May 23, 2019 • 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 right now.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of My
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and
there's Jerry over there. And this is Stuff you Should Know,
the Superstar Edition, the old timey Superstoff Edition. Yeah. Man,
(00:25):
I thought this was super cool. Tin pan Alley. Yeah,
this is one of those things where I've sort of
knew what tin pan alley was, and you always have
heard that term thrown around, but I never really really
got it until this episode. Yeah. Same here. Uh, and
it's pretty cool, like the term tin pan alley, t
I n full stop p A n alle You forgot
(00:50):
a second full stop full stop. Um. I just want
to make sure people know it's not one word like
tin pan It's two words. But that is linguistically speaking,
that's a senecto key what it is? You know what
that is? Right? I've seen the movie Man, that movie
geez Um about the Charlie Kaufman thing, right, Yeah, yeah, um,
(01:14):
senecta senect to key New York. Yeah, So a senect
the key is, uh, it's when a specific place stands
in for a broader term like Wall Street, like wall
streets are real street, but Wall Street also means like
the finance industry or Hollywood. Hollywoods a real place. Okay,
this makes a lot more sense than the Charlie Kaufman movie. Yeah,
(01:36):
so so tin pan Alley is uh is a bunch
of things. It was a place and in New York City,
which what we'll get to in a second, like exactly
where um. And it was also referred to sort of
the beginnings of the music publishing industry and a genre
(01:57):
as well. There's kind of a lot of things, but
it stems from the root of a tin pan, like
a tin pan or a it was a cheap piano,
Like if he had a really cheap piano, you would
say it sounds tin panty, right, because like that's what
the hammer on the piano's hitting is tin pans rather
than strings. Yeah, it sounds just like a real tinny tone,
(02:18):
like you're beating on a tin pan. So that's where
the term originally came from. And depending on who you ask,
this area of New York um was called tin pan
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 tin pan Alley. Right, it's
no exaggeration to say tin pan Alley. Specifically this little
(02:42):
stretch in New York like block or so maybe less
than a block. It's a it's a block, okay. Um
was the place where the American popular music industry was born. Yeah,
so it's specifically street between six and Broadway. Um, kind
of between Chelsea and Kipps Bay, a little northwest of
(03:03):
like the flat Iron building and Um. 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 music right right,
So I think, Chuck, we should get back in the
way back and go to an indeterminate part of the
(03:25):
mid nineteenth century in the United States. Let's do it. So,
like you said, everywhere, there's a lot of it. Um.
It's like you said, if you wanted to hear music,
you had basically two choices. You could go here it
(03:46):
played live somewhere everywhere, from a barbershop quartet to maybe
an orchestra um or right, or you could have a
family member who knew how to play music and buy
a piano and of it in your home. Those were
your too, two ways to to hear music because, um,
everywhere there was no such thing as radio. Let's just
(04:11):
let's just say it everybody, Yeah, there was no radio.
There wasn't And if you think about it, radio was was.
You know, we 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
(04:31):
the most the greatest musicians you've ever heard. You could
just sit 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. Um,
and that was your option aside from going to hear
it live. And so this this whole idea of uh
(04:51):
the music industry being born, it was basically predicated on
two things, Chuck. One was the fact that pianos were
starting to become ubiquity in American houses and people were
learning how to play those pianos, so music instruction became
kind of widespread. And then Secondly, copy copyright law started
to really solidify in the United States in the nineteenth century,
(05:14):
and so that sheet music became much more valuable than
it was before. Yeah, like, if you can't, like I
can't read sheet music, I learned, Yeah, I learned to
play guitar by ear um and kind of I guess
every friend I know that it's a musician except for
a couple learned by ear um. If you came up
formally through high school band or something like that, um,
(05:37):
or maybe just private music instruction, then you may be
able to read music. 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 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
(05:57):
head around now, but that was the commodity. It's hard
to wrap your head around. 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 too to hear it,
Like that is what you went and bought at the
store and then you came home and played it rather
(06:18):
than listening to somebody else playing it. Yeah, and like
they sold a lot of them, like the very first
hit that Tin Panaley put out, And this was a period.
