June 28, 2025 • 41 mins
Tin Pan Alley was an area of New York around the beginning of the 20th Century that served as ground zero for the earliest iterations of the music publishing industry. Learn all about this unique place and time in this classic episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi everyone, It's me Josh and for this week's select,
I've chosen our tinpan Alley episode from May twenty nineteen.
It's one of those topics I knew nothing about but
was pleasantly surprised to find that it's super interesting. It's
about the birth of the music industry and the place
where a lot of great songs that are still really
great today were produced. Hope you enjoy this episode.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles w Chuck Bryant, and
there's Jerry over there.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
And this is stuff you shnow The Superstar Edition, the
old time he Superstar Adition.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Yeah, man, I thought this was super cool.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
It tinpan Alley.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Yeah, this is one of those things where I've I
sort of knew what tinpan alley was. You always have
heard that term thrown around, but I never really really
got it until this episode.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Same here, and it's pretty cool. Like the term tin
pan alley t I N full stop p A n Ali.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
You forgot a second full stop there.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Full stop. I just want to make sure people know
it's not one word like ten pan. Right, it's two words, right,
but that is linguistically speaking, that's a synectic key. What
it is?
Speaker 3 (01:29):
You know what that is, right, I've seen the movie.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Man, that movie. Geez talking about the Charlie Cofflin thing.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Right, sure, yeah, yeah, yeah, senectady, senectic key New York.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Yeah. So a senectic key is it's when a specific
place stands in for a broader term, like Wall Street,
like Wall Street's a real street, but wall Street also
means like the finance industry, right, or Hollywood, Hollywood's a
real place.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Okay, this makes a lot more since then the Charlie
Coffman movie.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Yeah, so ten pan Alley is a bunch of things.
It was a place right in New York City, which
we'll get to in a second, like exactly where, and
it was also referred to sort of the beginnings of
the music publishing industry and a genre as well.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
So it's kind of a lot of things, but it
stems from the root of a ten pan, like a
ten pan or a was a cheap piano. Like if
you had a really cheap piano, you would say it
sounds ten panny.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Right, because like that's what the hammer on the piano's
hitting is ten pans rather than strings.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Yeah, it sounds just like a real tenny tone, like
you're beating on a tenpan. So that's where the term
originally came from. And depending on who you ask, this
area of New York was called tinpan Alley because perhaps
a journalist first wrote about it. All the sounds coming
from the songwriters from these buildings on this one block
sounded like tinpan Alley.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Right, it's no exaggeration to say tinpan Alley. Specifically this
little stretch in New York like a block or so,
maybe less than a block.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Again, it's a block, okay.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Was the place where the American popular music industry was born?
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Yeah, so it's specifically twenty eighth Street between six and Broadway,
kind of between Chelsea and kIPS Bay, a little northwest
of like the flat Iron building.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
Gotcha.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
And it's interesting to think that, like the music, the
beginnings of music distribution wasn't like pre phonograph from pre records.
There was still music distribution, but it was it was sheet.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
Music right right, So I think choke, we should get
back in the way back the ooh and go to
an indeterminate part of the mid nineteenth century in the
United States.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
Let's do it. So, like you said, there's everywhere, there's.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
A lot of it. It's like you said, if you
wanted to hear music, you had basically two choices. You
could go hear it played live somewhere everywhere, from a
barbershop quartet to maybe an orchestra or board right or
you could have a family member who knew how to
(04:23):
play music and buy a piano and have it in
your home. Those were your two ways to hear music
because everywhere there was no such thing as radio.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Let's just let's just say it everybody. Yeah, there was
no radio.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
There wasn't and if you think about it, radio was was.
You know, we take it so much for granted today,
but it was a huge watershed change in the way
that Americans in the world heard their music. You could
just hear it at home being played by professionals like
the most the greatest musicians you've ever heard, just sit
(05:00):
around and listen to it at your home, whereas just
years before, a few years before, you had to listen
to your twelve year old try to bang out some
song on the piano that you just bought and that
was your option, aside from going to hear it live.
And so this whole idea of the music industry being born,
it was basically predicated on two things, Chuck. One was
(05:23):
the fact that pianos were starting to become ubiquitous in
American houses and people were learning how to play those pianos,
so music instruction became kind of widespread. And then secondly,
copyright law started to really solidify in the United States
in the nineteenth century, and so that sheet music became
much more valuable than it was before.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
Yeah, Like, if you can't, like I can't read sheet music,
I learned I can't either. Yeah, I learned to play
guitar by ear, and kind of I guess every friend
I know that's a musician except for a couple learned
by ear. If you came up formally through through high
school band or something like that, or maybe just private
music instruction, then you may be able to read music.
(06:06):
But back in the day, if you could not end
still today, if you could not play by ear, the
only way to do so was through sheet music. And
that was the first commodity in the music business, was
literally just selling sheet music to people, right so it's
hard to wrap your head around now, but that was
the commodity.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
It is hard to wrap your head around.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
But if you think about sheet music is basically the
predecessor to the cassette or the record or the CD
or the MP three, it's the exact same thing. It's
just to hear it, like that is what you went
and bought at the store and then you came home
and played it rather than listening to somebody else playing it.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
Yeah, and like they sold a lot of them, like
the very first hit that tin Panale put out, and
this was a period. I mean, this was an eighteen
eighty one when Wait Till the Clouds Roll By was
put out, So tin Panale generally was or early eighteen
eighties till early nineteen twenties or so I saw.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
Like late nineteen twenties, was it really Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
Yeah, I guess you know, you can never say when
it was dead dead, But in one month in eighteen
eighty one, they sold seventy five thousand copies of sheet
music to Wait Till the Clouds Roll By.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
Right, that's amazing, yeah, because this was it was a
good song and people wanted to hear the song, so
they went and bought the sheet music. Yea, So that
was one thing, right, So there was sheet music. That
was how you got this stuff out. But even before
Wait Till the Clouds Rolled By, which it seems like
was probably America's first number one smash.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Hit yeah pop music.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Prior to that, there was plenty of sheet music to
be sold, but it was a largely like church hymns storing.
It was. There was a lot that were sold for schools.
And like I said, copyright law changed. It allowed tim
panale to develop, and it did so in two ways.
(08:02):
One it like the court started taking copyrights for music
seriously in the second half of the nineteenth century, so
you could actually enforce your copyright against people who were
infringing on it. And then secondly, the courts, the Supreme
Court and specifically said, hey, if you wrote a song
(08:23):
outside of America, when it comes to America it enjoys
you can copyright it in America too, which means that
the music publisher's source of free sheet music, which was
just basically stealing foreign music, printing it out in sheet
music form, and then selling it and not paying any
royalties because it enjoyed no copyright protection, that source dried up,
(08:45):
and so all of a sudden, this American music that
they had to pay for now seemed a lot more
attractive because now they had to pay for the music
generated overseas too. So this is copyright law and the
fact that more and more people were learn need to
play piano, and so you had an actual market four
sheet music. Those two things came together.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
All right, let's take a break. I feel like that's
pretty good setup, okay, and we'll come back and talk
a little bit about who these music publishers were and
how they went about their work early on in the
Tenpen Alley era right after this. All right, So we've
(09:32):
been throwing around the term music publishers a lot, and
that sort of means a different thing now than it
did back then. But back then music publishers some of
them wrote songs, to be sure, but generally they did
not a lot of the early publishers out of Tinpan
Alley had backgrounds as salespeople. So there was a guy
(09:53):
named very successful publisher, name Isidore Witmark. He started out
selling water filters. Another one name Leo Feist, sold corsets.
Another one named Joe Stern and Edward B. Mark sold
neckties and buttons, and a lot of these people, I
guess we should point out too, came over from Europe.
A lot were Jewish, some African American songwriters like they
(10:19):
were minorities kind of for the most part. Early on,
it feels.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
Like right, and they saw a huge opportunity in this
music business that was starting to coalesce, because prior to this,
I mean, there were music publishers, but it was basically
some guy who worked at a printer who had a
friend who could transpose music by ear and they would
just take some song that they heard and turn it
(10:46):
into sheet music and start selling it. Or they worked
at the music store, and the music store basically did
the exact same thing. And so everyone was ripping off
everyone else's songs, and anybody could be a music publisher.
But when those copyrights started to be come and forced,
it became much more valuable to invest in original music
because you could make a lot more money off of it.
(11:08):
So those a lot of those Jewish immigrants and a
lot of the African American songwriters and composers kind of
coalesced into New York. They came from Boston and Detroit
and Atlanta, and Saint Louis and all over the country,
and all those towns lost their publishing houses and they
(11:29):
all moved to New York and they very specifically moved
to this one little stretch on twenty eighth Street and
it became Timpan Alley.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Yeah, And it's really interesting to look at like how
it worked back then and how it sort of mirrored
how like music grew out of that model really and
changed in some ways, but kind of stayed the same
in a lot of ways too. Like you always hear
about music contracts and how terrible they are for rock
musicians or pop musicians, and it was kind kind of
(12:00):
the same way back then. These these publishers got together.
