When Pop Broke Up With Jazz

NPR STAFF
JANUARY 23, 2015 4:35 PM ET
Writer Ben Yagoda has set out to explain a shift in American popular culture, one that happened in the early 1950s. Before then, songwriters like Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin and Jerome Kern wrote popular songs that achieved a notable artistry, both in lyrics and music. That body of work, at least the best of it, came to be known as the American Songbook.

By the early 1950s the popular hit song had evolved into a work of less artistic ambition. Novelty and simplicity ruled — and sold. What happened? That's the question that Ben Yagoda addresses in his new book, The B-Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song. He spoke about it with NPR's Robert Siegel.

Robert Siegel: The way you tell it, the kind of song that gifted songwriters might write, or try to write, wasn't what the big record companies wanted in the early '50s. Why?

Ben Yagoda: There was a change in popular taste. The soldiers who had come back from World War II didn't seem to be as interested in the more complex, challenging kind of popular song, the more jazz-based song. Sentimental ballads and, yes, novelty numbers, suddenly was much more appealing.

Ben Yagoda teaches journalism at the University of Delaware. Maria Yagoda/Courtesy of Riverhead

You cite an interview that Patti Page, the singer, gave to Metronome in 1948. She said, "You've got to please the people who get up at 8 o'clock in the morning" — which I guess at the time seemed a measure of getting up early. What you're describing, in part, is the separation of jazz music from popular music in America.

Absolutely. And for that period that you were talking about, the Great American Songbook period, there was this amazing unity of great jazz and popular songwriting. The songwriters — Berlin, Porter, Gershwin — understood jazz. And the great improvisers — Lester Young, Benny Carter and so forth — understood those songs and did great improvisations with them. That broke down after the war.

There's someone whom you write about a great deal in the book, who was the most important decision-maker at Columbia Records about which songs would be made into records. His name was Mitch Miller, and 10 years later, he was known by everyone in America because he had a TV show with a male chorus called Sing Along with Mitch.


Mitch Miller, if you're under 50, means nothing. If you're between 50 and 60 or 65 or so, it's this smiling figure with a goatee, leading singalongs on television. But if you've studied or are aware of music history, his importance was far more than that. He was, simply put, the most powerful man in American popular music throughout the 1950s.

read more: http://www.npr.org/2015/01/23/379086600/when-pop-broke-up-with-jazz?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=music