I mean, this was an eighty one when Wait Till
the Clouds Roll By was put out, So Tin Panaley
generally was early eighteen eighties till early nineteen twenties or
so I saw, like late nineteen twenties, was it really Yeah, yeah,
(06:41):
I guess you know, you can never say when it
was dead dead um. But in one month in eighteen
eighty one, they sold seventy five thousand copies of sheet
music to Wait Till the Clouds Roll By. 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
(07:02):
the sheet music. So that was one thing, right, So
there was sheet music. That was how you got this
stuff out. And but even before Wait Till the Clouds
Roll By, which it seems like it was probably America's
first number one smash hit, prior to that, there was
plenty of sheet music to be sold. Um, but it
was a largely like church hymns. Um. It was it was.
(07:27):
There was a lot that were sold for schools um
and like I said, copyright law changed. It allowed tim
penalty to develop, and it did so in two ways. One,
it's like the courts 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
(07:50):
on it. And then secondly, the courts, the Supreme Court
and specifically said, hey, if you wrote a song outside
of America, when it comes to him Erica it enjoys
you can copyright it in America too, which means that
the music publishers source of free sheet music, which was
just basically stealing foreign music, printing it out in sheet
(08:12):
music form and then selling it and not paying any
royalties because it enjoyed no copyright protection, that source dried up,
and so all of a sudden, this American music that
they they had to pay for now seemed a lot
more attractive because now they had to pay for them.
The music generated overseas too, So this copyright law and
(08:32):
the fact that more and more people were learning to
play piano and so you had an actual market four
sheet music, those two things came together all right, let's
take a break. I feel like that's a pretty good
set up, 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 Tin
penn Alley era right after this. All right, So we've
(09:06):
been throwing around the term music publishers a lot, and
that sort of means a different thing now than it
did back then. Um. But back then music publishers. Some
of them wrote songs, to be sure, but generally they
did not. UM. A lot of the early publishers out
of Tin pan Alley had backgrounds as salespeople. So there
(09:27):
was a guy named very successful publisher name is Ador
wit Mark. He started out selling water filters. Another one
named Leo Feist sold corsets, another one named Joe Stern
and Edward B. Mark sold neckties and buttons. Uh. And
a lot of these people, I guess we should point
out to uh came over from Europe. A lot were Jewish, UM.
(09:50):
Some African American songwriters like they were minorities. Um kind
of for the most part, early on, it feels like, right,
and they they saw a huge opportunity in this music
business that was starting to coalesce because prior to this,
I mean, there were there were music publishers, but it
was basically some guy who worked at a printer who
(10:14):
had a friend who could transpose music by ear and
they would just take some song that they heard and
turn it 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 become enforced, um,
(10:36):
it became much more valuable to invest in original music
because you could make a lot more money off of it. So, um,
those 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
(10:56):
and Atlanta and St. Louis and all over the country,
and all those towns lost their publishing houses, um, and
they all moved to New York, and they very specifically
moved to this one little stretch on street UM, and
it became tim Pan Alley. And it's really interesting, um
to look at, like how it worked back then, and
(11:18):
how it sort of mirrored how music like music grew
out of that model really and change in some ways,
but kind of stayed the same in a lot of
ways too. Um. Like you always hear about music contracts
and how terrible they are for rock musicians or pop musicians,
and it was kind of the same way back then.
These these publishers got together, they created this songwriting factory
(11:40):
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. Uh. Sometimes they would have the right
to throw one of the other more I guess once
(12:02):
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 gonna buy them
from you, and we're gonna try and make them pop.
Like you couldn't put them on the radio, so we're
gonna try and get them popular by getting them onto
vaudeville and on stage and sending not moles, I guess.
(12:23):
But it was almost like early Paola, uh, sending these
performers into vaudeville to sing these songs and perform these songs,
and people are like, wow, that's pretty catchy. I want that, right.
That's how they that's how they marketed it, and that
was like the whole thing, like if if you, It
was the first time that the music became an industry
(12:43):
because there was almost an assembly line field to it
where they would have feelers out to find out like
what people were into a music at the time. One
of the one of the early transitions that Tim Panali
underwent was when it started, Um it was a it
was a factory churning out like comedic, often deeply racist songs,
(13:05):
UM lots of ballads, uh, just what you think of
a super old timey songs, right, And then the public
started to get kind of bored with that and they
decided that they kind of like this ragtime thing that
the Scott Joplin fella has um has started to create.