They created this songwriting factory on this block of buildings
through different companies, and they would get they would recruit
songwriters to come in. They had different arrangements. Sometimes they
would just buy it outright from you, including the rights
to change the name of who wrote it. Sometimes they
(12:22):
would have the right to throw one of the other more,
I guess once they had, you know, established themselves another
co author's name on there. But they would just you know, say,
write these songs, write these songs, and we're going to
buy them from you, and we're going to try and
make them pop. Like you couldn't put them on the radio,
so we're going to try and get them popular by
(12:43):
getting them onto vaudeville and on stage and sending not moles,
I guess, but it was almost like early Payola, sending
these performers into vaudeville to sing these songs, to perform
these songs, and people are like, well, that's pretty catchy,
I want that, right.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
That's how they that's how they marketed it, and that
was like the whole thing, Like if you it was
the first time that that music became an industry because
there was almost an assembly line feel to it where
they would have feelers out to find out, like what
people were into as music at the time. One of
the one of the early transitions that tim Panale underwent
(13:22):
was when it started, it was a it was a
factory for churning out like comedic, often deeply racist songs,
lots of ballads, just what you think of as super
old timey songs, right, and then the public started to
get kind of bored with that and they decided that
(13:42):
they kind of liked this ragtime thing that the Scott
Joplin Fella has has started to create and so Tim Panale,
this is classic. Tim Panale went out figured out how
to play rag time, started co opting the ragtime genre
and created pop music. So they took what was a
really difficult kind of music. It's called syncopated rhythm, where
(14:05):
you've got a melody within a rhythm, right, so you
know rag time, right?
Speaker 2 (14:10):
Sure?
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Okay, So they figured out how to take this very
difficult thing and kind of popify it to make it
easy for the audience to play. Because again, here's the thing.
They're not saying, Hey, you're the best of the best
studio musician. We've got this really tough song over here
that sounds great, but it's really tough to play. We
want to pay you to come play it. We're going
(14:32):
to record it and distribute it onto the radio that
didn't exist yet. They had to figure out how to
take difficult songs kind of dumb them down into something
catchy and memorable and importantly easy to play, so that
they could sell that sheet music to local musicians or
those barber shop cortets, or so that the twelve year
old at home could play it for the rest of
(14:53):
their family, and so that is how they kind of
started to take popular music and make it even more popular.
They decided what music was popular based on what what
the what America was starting to get into at the time.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
Yeah, and they would there were these musicians called song pluggers.
So how it would work is a music publisher in
ten Panelle would buy a song or the rights to
a song off of a musician who wrote it, maybe
put their own name on it, and then they would
give that song to a song plugger, who is a
(15:27):
musician who would go and perform this at a music
shop that maybe sold pianos or something like that. And
this was pre radio. How they got the music out
in the public and it was and it was crazy.
These song pluggers got money. Irving Berlin started out as
a song plugger.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Right, And so it's kind of like if you you know,
how you go to a grocery store on a Saturday
and they'll be sitting there giving out samples of something sure,
and you'll say, oh, this this cheese with this cracker
tastes really good. I'm going to go buy this cheese
and these crackers. This is the exact same thing, except
you say, oh, this song sounds really good, I'm going
to buy the sheet music. That's what music pluggers were for.
(16:05):
That's how they got the word up, that's how they
advertised the music was to play them. And then another
way to do it, Chuck, is like you were saying,
they would set vaudeville shows up or musical reviews or
Broadway shows whatever with these popular songs and these songwriters
to help get them out that way too, so the
(16:25):
audiences would go hear these things. So you could hear
them in the music shop, you could hear them at
the theater, you might hear them. Well, it's basically it
is the theater and the music shop where the two
main venues. Unless I'm forgetting one.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Yeah, and they would. That was the plugging. But there
was also booming. So, like I said, you had Irving Berlin,
and like George Gershwin started out as a song plugger,
Al Sherman started out as a song plugger. But if
you wanted to be more aggressive than that, even you
would do something called booming, which is you would buy
like twenty five tickets to a show. You would have
(17:02):
the plugger up there playing the song, and then those
twenty five people were plants basically that already knew the song,
that would sing along to it and then everyone, you know,
the only thing better than hearing a great song for
the first time, And you know, nineteen ten in New
York City is hearing twenty five people around you singing
it and you're thinking, how have I been missing out
(17:24):
on this thing?
Speaker 3 (17:24):
Right?
Speaker 2 (17:25):
And that may be the first time it was ever
performed in public. And it was all just a big,
kind of a big scam.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
It was. It's hilarious though, that that's how you just
look around and suddenly be overcome with fomo. So you'd
be into this new song and run out and buy.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
The sheet music I guess early fomo.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
So there was this process.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
To all this, and like you said, like you could
be like a no name composer who would show up
at tim Panlley with the song that you're trying to sell,
and if it was good, the publisher might buy it,
but like you said, you would get some sort of
terrible contractor they would buy it out right, take your
name off of the composition and put their own name
on there. But they also hired composers I think like
(18:07):
you were saying too, where they were they were they
had they had a few hits under their belts, so
they had a steady gig at the music publisher and
their contract was a little better, but they were not
in creative control for the most part, to where the
music publisher would say, Hey, everybody's into this ragtime, make
me some ragtime songs. Everybody's into this jazz and this
blues stuff. Make me some bluesy kind of stuff that
(18:29):
I can turn around and sell. And the competition was
really fierce among the the in house composers, because just
because you composed a song doesn't mean it was going
to be turned around and transcribed into sheet music and
then people would buy it. Like you, you had to
basically audition your song to see whether it made it
to the next level. And so in tim Panelle, and
(18:50):
this is where it got its name, there would be
you know, no name composers, house composers, vaudeville acts, all
running around playing music from these open windows because there
wasn't air conditioning back then, and so at any given
time you'd walk down Timpanaley and there'd be a dozen
or scores of different songs all being played on these
(19:10):
pianos streaming out of the windows onto the street at
the same time, and that's where that reporter Monroe Rosenfeld,
came up with the idea timpanale. He said, when he
was walking down the street, he was kind of describing.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
What that was like.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
He said, it sounded like, you know, a bunch of
tim pans being struck at once.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Yeah, And this whole area of New York, this one
block just really became like a creative well. There were
vaudeville theaters, there were play theaters, like it was sort
of the earliest incarnation of the theater district before it
moved toward Times Square. And then other parts of the
entertainment industry obviously are drawn to that area. Variety Magazine
(19:49):
that's where it first popped up on that block when
it was called The Clipper. The William Morris Tallon Agency
had an office on that block, and it was just
sort of the you know, after I think Austin, Chicago, Cincinnati,
and I think one other city kind of where the
early seats of the early music industry. It all roundly
(20:09):
landed in New York and just such a creative area
and era.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
It's so neat to think about it too, because that's
happened in places before where if you take a bunch
of creative people and jam them into a small area,
just amazing stuff happens. Like you can do something as
big as birth a genre of music, or like pop music,
which is like an umbrella. It's not even a genre.
(20:35):
There's genres underneath pop music, you know, where something that
big can happen when you get that many creative people
together in one place.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
Should we take another break?
Speaker 3 (20:45):
Sure?
Speaker 2 (20:45):
All right, we'll take another break and we'll talk about
some of these songs these composers in the Great American
Songbook right after this. All right, So there's money being made. Yeah,
(21:09):
Tad a lot of money, even for early on. I mean,
I can't imagine what sheet music costs, but they were
selling so much of it it added up. Irving Berlin,
I mean, he went on to start his own music
publishing business, but early on, when he was just pumping
out tunes. In nineteen seventeen, he made about one hundred
thousand dollars a year in royalties.
Speaker 3 (21:30):
Yeah, that's nineteen seventeen dollars too, right.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
Yeah, And these songs like these are some standards, you know,
it's what's known as the standard American Songbook just like
it's an unofficial designation, but they're considered to be like
the classics of the early early twentieth century. Like, I mean,
we all still know these songs, stuff like Ain't She Sweet?
Speaker 3 (21:55):
I don't know that's Ain't She Sweet?
Speaker 2 (21:58):
You're mucking down the street. What you don't know that song? No?
Speaker 3 (22:03):
That one I've not heard?
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Oh boy, do you know babyface? Yes, got the cutest
little baby face.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Yes, I love that song. It makes me smile.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
By the light of the silvery moon. Give my regards
to Broadway. Sure, happy days are here again over there.
A lot of this had to do with like wartime,
early wartime stuff, right, Sweet Georgia Brown, Take Me out
to the ballgame?
Speaker 1 (22:25):
Yeah, and that in particular, we got to say that
was written by two guys, Jack Norworth and Albert von Tilzer. Yeah,
and they never they'd never seen a ball game before.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
Well maybe that's what they were saying.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
But yeah, the original take me.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
Out to the ballgame because I've never been right exactly,
And they changed that line.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
But that was so tim Panaley like where it's like
everybody's into baseball right now, so let's make a song
about baseball. You two, we've never seen a baseball game.
