You know a genre of music has become a part of culture when it is a featured night on American Idol. So it is with the American Songbook, a genre of music and a cultural movement that, from the mid-1920s, defined American tastes in music, theatre, movies and fashion for three decades. Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and George Gershwin were its principal writers, and stars such as Ella Fitzgerald, Fred Astaire, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong interpreted their work.
Its power dissipated after the second world war, outperformed by soppy ballads and pseudo-country numbers. Eventually, rock’n’roll took over.
This history is told with vivid detail and passion by cultural critic Ben Yagoda in The B Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Songbook. It explores the cultural, social and economic changes that led to the decline of the Songbook. Yagoda, 60, spoke to Tirdad Derakhshani about music, theatre, the movies and his love for music.
You came of age during one of the most fecund periods of rock’n’roll, yet gravitated to Broadway songs
I was a big Broadway fan as a kid. I grew up in New Rochelle, in New York and we used to go to Broadway shows. It was the last gasp of the traditional musical, and I caught Funny Girl, Fiddler on the Roof, Hello Dolly and a revival of Guys and Dolls with Jerry Orbach as Sky Masterson and Alan King as Nathan Detroit.
That was a real game-changer for me. Of course, when The Beatles came along, like everyone else, I got into them. It wasn’t until college that I became reacquainted with Broadway when a lot of singers who were then popular began singing standards: Randy Newman, Ry Cooder, Leon Redbone.