And so Tim Panaley this is classic. Tim Panalty went
(13:25):
out figured out how to play ragtime, started co opting
the ragtime genre and created pop music. So they took
what was a really difficult um kind of music. It's
called syncopated rhythm where you've got a melody within a rhythm, right, So, um,
you know ragtime, right, Okay, So they figured out how
(13:48):
to take this very difficult thing and kind of popify
it to make it easy for uh, 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 to record it and distribute
(14:08):
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 barbershop cortets, or so
that the twelve year old at home could play it
for the rest of their family. And so that is
(14:29):
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. Yeah, and they would, um,
there were these musicians called song pluggers. So how it
would work is a music publisher and Tin Panaley would
(14:51):
um buy a song or the rights to a song
off of them 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 was a
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. Uh, and it was it was crazy.
(15:13):
These song pluggers got money. Irving Berlin started out as
a song plugger, right and so um, 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 and you'll say, oh, this
this cheese with this cracker tastes really good. I'm gonna
go buy this cheese and these crackers. This is the
exact same thing, except you would say, oh, this song
(15:35):
sounds really good, I'm going to buy the sheet music.
That's what music pluggers were for. That's how they got
the word out. They that's how they advertised the music
was to play them. And then another way to do
it check 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 to help
(15:58):
get them out that way too, so that audiences would
go hear these things. So you could hear him in
the music shop, you could hear him at the theater.
Um you uh, you might hear them. Um well, it's
basically it is the theater in the music shop where
the two main venues less I'm forgetting what yeah, and
they would That was the plugging, But there was also booming. So,
(16:20):
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 uh, you would buy like tickets
to a show. You would have the plugger up there
playing the song, and then those twenty five people were
(16:42):
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 in you know, nineteen ten in New York City
is hearing people around you singing it and you're thinking,
how have I been missing out on this thing? And
that may be the first time it was ever performed
in public, and it was all just a big, kind
(17:04):
of a big scam. 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 the sheet music, I guess, um So,
so there's there was this process to all this, and
like you said, like you could be a like a
no name composer who would show up at Tim Panaley
(17:25):
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 um hired composers I think, like you
were saying to where they were they were they had
they had a few hits under their belts, so they
(17:46):
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 jazz and this blues stuff.
Make me some bluesy kind of stuff that I can
turn around and sell. And the competition was really fierce
(18:07):
among 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 you had to basically audition your
song to see whether it made it to the next level.
And so in tim Panaley, and this is where it
got its name, there would be you know, no name composers,
(18:28):
house composers, vaudeville acts um 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 tim
Panaley and there'd be a dozen or scores of different
songs all being played on these pianos, streaming out of
the windows onto the street at the same time. And
(18:48):
that's where that that reporter Monroe Rosenfeld came up with
the idea of tim Panale said when he was walking
down the street, he was kind of describing what that
was like. He said, it sounded like, you know, a
bunch of tim pants being struck at once. Yeah, and
this this whole area of New York, this one block
just really became like a creative well. There were uh,
(19:09):
vaudeville theaters, there were play theaters, like it was sort
of the earliest incarnation of the theater district before it
moved towards Times Square. Uh. And then other parts of
the entertainment industry obviously are drawn to that area. UM
Variety Magazine that's where it first popped up on that
block when it was called the Clipper. Uh. The William
Morris Talent Agency had an office on that block, and
(19:30):
it was just sort of the you know, after I
think Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, and I think one other city
kind of where the early seats of the early music industry.
It all roundly landed in New York and just such
a creative area and era. It's so neat to think about, too,
because that's happened in places before. Where if you take
(19:53):
a bunch of creative people and jam them into a
small area, just amazing stuff of 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. There's genres underneath pop music, you know,
where something that big can happen when you get that
(20:14):
many creative people together in one place. Should we take
another break? Sure? Alright, let's take another break, and we'll
talk about some of these songs of these composers. Uh
in the Great American Songbook right after this. Alright, So
(20:41):
there's money being made, yeah, dad, a lot of money,
even for early on. I mean, I can't imagine what
sheep music costs, but they were selling so much of it,
um it added up um. Irving Berlin, I mean he
went on to start his own music publishing business, but
early on, when he was just pumping out tunes and
nineteen seventeen, he made about a hundred thousand dollars a
(21:03):
year in royalties. Yeah, that's that's dollars too, right, Yeah,
And these songs like these are some standards. You know.
It's what's known as the Standard American Songbook. Um, just
like it's an unofficial designation, but they're considered to be
like the classics of the earlier early twentieth century. Like,
(21:24):
I mean, we all still know these songs, stuff like uh,
Ain't She Sweet? I don't know. Ain't she sweet? You're
mucking down the street? What you don't know? That song? No,
that one I've not heard. Oh boy, do you know
baby face? Yes, got the cutest little baby face. Yes.