It doesn't matter. Make it, make me a song, and
that's that's how it Take Me Out to the Ballgame
was formed.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Yeah, And I think under one of the like you
said earlier, some of the early work with like kind
of humorous comedy songs. One that still stands out today,
I believe from that genre is Yes, we Have No Bananas,
which I always thought was kind of funny when I
was a kid.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
It's a little funny, and I guess I still do
if I'm being honest.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
There was also Yeah, you can go down this line.
And there's some pretty substantial songs that were written during
this time, and not all of them were standalone. A
lot of them, like I said earlier, were created for
musical reviews. America the Beautiful was written by Irving Berlin
(23:36):
for a musical review called Yep, Yep, Yep Hank, which
no one.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
Has heard of.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
No one knows that anymore, but.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
It was meant to be performed and produced by Soldiers.
I had an eight show run, but the song, obviously,
America the Beautiful has survived long beyond that because it
became an American standard.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
So like these these vas.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
That were built around to kind of get the song
out there to the public faded away, But the songs
themselves have stood the test of time.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Yeah. Absolutely, I think he pulled it from that production.
Or was it in the original production or did he
pull it?
Speaker 3 (24:16):
I think it was in the original one.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Well, he eventually pulled it out of the production then
because he thought it was too sentimental. And then that
song went on to be the one that everyone remembers.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Yeah, you're right, You're right. I'm sorry it didn't show
up in there. But you also said so. You mentioned
Irving Berlin forming his own publishing house. He was a
quintessential Rags to Rich's story for Tim Panaley, where he
was like a waiter in a cafe, became a song plugger,
one of those guys who plays songs to basically his marketing,
(24:49):
couldn't reacheat music, knew everything by ear, had a friend
transposed the songs he came up with into actual written music.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
That's a pretty get a little facto it that Irving
Berlin couldn't read or write music right.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
And then he became a well known composer. And then
he became such a well known composer. He opened his
own publishing house and then started making one hundred thousand
dollars a year in royalties.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Amazing.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
There was another guy named Charles K. Harris who was
one of the earlier success stories. I think in eighteen
ninety three or two, he had a song called After
the Ball and he just knew it was a gem
because he offered it to a publisher and they offered
him a price for it that he was like, that's
way too low. I'm going to set up my own
publishing house. And he did, and he started selling it
(25:35):
and was making something like twenty five thousand dollars a
week in eighteen nineties money, which is like seven hundred
grand a week. This guy just went from nobody to
seven hundred grand a week. Ended up selling five million
copies of his song After the Ball. And if you
listen to it now, it's not that good. Frankly, it's not,
but bully for him.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
You know, it's no ancient suite. No, Yeah, it's amazing, man.
People like popular music hit the world like, you know,
like a lightning bolt from the beginning.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
Yes, because it was so ultra tailored for the American public.
Like again, they would take Ragtime, which was a Scott
Joplin creation, And Scott Joplin was the son of a slave.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
He was an African American.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Yeah, a lot of people thought he was white.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
Still to this day, a lot of people think he
was white. I think because of his name, Frankly, and
it was the predecessor. Ragtime was the predecessor to jazz.
And it had like a real like feel to a
real soul. Everybody's heard like some of the original ragtime music,
like The Entertainer and Maple Leaf rag And if you
can't immediately bring those to mind, just go to YouTube
(26:47):
and you'll be like, oh, okay, of course I get that.
But the idea that Tim Panlley could just kind of
come along and take this cool, deep soul for music
and opify it basically to make it palatable to audiences,
in particular white audiences who had the most money at
the time. That was why it would why it became
(27:11):
so successful. It was almost dumbed down. It was music
that was dumbed down in a way to make it
appeal to as many people as possible.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
Yeah, or even worse, co opted by white publishers and
producers to be used in minstrel shows. Yeah, this version
of music, this new genre of music that was so
unique in the Harlem Renaissance by Scott Joplin, was co
opted for minstrel shows. So shameful.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
So there's a real debate going on now about the
legacy of Timpanalei in some ways, and some people point
to it and say, look, these guys were churning out
the most eye poppingly racist songs that that America has
ever come up with.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Yeah, they were some, to be sure.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
They were, they were coming, they were selling them to
the masses. And in doing this, because this was the
origin of popular music, they were really effectively perpetuating racial
stereotypes and embedding them more than they ever had been
before because people were not being mass audiences were being
reached like they were with this early sheet music. And
(28:19):
so in this respect, tim panale doesn't deserve to be
revered or respected.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Or designated as a historical landmark. Is the real fight?
Speaker 3 (28:28):
Yeah, that's I guess.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
Recently, as like late last month, I believe, Chuck, there
was a Landmark Commission City Landmark Commission meeting where this
was being debated, right.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Well, yeah, and so like you said, some people were
saying that. On one hand, other people are saying, yeah,
but so many of these were Jewish immigrants, an ethnic minority,
so many of them were African American songwriters, and tin
Panale was also the home to the first black owned
and operated music publishing business in the country.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Yeah, some people are saying, look like, yes, it was
taken in co opted to be popular, but so were
operettas and ballots, like that's just what they did. It
wasn't meant to be offensive to African Americans. And as
a matter of fact, it was basically these Jewish immigrants saying,
I kind of identify with your plight. I want to
preserve and celebrate this and expose this music to as
(29:18):
many people as possible. And that some people pointed this
process in Tinpanaley as the way that the African American
arts became exposed to the larger the larger population of America.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
At the time.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
Yeah, it's pretty interesting.
Speaker 3 (29:36):
Yeah, so that debate's going on.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
That's where the idea of whether or not this area
should be designated as an historic landmark is falling, right.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Yeah, And like you said, it's kind of hard to
pinpoint an actual death date of tinpan Alley, because these
things like that happened gradually over time. But technology, like
it has so many other times, kind of killed the
notion of Tin Panaley, didn't it.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
That's a really good point, right, So the radio, it
was the radio radio killed the old timey sheet music star.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
And then video killed the radio star.
Speaker 3 (30:13):
Right exactly.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
So again, you didn't need to make sheet music any longer,
or you certainly didn't have to learn to play sheet
music at home if you wanted to enjoy music, if
you could just buy a radio.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
Yeah, people quit buying pianos, and yeah, it's kind of sad,
it is said.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
It would be nice if everybody was walking around and
knew how to play a piano, like hotel lounges would
be a lot more interesting, right, Yeah, But that's I mean,
once the radio came along, everybody said, so long sheet music.
I hated you all along, but you were my only option.
Now I can listen to like Benny Goodman and all
of these other cats who are super hip and really
good at what they're doing, and I want to listen
(30:50):
to their music. And not only did technology kill Timpanale
in this sheet music publishing industry, but It also changed
the the genre a little bit. It kind of skewed
it more into swing and some of this yeah big band,
some of the stuff that came out of the thirties
onward or that was really kind of where that transition went.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
Yeah. Have you ever been somewhere where they have a
public piano and seen someone just walk by and sit
down and blow minds?
Speaker 3 (31:22):
Didn't you see Greg Almond do that?
Speaker 2 (31:25):
Oh my god?
Speaker 3 (31:26):
No.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
If you know someone who saw that, please try and
remember who it was, because I need to hear that story.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
I'll try to remember. I can't remember who it was.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
That's pretty amazing.
Speaker 3 (31:36):
Okay, I don't think I'm making this up.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
Let me let me go back through my specific mental
role of DEECKX.
Speaker 3 (31:43):
But have you ever seen that?
Speaker 2 (31:44):
Sure, just like you're I mean, not Greg Almond, but
I've just seen your regular average person sit down at
a piano and like, wow, Someone New York does this
from time to time. They'll have them on a sidewalk
or in a park or something. And in Atlanta they
have one over in Atlantic Station. I've seen people to
it there and it's always just really cool. And that
makes me miss the fact that piano like a lot
(32:06):
more people used to learn piano than they do now.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
I think I would love to know how to play
the piano me too, for that time, for that very reason,
because I'd love to be able to sit down and
just want to play that guy so bad right someday
it's not too late.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
I remember the first time I saw it was at
a student council retreat in high school. There was this one.
You know, all the student councils from the county get
together over the course of a weekend or a week
and do stupid stuff and learn about leadership. But there
was there's always like this one guy on student council
at another school where you're like, man, he didn't seem
(32:41):
like a student council type.
