,
Speaker 1: and he also fell in love again. And that is
Speaker 1: where we are going to pick up next time. Do
Speaker 1: you have some yummi listener mail to tide us over
Speaker 1: until our next episode? I do. This is from Angela
Speaker 1: and Angela wrote after our recent episode on Charles Drew
Speaker 1: and blood banking. Angela said, Hi, Holly and Tracy. I'm
Speaker 1: sure you recorded the behind the scenes about blood banks
Speaker 1: before this news came out, but I thought I would
Speaker 1: put out the p s A that the deferral for
Speaker 1: donating blood if you were in Europe during Mad Cow
Speaker 1: has been lifted. Blood donation is very important to me
Speaker 1: and has been a regular part of my life since
Speaker 1: I turned eighteen. I won't say how old I am,
Speaker 1: but I have recently gotten my six gallon pin and
Speaker 1: that doesn't include the different places I donated when I
Speaker 1: was younger. Since I have loved many people who have
Speaker 1: benefited from blood donation. Anything that makes it so more
Speaker 1: people can donate makes me happy. I'm glad the f
Speaker 1: d A is constantly going back and reevaluating the policy
Speaker 1: is to try to maximize the number of people who
Speaker 1: can donate, but I do agree with you that it
Speaker 1: seems like there are some in place for the wrong reasons.
Speaker 1: Thank you, as always for your continued work to keep
Speaker 1: listeners informed of the past and its impact today, Angela,
Speaker 1: Thank you so much Angela for this update. So yeah,
Speaker 1: the last time that I gave blood, before writing that
Speaker 1: episode and doing the behind the scenes UM, the f
Speaker 1: d A had actually issued new guidance UM, but the
Speaker 1: Red Cross had not incorporated that new guidance into their
Speaker 1: process yet. So when I gave blood at that point,
Speaker 1: folks who had lived in Europe during the big Mad
Speaker 1: Cow outbreak, we're still excluded from donating. UM. They actually changed.
Speaker 1: They announced that they were changing the policy UM shortly
Speaker 1: before we recorded this episode, and also shortly before the
Speaker 1: next time I gave blood. But I'm pretty sure that
Speaker 1: was still in the questionnaire that day. It's not in
Speaker 1: the questionnaire anymore. UM. This directly affects people I know
Speaker 1: who either like lived in the UK for a period
Speaker 1: while they were in college or grad school, or folks
Speaker 1: I know who moved from the UK to the United States.
Speaker 1: So yeah, that that rule has changed from what was
Speaker 1: in place for a very long time. So thank you
Speaker 1: Angela for letting me know about that. A couple of
Speaker 1: folks I know who this applies to also said something like,
Speaker 1: within two or three days of getting this email that
Speaker 1: we're like, hey, I can give blood again and we're
Speaker 1: very excited about it. If you would like to send
Speaker 1: us a note about this or any other podcast where
Speaker 1: history podcast that I heart radio dot com and we're
Speaker 1: all over social media at miss in History, So you'll
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