(21:44):
I love that song. It makes me smiling by the
light of the silvery moon. Give my regards to Broadway.
Happy days are here again over there. A lot of
this had to do with like wartime, early wartime stuff.
Sweet Georgia Brown, Take Me out to the ball game? Yeah,
and that that in particular, we gotta say that was
written by two guys, um Jack Norworth and Albert von
(22:06):
tilser Um and they've never they've never seen a ball
game before. Well maybe that's what they were saying, but though, yeah,
take me out to the ball game because I've never
been exactly, And they changed that line. But that was
so tim panale, like where it's like everybody's into baseball
right now, so let's make a song about baseball. YouTube.
We've never seen a baseball game, it doesn't matter. Make
(22:27):
make me a song. And that's that's how to take
Me Out to the ball Game was formed. Yeah, and
I think under one of the like you said earlier,
some of the earliest 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
always thought was kind of funny when I was a kid.
It's a little funny, and I guess I still do
if I'm being honest. Um. There was also uh yeah,
(22:52):
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 stand alone. A lot of them,
like I said earlier, were created for musical reviews. Um,
America the Beautiful was written by Irving Berlin for a
musical review called Yip Yip Yap Hank, which no one
(23:15):
has heard of. No one does that anymore, but um,
it was. It was meant to be performed and produced
by soldiers that had an eight show run. But um,
the song, obviously, America the Beautiful has survived long beyond
that because it became an American standard. So like these
these vehicles that were built around to kind of get
(23:37):
the song out there to the public faded away, but
the songs themselves have stood the test of time. Yeah. Absolutely,
I think he pulled it from that production or was
it in the original production or did he pull it.
I think it was in the original one. Well, he
eventually pulled it out of the production then because he
thought it was too sentimental. And then that song went
(23:58):
on to be the one that everyone remembers. 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. Um, he was a quintessential rags
to riches story for Tim Panaley, where he was like
a waiter in a cafe. Um became a song plugger,
(24:19):
one of those guys who plays songs to basically his marketing.
UM couldn't reach eat music, knew everything by ear Um
had a friend transposed the songs he came up with
into into actual written music. A little factoid there that
Irving Berlin couldn't read or write music, right, Um. And
then he became a well known composer. And then he
(24:41):
became such a well known composer he opened his own
publishing house and then started making a hundred thousand dollars
a year in royalties. There was another guy named Charles K.
Harris who was one of the earlier success stories. I
think in eight nine three or two, he had a
song called After the Ball, and he just knew it
was a gem because he offered to a publisher and
they offered him a price for it that he was like,
(25:03):
that's way too low. I'm going to set up my
own publishing house. And he did, and he started selling
it um and was making something like twenty five thousand
dollars a week eighteen nineties money, which is like seven
hundred grand a week. This guy just went from nobody
to seven grand a week, ended up selling five million
copies of his song After the Ball. And if you
(25:24):
listen to it now, it's not that good. Frankly, it's
not but but bully for him, you know, it's no
ancient suite. No, uh yeah, it's amazing, man. People like
popular music hit the world like, you know, like a
lightning bolt from the beginning. Yes, because it was so
(25:45):
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. He was an
African American. A lot of people thought he was white.
Still to this day, a lot of people think he
was white. I think because of his his name frankly um.
And it was the predecessor ragtime was the predecessor to jazz.
(26:10):
And it had like a real like feel to a
real soul that everybody's heard, like some of the original
ragtime music, like the entertainer Maple Leaf rag And if
you can't immediately bring those to mind, just go to
YouTube and you'll be like, Okay, of course I get that. Um.
But the idea that that Tim Panaley could just kind
of come along and take this cool, deep soulful music
(26:33):
and popify it basically to make it palatable to audiences,
in particular white audiences who had the most money at
the time. Um, that was why it would why why
it became so successful. It was almost dumbed down. It
was music that was dumbed down in a way to
make it appealed to as many people as possible. Yeah,
(26:56):
or even worse, uh, by white publish shows 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. Yes, So there's a real debate
going on now about the legacy of tim Panale in
(27:16):
some ways, um, and some people point to it and say, look,
these guys were churning out the most eye popping lee
racist songs that the America has ever come up with.
They were they were coming, they were selling them to
the masses, and in doing this, because this was the
(27:38):
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
so in this in this respect, the tim Panale doesn't
deserve to be revered or respected or to be made
(28:00):
it as a historical landmark as the real fight. Yeah.