Speaker 3 (32:43):
He seems like he's thirty.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
This guy did, and he was on student council at
some other school. But he was like, you know, had
like the rat T shirt and it was just sort
of a like a dirty metal head.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
The bad boy of student counsel.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
He totally was. And there was a piano and one
of the lobbies of the dormitory is where we stayed
at Barry College in Rome, Georgia, and on the very
last day there were a bunch of people hanging out
in there, and this dude goes over and sits down
and just crushes it. And I remember seeing the girls
in the room and thinking that guy has got it
(33:17):
all going on, right, Like that's the key man.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
And that boy and the rat T shirt grew up
to be Greg allman.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
Have you have you ever been.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
To Siggold's Request Room now or that you and me's
friend Joe McGuinty owns it. He's a co owner of it,
and he plays piano there. It's just like sing along
piano karaoke. Oh wow, and it is amazing.
Speaker 3 (33:41):
I cannot believe you haven't been there yet. You have?
Speaker 2 (33:43):
So does one person play the piano and everyone sings along?
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Joe McGuinty plays and then no, there like like people
can sing along if you want, but it's really one
person going out there and doing karaoke with Joe accompanying
you on the piano.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
Oh okay, well I've done I've done the rock and
roll live band karaoke before. Oh yeah, here in Atlanta,
which is a lot of fun.
Speaker 3 (34:01):
Okay, do you where do you do that?
Speaker 2 (34:04):
Uh? Somewhere in the Highlands. I think the dark Horse.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
Maybe Okay, yeah, that sounds right.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
Yeah. I went for my birthday a couple of years
ago and did Cheap Tricks Surrender and did a pretty
good job, if I may say so.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
Is that Surrender Parentheses? Dream Police?
Speaker 2 (34:19):
Those are two different songs.
Speaker 3 (34:20):
Okay? Is it surrender Parentheses? I Want You to Want Me?
Speaker 2 (34:26):
Yeah, that's the one. Okay, I've heard that song, but
it's funny at the one in Atlanta, there's you know,
the DJ English Nick.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
No, wait, was he on like the radio like radio DJ?
Speaker 2 (34:37):
Yeah? He still is sure English Nick in Atlanta. Yeah,
he hosts it and he is the the the emergency
backup if you're no good, because being bad at karaoke
is no fun, but being bad at live being karaoke
is really no fun for anyone. So he stands back
there and if you're not very good, he's singing along
(34:57):
with you, and he will just give the signal to
sort of do a little upping of his vocals and
lowering of the other vocals.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
Is it like the slice across your neck like that?
Speaker 2 (35:06):
Nah? I mean I think it's just like an eye signal.
I got it, and I remember being nervous. I was like, oh,
man if they bring up English Nick during surrendering and
be mortified. But they didn't, and afterward he gave me
a nod like a good job, buddy.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
Oh oh you got the nod from English Nick.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Yeah, it means a lot.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
I have the opposite story.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
Oh what happened?
Speaker 1 (35:26):
I went to Claremont Lounge to do karaoke years back,
chose to do Darling Nicky.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
Oh interesting.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
In the middle, the karaoke DJ breaks in and goes,
It's like William Shatner singing, isn't.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
It a Oh my god?
Speaker 1 (35:42):
You mean was there supporting dancing but really just hanging
on by your fingernails? You know?
Speaker 2 (35:48):
You got it? Stopped and insulted mid.
Speaker 3 (35:50):
Song, mid song, but I finished buddy good. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
I would literally pay one hundred dollars to have seen that.
Speaker 3 (35:59):
I wager it would have been worth two fifty. Okay,
it was pretty pretty bad.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
Do we have anything else on Tinpan Alley?
Speaker 3 (36:08):
I forgot what we were talking about? Shuck, Well we should.
Speaker 2 (36:11):
We're not going to get into it here. We should
do a full show on as CAP though.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
Yeah, because yet another thing that Irving Berlin did was
create as CAP the American Society of composers and performers.
Speaker 3 (36:23):
Right, I think producers producers.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
Okay, man, I didn't even have it in front of me,
but they basically protect and register copyrights for artists.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
Yeah. It's kind of so convoluted to these days.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
Yeah, yeah, I think it definitely deserves its own thing.
But that was another thing that was born out of
timpan Alley.
Speaker 2 (36:42):
Yeah. And you know what, I am living in the
future now because I have a turntable now, finally again
after many many years of not having one that I
can play wirelessly throughout all the speakers in my home. Oh,
isn't that amazing?
Speaker 3 (36:57):
That is the future for sure, that you can.
Speaker 2 (36:59):
Actually do that, and it sounds great. And now I
just went to the record store for the first time
in a long time yesterday and bought thirteen records. I
traded in probably five hundred CDs to get thirteen records.
He was like, I'll give you one hundred and thirty
bucks for the lot, and I was like, fine.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
Fine, just get these stupid ninety CDs away from me.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
Now. They were great, but it was just I felt
like I should pay him to take all these off
my hands.
Speaker 3 (37:26):
Did you still have the jewel cases?
Speaker 2 (37:28):
Oh yeah, they were all there, something jeweled up and
so yeah, I bought records for the first time. And
I'm going to make that a when we go on
tour now and when I travel, I'm going to make
it a point to go into local record stores again.
Speaker 3 (37:39):
I think that's great.
Speaker 2 (37:40):
I really really had a good time thumbing through records.
It was a lot of fun.
Speaker 3 (37:44):
I'll go with you, text me, yeah, let's do it. Okay.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
I think that's it for timpan Alley, rip Timpanelle. Depending
on your viewpoint, I guess, yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
There needs to be a great I know there was
a movie in the forties called ten pan Alley, but
someone should do a really good look at the early
burgeoning film I'm sorry, movie into almost oh boy, music
industry about ten Penalty.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
Oh yeah, that would be great. There's so many characters involved.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
Just put Hugh Jackman in a Sharknado in it.
Speaker 3 (38:15):
Yep, we're all good.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
And by the way, you got called out for bringing
back bread.
Speaker 3 (38:22):
I did.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
I said in some episode that I think the Diving
Bell episode, that we should bring Bread back, and I
guess that's what the kids all say.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
Now. I didn't realize that, but like at least ten
people emailed and said, yeah, millennials are talking about getting
that bread. Yep, it's like they are.
Speaker 1 (38:37):
I guess so I like to think that I had
absolutely nothing to do with that.
Speaker 2 (38:41):
No, I bet, I bet you were the seed?
Speaker 3 (38:43):
Do you think so? You never know? Man, that'd be cool.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
Before we go to the chuck, I do have one
more thing, well, I have to give a shout out
to what I considered the greatest song to come out
of Timpanaley, and I believe it was an Irving Berlin song.
Yeah it was Let's have another cup of Have.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
You heard this soul? We use that for something, didn't we?
Speaker 1 (39:03):
I don't remember. We probably did because it's prominent in
one of my favorite movies of all time, Paper Moon.
That was a great song. I love that song so much.
If you haven't ever heard that song, go listen to
it because it's one of the most just blindly optimistic
songs of all time and it's about coffee yep and pi. Okay,
now that's it. Now I've got nothing else. If you
(39:26):
want to know more about Tim pan Alley, you can
go read up on it and maybe follow whether it's
going to get designated as in a story.
Speaker 3 (39:33):
Clan mark or not, we'll find out. In the meantime,
it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
So this is just a very sweet email from someone. Hey, guys,
I'm sure you received emails like this all the time,
but I would be remiss if I didn't thank you
for all the wonderful work you do. I've had a
really tough time with mental illness, and there have been
a lot of nights your wonderful podcast staved off panic
attacks or worse. Wow, thank you for keeping me calm
and educated, and thank you for making me feel safe
(40:01):
even in periless circumstances. Thank you for giving me something
to talk about when my depression has kept me in
a fog. Without your massive backlog and seemingly endless supply
of fresh, fascinating subjects, I surely would be lost. Spend
some time researching, and I can truly appreciate just how
much time and energy go into becoming familiar enough with
something to explain it as succinctly as you guys do
(40:24):
your superheroes and rock stars. From the bottom of my heart,
thank you for the wonderful work you do. You have
truly saved me. Kindest and warmest regards Georgia. That is
really lovely, Georgia. If we're ever in a town near you,
you are guests listed.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
Yes, Wow, Chuck, I think that was a really good,
good idea. Thanks a lot, Georgia. That was a very
sweet email. We appreciate it. We're glad we could help
in some small measure. Thank you very much for the kudos.
If you want to send us kudos, we love that.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
Kind of thing, including kudos.
Speaker 3 (40:53):
The candy bar Yeah, I remember those, send us a kudos.
They were great. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
I don't know if somebody send us one if it
would still be so great.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
Are they not around?
Speaker 3 (41:05):
No?
Speaker 1 (41:05):
I think like they would have been manufactured in nineteen
eighty six or something like that.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
I don't keep up with the candy bar scene.
Speaker 3 (41:11):
That's what I'm saying. They're not around anymore.
Speaker 2 (41:13):
Yeah, no, I know.
Speaker 1 (41:14):
Okay, So wow, that was a little sidetrack on kudos,
wasn't that.
Speaker 2 (41:18):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (41:19):
If you want to get in touch with this, you
can go on to stuff youshould know dot com and
find all of our social links there, and you can
also send us an email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio
dot com. You know, Stuff you should Know is a
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
For more podcasts My heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hi everyone, It's me Josh and for this week's select,
I've chosen our tinpan Alley episode from May twenty nineteen.
It's one of those topics I knew nothing about but
was pleasantly surprised to find that it's super interesting. It's
about the birth of the music industry and the place
where a lot of great songs that are still really
great today were produced. Hope you enjoy this episode.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles w Chuck Bryant, and
there's Jerry over there.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
And this is stuff you shnow The Superstar Edition, the
old time he Superstar Adition.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Yeah, man, I thought this was super cool.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
It tinpan Alley.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Yeah, this is one of those things where I've I
sort of knew what tinpan alley was. You always have
heard that term thrown around, but I never really really
got it until this episode.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Same here, and it's pretty cool. Like the term tin
pan alley t I N full stop p A n Ali.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
You forgot a second full stop there.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Full stop. I just want to make sure people know
it's not one word like ten pan. Right, it's two words, right,
but that is linguistically speaking, that's a synectic key. What
it is?
Speaker 3 (01:29):
You know what that is, right, I've seen the movie.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Man, that movie. Geez talking about the Charlie Cofflin thing.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Right, sure, yeah, yeah, yeah, senectady, senectic key New York.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Yeah. So a senectic key is it's when a specific
place stands in for a broader term, like Wall Street,
like Wall Street's a real street, but wall Street also
means like the finance industry, right, or Hollywood, Hollywood's a
real place.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Okay, this makes a lot more since then the Charlie
Coffman movie.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Yeah, so ten pan Alley is a bunch of things.
It was a place right in New York City, which
we'll get to in a second, like exactly where, and
it was also referred to sort of the beginnings of
the music publishing industry and a genre as well.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
So it's kind of a lot of things, but it
stems from the root of a ten pan, like a
ten pan or a was a cheap piano. Like if
you had a really cheap piano, you would say it
sounds ten panny.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Right, because like that's what the hammer on the piano's
hitting is ten pans rather than strings.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Yeah, it sounds just like a real tenny tone, like
you're beating on a tenpan. So that's where the term
originally came from. And depending on who you ask, this
area of New York was called tinpan Alley because perhaps
a journalist first wrote about it. All the sounds coming
from the songwriters from these buildings on this one block
sounded like tinpan Alley.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Right, it's no exaggeration to say tinpan Alley. Specifically this
little stretch in New York like a block or so,
maybe less than a block.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Again, it's a block, okay.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Was the place where the American popular music industry was born?
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Yeah, so it's specifically twenty eighth Street between six and Broadway,
kind of between Chelsea and kIPS Bay, a little northwest
of like the flat Iron building.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
Gotcha.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
And it's interesting to think that, like the music, the
beginnings of music distribution wasn't like pre phonograph from pre records.
There was still music distribution, but it was it was sheet.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
Music right right, So I think choke, we should get
back in the way back the ooh and go to
an indeterminate part of the mid nineteenth century in the
United States.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
Let's do it. So, like you said, there's everywhere, there's.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
A lot of it. It's like you said, if you
wanted to hear music, you had basically two choices. You
could go hear it played live somewhere everywhere, from a
barbershop quartet to maybe an orchestra or board right or
you could have a family member who knew how to
(04:23):
play music and buy a piano and have it in
your home. Those were your two ways to hear music
because everywhere there was no such thing as radio.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Let's just let's just say it everybody. Yeah, there was
no radio.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
There wasn't and if you think about it, radio was was.
You know, we take it so much for granted today,
but it was a huge watershed change in the way
that Americans in the world heard their music. You could
just hear it at home being played by professionals like
the most the greatest musicians you've ever heard, just sit
(05:00):
around and listen to it at your home, whereas just
years before, a few years before, you had to listen
to your twelve year old try to bang out some
song on the piano that you just bought and that
was your option, aside from going to hear it live.
And so this whole idea of the music industry being born,
it was basically predicated on two things, Chuck. One was
(05:23):
the fact that pianos were starting to become ubiquitous in
American houses and people were learning how to play those pianos,
so music instruction became kind of widespread. And then secondly,
copyright law started to really solidify in the United States
in the nineteenth century, and so that sheet music became
much more valuable than it was before.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
Yeah, Like, if you can't, like I can't read sheet music,
I learned I can't either. Yeah, I learned to play
guitar by ear, and kind of I guess every friend
I know that's a musician except for a couple learned
by ear. If you came up formally through through high
school band or something like that, or maybe just private
music instruction, then you may be able to read music.
(06:06):
But back in the day, if you could not end
still today, if you could not play by ear, the
only way to do so was through sheet music. And
that was the first commodity in the music business, was
literally just selling sheet music to people, right so it's
hard to wrap your head around now, but that was
the commodity.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
It is hard to wrap your head around.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
But if you think about sheet music is basically the
predecessor to the cassette or the record or the CD
or the MP three, it's the exact same thing. It's
just to hear it, like that is what you went
and bought at the store and then you came home
and played it rather than listening to somebody else playing it.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
Yeah, and like they sold a lot of them, like
the very first hit that tin Panale put out, and
this was a period. I mean, this was an eighteen
eighty one when Wait Till the Clouds Roll By was
put out, So tin Panale generally was or early eighteen
eighties till early nineteen twenties or so I saw.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
Like late nineteen twenties, was it really Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
Yeah, I guess you know, you can never say when
it was dead dead, But in one month in eighteen
eighty one, they sold seventy five thousand copies of sheet
music to Wait Till the Clouds Roll By.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
Right, that's amazing, yeah, because this was it was a
good song and people wanted to hear the song, so
they went and bought the sheet music. Yea, So that
was one thing, right, So there was sheet music. That
was how you got this stuff out. But even before
Wait Till the Clouds Rolled By, which it seems like
was probably America's first number one smash.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Hit yeah pop music.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Prior to that, there was plenty of sheet music to
be sold, but it was a largely like church hymns storing.
It was. There was a lot that were sold for schools.
And like I said, copyright law changed. It allowed tim
panale to develop, and it did so in two ways.
(08:02):
One it like the court started taking copyrights for music
seriously in the second half of the nineteenth century, so
you could actually enforce your copyright against people who were
infringing on it. And then secondly, the courts, the Supreme
Court and specifically said, hey, if you wrote a song
(08:23):
outside of America, when it comes to America it enjoys
you can copyright it in America too, which means that
the music publisher's source of free sheet music, which was
just basically stealing foreign music, printing it out in sheet
music form, and then selling it and not paying any
royalties because it enjoyed no copyright protection, that source dried up,
(08:45):
and so all of a sudden, this American music that
they had to pay for now seemed a lot more
attractive because now they had to pay for the music
generated overseas too. So this is copyright law and the
fact that more and more people were learn need to
play piano, and so you had an actual market four
sheet music. Those two things came together.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
All right, let's take a break. I feel like that's
pretty good setup, okay, and we'll come back and talk
a little bit about who these music publishers were and
how they went about their work early on in the
Tenpen Alley era right after this. All right, So we've
(09:32):
been throwing around the term music publishers a lot, and
that sort of means a different thing now than it
did back then. But back then music publishers some of
them wrote songs, to be sure, but generally they did
not a lot of the early publishers out of Tinpan
Alley had backgrounds as salespeople. So there was a guy
(09:53):
named very successful publisher, name Isidore Witmark. He started out
selling water filters. Another one name Leo Feist, sold corsets.
Another one named Joe Stern and Edward B. Mark sold
neckties and buttons, and a lot of these people, I
guess we should point out too, came over from Europe.
A lot were Jewish, some African American songwriters like they
(10:19):
were minorities kind of for the most part. Early on,
it feels.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
Like right, and they saw a huge opportunity in this
music business that was starting to coalesce, because prior to this,
I mean, there were music publishers, but it was basically
some guy who worked at a printer who had a
friend who could transpose music by ear and they would
just take some song that they heard and turn it
(10:46):
into sheet music and start selling it. Or they worked
at the music store, and the music store basically did
the exact same thing. And so everyone was ripping off
everyone else's songs, and anybody could be a music publisher.
But when those copyrights started to be come and forced,
it became much more valuable to invest in original music
because you could make a lot more money off of it.
(11:08):
So those a lot of those Jewish immigrants and a
lot of the African American songwriters and composers kind of
coalesced into New York. They came from Boston and Detroit
and Atlanta, and Saint Louis and all over the country,
and all those towns lost their publishing houses and they
(11:29):
all moved to New York and they very specifically moved
to this one little stretch on twenty eighth Street and
it became Timpan Alley.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Yeah, And it's really interesting to look at like how
it worked back then and how it sort of mirrored
how like music grew out of that model really and
changed in some ways, but kind of stayed the same
in a lot of ways too. Like you always hear
about music contracts and how terrible they are for rock
musicians or pop musicians, and it was kind kind of
(12:00):
the same way back then. These these publishers got together.
They created this songwriting factory on this block of buildings
through different companies, and they would get they would recruit
songwriters to come in. They had different arrangements. Sometimes they
would just buy it outright from you, including the rights
to change the name of who wrote it. Sometimes they
(12:22):
would have the right to throw one of the other more,
I guess once they had, you know, established themselves another
co author's name on there. But they would just you know, say,
write these songs, write these songs, and we're going to
buy them from you, and we're going to try and
make them pop. Like you couldn't put them on the radio,
so we're going to try and get them popular by
(12:43):
getting them onto vaudeville and on stage and sending not moles,
I guess, but it was almost like early Payola, sending
these performers into vaudeville to sing these songs, to perform
these songs, and people are like, well, that's pretty catchy,
I want that, right.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
That's how they that's how they marketed it, and that
was like the whole thing, Like if you it was
the first time that that music became an industry because
there was almost an assembly line feel to it where
they would have feelers out to find out, like what
people were into as music at the time. One of
the one of the early transitions that tim Panale underwent
(13:22):
was when it started, it was a it was a
factory for churning out like comedic, often deeply racist songs,
lots of ballads, just what you think of as super
old timey songs, right, and then the public started to
get kind of bored with that and they decided that
(13:42):
they kind of liked this ragtime thing that the Scott
Joplin Fella has has started to create and so Tim Panale,
this is classic. Tim Panale went out figured out how
to play rag time, started co opting the ragtime genre
and created pop music. So they took what was a
really difficult kind of music. It's called syncopated rhythm, where
(14:05):
you've got a melody within a rhythm, right, so you
know rag time, right?
Speaker 2 (14:10):
Sure?
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Okay, So they figured out how to take this very
difficult thing and kind of popify it to make it
easy for the audience to play. Because again, here's the thing.
They're not saying, Hey, you're the best of the best
studio musician. We've got this really tough song over here
that sounds great, but it's really tough to play. We
want to pay you to come play it. We're going
(14:32):
to record it and distribute it onto the radio that
didn't exist yet. They had to figure out how to
take difficult songs kind of dumb them down into something
catchy and memorable and importantly easy to play, so that
they could sell that sheet music to local musicians or
those barber shop cortets, or so that the twelve year
old at home could play it for the rest of
(14:53):
their family, and so that is how they kind of
started to take popular music and make it even more popular.
They decided what music was popular based on what what
the what America was starting to get into at the time.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
Yeah, and they would there were these musicians called song pluggers.
So how it would work is a music publisher in
ten Panelle would buy a song or the rights to
a song off of a musician who wrote it, maybe
put their own name on it, and then they would
give that song to a song plugger, who is a
(15:27):
musician who would go and perform this at a music
shop that maybe sold pianos or something like that. And
this was pre radio. How they got the music out
in the public and it was and it was crazy.
These song pluggers got money. Irving Berlin started out as
a song plugger.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Right, And so it's kind of like if you you know,
how you go to a grocery store on a Saturday
and they'll be sitting there giving out samples of something sure,
and you'll say, oh, this this cheese with this cracker
tastes really good. I'm going to go buy this cheese
and these crackers. This is the exact same thing, except
you say, oh, this song sounds really good, I'm going
to buy the sheet music. That's what music pluggers were for.
(16:05):
That's how they got the word up, that's how they
advertised the music was to play them. And then another
way to do it, Chuck, is like you were saying,
they would set vaudeville shows up or musical reviews or
Broadway shows whatever with these popular songs and these songwriters
to help get them out that way too, so the
(16:25):
audiences would go hear these things. So you could hear
them in the music shop, you could hear them at
the theater, you might hear them. Well, it's basically it
is the theater and the music shop where the two
main venues. Unless I'm forgetting one.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Yeah, and they would. That was the plugging. But there
was also booming. So, like I said, you had Irving Berlin,
and like George Gershwin started out as a song plugger,
Al Sherman started out as a song plugger. But if
you wanted to be more aggressive than that, even you
would do something called booming, which is you would buy
like twenty five tickets to a show. You would have
(17:02):
the plugger up there playing the song, and then those
twenty five people were plants basically that already knew the song,
that would sing along to it and then everyone, you know,
the only thing better than hearing a great song for
the first time, And you know, nineteen ten in New
York City is hearing twenty five people around you singing
it and you're thinking, how have I been missing out
(17:24):
on this thing?
Speaker 3 (17:24):
Right?
Speaker 2 (17:25):
And that may be the first time it was ever
performed in public. And it was all just a big,
kind of a big scam.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
It was. It's hilarious though, that that's how you just
look around and suddenly be overcome with fomo. So you'd
be into this new song and run out and buy.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
The sheet music I guess early fomo.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
So there was this process.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
To all this, and like you said, like you could
be like a no name composer who would show up
at tim Panlley with the song that you're trying to sell,
and if it was good, the publisher might buy it,
but like you said, you would get some sort of
terrible contractor they would buy it out right, take your
name off of the composition and put their own name
on there. But they also hired composers I think like
(18:07):
you were saying too, where they were they were they
had they had a few hits under their belts, so
they had a steady gig at the music publisher and
their contract was a little better, but they were not
in creative control for the most part, to where the
music publisher would say, Hey, everybody's into this ragtime, make
me some ragtime songs. Everybody's into this jazz and this
blues stuff. Make me some bluesy kind of stuff that
(18:29):
I can turn around and sell. And the competition was
really fierce among the the in house composers, because just
because you composed a song doesn't mean it was going
to be turned around and transcribed into sheet music and
then people would buy it. Like you, you had to
basically audition your song to see whether it made it
to the next level. And so in tim Panelle, and
(18:50):
this is where it got its name, there would be
you know, no name composers, house composers, vaudeville acts, all
running around playing music from these open windows because there
wasn't air conditioning back then, and so at any given
time you'd walk down Timpanaley and there'd be a dozen
or scores of different songs all being played on these
(19:10):
pianos streaming out of the windows onto the street at
the same time, and that's where that reporter Monroe Rosenfeld,
came up with the idea timpanale. He said, when he
was walking down the street, he was kind of describing.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
What that was like.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
He said, it sounded like, you know, a bunch of
tim pans being struck at once.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Yeah, And this whole area of New York, this one
block just really became like a creative well. There were
vaudeville theaters, there were play theaters, like it was sort
of the earliest incarnation of the theater district before it
moved toward Times Square. And then other parts of the
entertainment industry obviously are drawn to that area. Variety Magazine
(19:49):
that's where it first popped up on that block when
it was called The Clipper. The William Morris Tallon Agency
had an office on that block, and it was just
sort of the you know, after I think Austin, Chicago, Cincinnati,
and I think one other city kind of where the
early seats of the early music industry. It all roundly
(20:09):
landed in New York and just such a creative area
and era.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
It's so neat to think about it too, because that's
happened in places before where if you take a bunch
of creative people and jam them into a small area,
just amazing stuff happens. Like you can do something as
big as birth a genre of music, or like pop music,
which is like an umbrella. It's not even a genre.
(20:35):
There's genres underneath pop music, you know, where something that
big can happen when you get that many creative people
together in one place.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
Should we take another break?
Speaker 3 (20:45):
Sure?
Speaker 2 (20:45):
All right, we'll take another break and we'll talk about
some of these songs these composers in the Great American
Songbook right after this. All right, So there's money being made. Yeah,
(21:09):
Tad a lot of money, even for early on. I mean,
I can't imagine what sheet music costs, but they were
selling so much of it it added up. Irving Berlin,
I mean, he went on to start his own music
publishing business, but early on, when he was just pumping
out tunes. In nineteen seventeen, he made about one hundred
thousand dollars a year in royalties.
Speaker 3 (21:30):
Yeah, that's nineteen seventeen dollars too, right.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
Yeah, And these songs like these are some standards, you know,
it's what's known as the standard American Songbook just like
it's an unofficial designation, but they're considered to be like
the classics of the early early twentieth century. Like, I mean,
we all still know these songs, stuff like Ain't She Sweet?
Speaker 3 (21:55):
I don't know that's Ain't She Sweet?
Speaker 2 (21:58):
You're mucking down the street. What you don't know that song? No?
Speaker 3 (22:03):
That one I've not heard?
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Oh boy, do you know babyface? Yes, got the cutest
little baby face.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Yes, I love that song. It makes me smile.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
By the light of the silvery moon. Give my regards
to Broadway. Sure, happy days are here again over there.
A lot of this had to do with like wartime,
early wartime stuff, right, Sweet Georgia Brown, Take Me out
to the ballgame?
Speaker 1 (22:25):
Yeah, and that in particular, we got to say that
was written by two guys, Jack Norworth and Albert von Tilzer. Yeah,
and they never they'd never seen a ball game before.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
Well maybe that's what they were saying.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
But yeah, the original take me.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
Out to the ballgame because I've never been right exactly,
And they changed that line.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
But that was so tim Panaley like where it's like
everybody's into baseball right now, so let's make a song
about baseball. You two, we've never seen a baseball game.
It doesn't matter. Make it, make me a song, and
that's that's how it Take Me Out to the Ballgame
was formed.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Yeah, And I think under one of the like you
said earlier, some of the early work with like kind
of humorous comedy songs. One that still stands out today,
I believe from that genre is Yes, we Have No Bananas,
which I always thought was kind of funny when I
was a kid.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
It's a little funny, and I guess I still do
if I'm being honest.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
There was also Yeah, you can go down this line.
And there's some pretty substantial songs that were written during
this time, and not all of them were standalone. A
lot of them, like I said earlier, were created for
musical reviews. America the Beautiful was written by Irving Berlin
(23:36):
for a musical review called Yep, Yep, Yep Hank, which
no one.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
Has heard of.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
No one knows that anymore, but.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
It was meant to be performed and produced by Soldiers.
I had an eight show run, but the song, obviously,
America the Beautiful has survived long beyond that because it
became an American standard.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
So like these these vas.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
That were built around to kind of get the song
out there to the public faded away, But the songs
themselves have stood the test of time.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Yeah. Absolutely, I think he pulled it from that production.
Or was it in the original production or did he
pull it?
Speaker 3 (24:16):
I think it was in the original one.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Well, he eventually pulled it out of the production then
because he thought it was too sentimental. And then that
song went on to be the one that everyone remembers.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Yeah, you're right, You're right. I'm sorry it didn't show
up in there. But you also said so. You mentioned
Irving Berlin forming his own publishing house. He was a
quintessential Rags to Rich's story for Tim Panaley, where he
was like a waiter in a cafe, became a song plugger,
one of those guys who plays songs to basically his marketing,
(24:49):
couldn't reacheat music, knew everything by ear, had a friend
transposed the songs he came up with into actual written music.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
That's a pretty get a little facto it that Irving
Berlin couldn't read or write music right.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
And then he became a well known composer. And then
he became such a well known composer. He opened his
own publishing house and then started making one hundred thousand
dollars a year in royalties.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Amazing.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
There was another guy named Charles K. Harris who was
one of the earlier success stories. I think in eighteen
ninety three or two, he had a song called After
the Ball and he just knew it was a gem
because he offered it to a publisher and they offered
him a price for it that he was like, that's
way too low. I'm going to set up my own
publishing house. And he did, and he started selling it
(25:35):
and was making something like twenty five thousand dollars a
week in eighteen nineties money, which is like seven hundred
grand a week. This guy just went from nobody to
seven hundred grand a week. Ended up selling five million
copies of his song After the Ball. And if you
listen to it now, it's not that good. Frankly, it's not,
but bully for him.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
You know, it's no ancient suite. No, Yeah, it's amazing, man.
People like popular music hit the world like, you know,
like a lightning bolt from the beginning.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
Yes, because it was so ultra tailored for the American public.
Like again, they would take Ragtime, which was a Scott
Joplin creation, And Scott Joplin was the son of a slave.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
He was an African American.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Yeah, a lot of people thought he was white.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
Still to this day, a lot of people think he
was white. I think because of his name, Frankly, and
it was the predecessor. Ragtime was the predecessor to jazz.
And it had like a real like feel to a
real soul. Everybody's heard like some of the original ragtime music,
like The Entertainer and Maple Leaf rag And if you
can't immediately bring those to mind, just go to YouTube
(26:47):
and you'll be like, oh, okay, of course I get that.
But the idea that Tim Panlley could just kind of
come along and take this cool, deep soul for music
and opify it basically to make it palatable to audiences,
in particular white audiences who had the most money at
the time. That was why it would why it became
(27:11):
so successful. It was almost dumbed down. It was music
that was dumbed down in a way to make it
appeal to as many people as possible.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
Yeah, or even worse, co opted by white publishers and
producers to be used in minstrel shows. Yeah, this version
of music, this new genre of music that was so
unique in the Harlem Renaissance by Scott Joplin, was co
opted for minstrel shows. So shameful.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
So there's a real debate going on now about the
legacy of Timpanalei in some ways, and some people point
to it and say, look, these guys were churning out
the most eye poppingly racist songs that that America has
ever come up with.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Yeah, they were some, to be sure.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
They were, they were coming, they were selling them to
the masses. And in doing this, because this was the
origin of popular music, they were really effectively perpetuating racial
stereotypes and embedding them more than they ever had been
before because people were not being mass audiences were being
reached like they were with this early sheet music. And
(28:19):
so in this respect, tim panale doesn't deserve to be
revered or respected.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Or designated as a historical landmark. Is the real fight?
Speaker 3 (28:28):
Yeah, that's I guess.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
Recently, as like late last month, I believe, Chuck, there
was a Landmark Commission City Landmark Commission meeting where this
was being debated, right.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Well, yeah, and so like you said, some people were
saying that. On one hand, other people are saying, yeah,
but so many of these were Jewish immigrants, an ethnic minority,
so many of them were African American songwriters, and tin
Panale was also the home to the first black owned
and operated music publishing business in the country.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Yeah, some people are saying, look like, yes, it was
taken in co opted to be popular, but so were
operettas and ballots, like that's just what they did. It
wasn't meant to be offensive to African Americans. And as
a matter of fact, it was basically these Jewish immigrants saying,
I kind of identify with your plight. I want to
preserve and celebrate this and expose this music to as
(29:18):
many people as possible. And that some people pointed this
process in Tinpanaley as the way that the African American
arts became exposed to the larger the larger population of America.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
At the time.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
Yeah, it's pretty interesting.
Speaker 3 (29:36):
Yeah, so that debate's going on.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
That's where the idea of whether or not this area
should be designated as an historic landmark is falling, right.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Yeah, And like you said, it's kind of hard to
pinpoint an actual death date of tinpan Alley, because these
things like that happened gradually over time. But technology, like
it has so many other times, kind of killed the
notion of Tin Panaley, didn't it.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
That's a really good point, right, So the radio, it
was the radio radio killed the old timey sheet music star.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
And then video killed the radio star.
Speaker 3 (30:13):
Right exactly.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
So again, you didn't need to make sheet music any longer,
or you certainly didn't have to learn to play sheet
music at home if you wanted to enjoy music, if
you could just buy a radio.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
Yeah, people quit buying pianos, and yeah, it's kind of sad,
it is said.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
It would be nice if everybody was walking around and
knew how to play a piano, like hotel lounges would
be a lot more interesting, right, Yeah, But that's I mean,
once the radio came along, everybody said, so long sheet music.
I hated you all along, but you were my only option.
Now I can listen to like Benny Goodman and all
of these other cats who are super hip and really
good at what they're doing, and I want to listen
(30:50):
to their music. And not only did technology kill Timpanale
in this sheet music publishing industry, but It also changed
the the genre a little bit. It kind of skewed
it more into swing and some of this yeah big band,
some of the stuff that came out of the thirties
onward or that was really kind of where that transition went.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
Yeah. Have you ever been somewhere where they have a
public piano and seen someone just walk by and sit
down and blow minds?
Speaker 3 (31:22):
Didn't you see Greg Almond do that?
Speaker 2 (31:25):
Oh my god?
Speaker 3 (31:26):
No.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
If you know someone who saw that, please try and
remember who it was, because I need to hear that story.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
I'll try to remember. I can't remember who it was.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
That's pretty amazing.
Speaker 3 (31:36):
Okay, I don't think I'm making this up.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
Let me let me go back through my specific mental
role of DEECKX.
Speaker 3 (31:43):
But have you ever seen that?
Speaker 2 (31:44):
Sure, just like you're I mean, not Greg Almond, but
I've just seen your regular average person sit down at
a piano and like, wow, Someone New York does this
from time to time. They'll have them on a sidewalk
or in a park or something. And in Atlanta they
have one over in Atlantic Station. I've seen people to
it there and it's always just really cool. And that
makes me miss the fact that piano like a lot
(32:06):
more people used to learn piano than they do now.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
I think I would love to know how to play
the piano me too, for that time, for that very reason,
because I'd love to be able to sit down and
just want to play that guy so bad right someday
it's not too late.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
I remember the first time I saw it was at
a student council retreat in high school. There was this one.
You know, all the student councils from the county get
together over the course of a weekend or a week
and do stupid stuff and learn about leadership. But there
was there's always like this one guy on student council
at another school where you're like, man, he didn't seem
(32:41):
like a student council type.
Speaker 3 (32:43):
He seems like he's thirty.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
This guy did, and he was on student council at
some other school. But he was like, you know, had
like the rat T shirt and it was just sort
of a like a dirty metal head.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
The bad boy of student counsel.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
He totally was. And there was a piano and one
of the lobbies of the dormitory is where we stayed
at Barry College in Rome, Georgia, and on the very
last day there were a bunch of people hanging out
in there, and this dude goes over and sits down
and just crushes it. And I remember seeing the girls
in the room and thinking that guy has got it
(33:17):
all going on, right, Like that's the key man.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
And that boy and the rat T shirt grew up
to be Greg allman.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
Have you have you ever been.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
To Siggold's Request Room now or that you and me's
friend Joe McGuinty owns it. He's a co owner of it,
and he plays piano there. It's just like sing along
piano karaoke. Oh wow, and it is amazing.
Speaker 3 (33:41):
I cannot believe you haven't been there yet. You have?
Speaker 2 (33:43):
So does one person play the piano and everyone sings along?
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Joe McGuinty plays and then no, there like like people
can sing along if you want, but it's really one
person going out there and doing karaoke with Joe accompanying
you on the piano.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
Oh okay, well I've done I've done the rock and
roll live band karaoke before. Oh yeah, here in Atlanta,
which is a lot of fun.
Speaker 3 (34:01):
Okay, do you where do you do that?
Speaker 2 (34:04):
Uh? Somewhere in the Highlands. I think the dark Horse.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
Maybe Okay, yeah, that sounds right.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
Yeah. I went for my birthday a couple of years
ago and did Cheap Tricks Surrender and did a pretty
good job, if I may say so.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
Is that Surrender Parentheses? Dream Police?
Speaker 2 (34:19):
Those are two different songs.
Speaker 3 (34:20):
Okay? Is it surrender Parentheses? I Want You to Want Me?
Speaker 2 (34:26):
Yeah, that's the one. Okay, I've heard that song, but
it's funny at the one in Atlanta, there's you know,
the DJ English Nick.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
No, wait, was he on like the radio like radio DJ?
Speaker 2 (34:37):
Yeah? He still is sure English Nick in Atlanta. Yeah,
he hosts it and he is the the the emergency
backup if you're no good, because being bad at karaoke
is no fun, but being bad at live being karaoke
is really no fun for anyone. So he stands back
there and if you're not very good, he's singing along
(34:57):
with you, and he will just give the signal to
sort of do a little upping of his vocals and
lowering of the other vocals.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
Is it like the slice across your neck like that?
Speaker 2 (35:06):
Nah? I mean I think it's just like an eye signal.
I got it, and I remember being nervous. I was like, oh,
man if they bring up English Nick during surrendering and
be mortified. But they didn't, and afterward he gave me
a nod like a good job, buddy.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
Oh oh you got the nod from English Nick.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Yeah, it means a lot.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
I have the opposite story.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
Oh what happened?
Speaker 1 (35:26):
I went to Claremont Lounge to do karaoke years back,
chose to do Darling Nicky.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
Oh interesting.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
In the middle, the karaoke DJ breaks in and goes,
It's like William Shatner singing, isn't.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
It a Oh my god?
Speaker 1 (35:42):
You mean was there supporting dancing but really just hanging
on by your fingernails? You know?
Speaker 2 (35:48):
You got it? Stopped and insulted mid.
Speaker 3 (35:50):
Song, mid song, but I finished buddy good. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
I would literally pay one hundred dollars to have seen that.
Speaker 3 (35:59):
I wager it would have been worth two fifty. Okay,
it was pretty pretty bad.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
Do we have anything else on Tinpan Alley?
Speaker 3 (36:08):
I forgot what we were talking about? Shuck, Well we should.
Speaker 2 (36:11):
We're not going to get into it here. We should
do a full show on as CAP though.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
Yeah, because yet another thing that Irving Berlin did was
create as CAP the American Society of composers and performers.
Speaker 3 (36:23):
Right, I think producers producers.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
Okay, man, I didn't even have it in front of me,
but they basically protect and register copyrights for artists.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
Yeah. It's kind of so convoluted to these days.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
Yeah, yeah, I think it definitely deserves its own thing.
But that was another thing that was born out of
timpan Alley.
Speaker 2 (36:42):
Yeah. And you know what, I am living in the
future now because I have a turntable now, finally again
after many many years of not having one that I
can play wirelessly throughout all the speakers in my home. Oh,
isn't that amazing?
Speaker 3 (36:57):
That is the future for sure, that you can.
Speaker 2 (36:59):
Actually do that, and it sounds great. And now I
just went to the record store for the first time
in a long time yesterday and bought thirteen records. I
traded in probably five hundred CDs to get thirteen records.
He was like, I'll give you one hundred and thirty
bucks for the lot, and I was like, fine.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
Fine, just get these stupid ninety CDs away from me.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
Now. They were great, but it was just I felt
like I should pay him to take all these off
my hands.
Speaker 3 (37:26):
Did you still have the jewel cases?
Speaker 2 (37:28):
Oh yeah, they were all there, something jeweled up and
so yeah, I bought records for the first time. And
I'm going to make that a when we go on
tour now and when I travel, I'm going to make
it a point to go into local record stores again.
Speaker 3 (37:39):
I think that's great.
Speaker 2 (37:40):
I really really had a good time thumbing through records.
It was a lot of fun.
Speaker 3 (37:44):
I'll go with you, text me, yeah, let's do it. Okay.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
I think that's it for timpan Alley, rip Timpanelle. Depending
on your viewpoint, I guess, yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
There needs to be a great I know there was
a movie in the forties called ten pan Alley, but
someone should do a really good look at the early
burgeoning film I'm sorry, movie into almost oh boy, music
industry about ten Penalty.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
Oh yeah, that would be great. There's so many characters involved.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
Just put Hugh Jackman in a Sharknado in it.
Speaker 3 (38:15):
Yep, we're all good.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
And by the way, you got called out for bringing
back bread.
Speaker 3 (38:22):
I did.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
I said in some episode that I think the Diving
Bell episode, that we should bring Bread back, and I
guess that's what the kids all say.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
Now. I didn't realize that, but like at least ten
people emailed and said, yeah, millennials are talking about getting
that bread. Yep, it's like they are.
Speaker 1 (38:37):
I guess so I like to think that I had
absolutely nothing to do with that.
Speaker 2 (38:41):
No, I bet, I bet you were the seed?
Speaker 3 (38:43):
Do you think so? You never know? Man, that'd be cool.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
Before we go to the chuck, I do have one
more thing, well, I have to give a shout out
to what I considered the greatest song to come out
of Timpanaley, and I believe it was an Irving Berlin song.
Yeah it was Let's have another cup of Have.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
You heard this soul? We use that for something, didn't we?
Speaker 1 (39:03):
I don't remember. We probably did because it's prominent in
one of my favorite movies of all time, Paper Moon.
That was a great song. I love that song so much.
If you haven't ever heard that song, go listen to
it because it's one of the most just blindly optimistic
songs of all time and it's about coffee yep and pi. Okay,
now that's it. Now I've got nothing else. If you
(39:26):
want to know more about Tim pan Alley, you can
go read up on it and maybe follow whether it's
going to get designated as in a story.
Speaker 3 (39:33):
Clan mark or not, we'll find out. In the meantime,
it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
So this is just a very sweet email from someone. Hey, guys,
I'm sure you received emails like this all the time,
but I would be remiss if I didn't thank you
for all the wonderful work you do. I've had a
really tough time with mental illness, and there have been
a lot of nights your wonderful podcast staved off panic
attacks or worse. Wow, thank you for keeping me calm
and educated, and thank you for making me feel safe
(40:01):
even in periless circumstances. Thank you for giving me something
to talk about when my depression has kept me in
a fog. Without your massive backlog and seemingly endless supply
of fresh, fascinating subjects, I surely would be lost. Spend
some time researching, and I can truly appreciate just how
much time and energy go into becoming familiar enough with
something to explain it as succinctly as you guys do
(40:24):
your superheroes and rock stars. From the bottom of my heart,
thank you for the wonderful work you do. You have
truly saved me. Kindest and warmest regards Georgia. That is
really lovely, Georgia. If we're ever in a town near you,
you are guests listed.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
Yes, Wow, Chuck, I think that was a really good,
good idea. Thanks a lot, Georgia. That was a very
sweet email. We appreciate it. We're glad we could help
in some small measure. Thank you very much for the kudos.
If you want to send us kudos, we love that.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
Kind of thing, including kudos.
Speaker 3 (40:53):
The candy bar Yeah, I remember those, send us a kudos.
They were great. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
I don't know if somebody send us one if it
would still be so great.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
Are they not around?
Speaker 3 (41:05):
No?
Speaker 1 (41:05):
I think like they would have been manufactured in nineteen
eighty six or something like that.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
I don't keep up with the candy bar scene.
Speaker 3 (41:11):
That's what I'm saying. They're not around anymore.
Speaker 2 (41:13):
Yeah, no, I know.
Speaker 1 (41:14):
Okay, So wow, that was a little sidetrack on kudos,
wasn't that.
Speaker 2 (41:18):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (41:19):
If you want to get in touch with this, you
can go on to stuff youshould know dot com and
find all of our social links there, and you can
also send us an email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio
dot com. You know, Stuff you should Know is a
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
For more podcasts My heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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