That that's like as recently as like late last month,
I believe, Chuck, there was a Landmark Commission City Landmark
Commission meeting where this was being debated, right. 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, uh, an ethnic minority.
(28:21):
So many of them were African American songwriters, and tim
Panaley was also the home to the first black owned
and operated music publishing business in the country. Yeah, some
people are saying, look like, yes, it was taken and
co opted to be popular, but so were operettas and ballots,
like that's just what they did. It wasn't it wasn't
meant to be offensive to UM African Americans. And as
(28:43):
a matter of fact, it was basically these Jewish immigrants
saying I kind of identify with your plate. I want
to preserve and celebrate this and expose this music to
as many people as possible. And that some people pointed
this process in tim panale as the way that um,
the African American arts became um exposed to the larger
(29:07):
the larger population of America at the time. Yeah, it's
pretty interesting. Yeah, so that that debates going on, that's
where the idea of whether or not this area should
be designated as an historic landmark is falling, right. Yeah,
And like you said, it's kind of hard to pinpoint
an actual death date of tin Pan Alley because these
(29:27):
things like that happened gradually over time, but technology, like
uh it has so many other times kind of killed
the notion of Tin Pan Alley, didn't it. Well, that's
a really good point right, the radio. It was the
radio radio killed the old timey sheet music star, and
the video killed the radio star right exactly. So again,
(29:50):
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, people quit buying piano those
And yeah, it's kind of sad, it is said. 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, But that's I mean. Once
(30:12):
the radio came along, everybody said, so long cheap music.
I hated you all along, but you are 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 I
want to listen to their their music. And not only
did technology killed Tim Panale in this sheet music publishing industry,
(30:32):
but it also changed the genre a little bit. It
kind of skewed it more into swing and um some
of this yeah big band, some of the stuff that
came out of the thirties onward, Um, or that was
really kind of where that transition went. Yeah, have you
ever been somewhere where they have a public piano and
(30:53):
seeing someone just walk by and sit down and blow mines?
Didn't you see Greg Allman do that? God? No, if
you know someone who saw that, please try and remember
who it was, because I need to hear that story.
I'll try to remember. I can't remember who it was.
That's pretty amazing. Okay, I don't think I'm making this up.
Let me, let me, let me go specific mental role
(31:16):
of decks. But have you ever seen that? 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, while someone uh New York does this from
time to time, they'll have them on a sidewalker in
a park or something. And in Atlanta they have one
over in Atlantic Station. I've seen people do it there, uh,
and it's always just really cool. And that makes me
(31:37):
miss the fact that piano, Like a lot more people
used to learn piano than they do now. I think
I would love to know how to play the piano
to for that very reason, because I'd love to be
able to sit down and just want to be that
guy so bad, right, someday, it's not too late. I
remember the first time I saw it was that a
student council retreat in high school. That was this one. Uh.
(32:01):
You know, all the student councils from the county get
together over the course of a weekend or a weekend
do stupid stuff um, and learned about leadership um. But
there was this there's always like this one guy on
student council at another school. You're like, man, he didn't
seem like a student council type. He seems like he's thirty.
And this guy did uh, and he was on student
council at some other school. But he was like, you know,
(32:24):
I had like the rat T shirt and it was
just sort of a like a dirty metal head bad
boy of student counts. He totally was. And there was
a piano and one of the lobbies of the dormitories
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
(32:45):
seeing the girls in the room and thinking that guy
has got it. All going on, like that's the key
man and that boy and the rat t shirt grew
up to be Greg allman. Have you have you ever
been to a sig Goold's Request Room? Um? You His
(33:07):
friend Joe McGinty owns it, he's co owner of it,
and he plays piano there. It's just like sing along
piano karaoke and it is amazing. I cannot believe you
haven't been there yet. You have? So does one person
play the piano and everyone sings along? Joe McGinty plays,
and then no, they 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. Okay,
(33:29):
well I've done I've done the rock and Roll Live
Man karaoke before. Oh yeah here in Atlanta, which is
a lot of fun. Um, what do you what do
you do that? Uh? Somewhere in the Highlands I think
the Dark Horse maybe. Okay, yeah, that sounds right. Yeah.
I went for my birthday a couple of years ago
and did Cheap Tricks Surrender and uh did a pretty
good job, if I may say so. Is that surrender parentheses?
(33:52):
Dream Police those are two different songs. Okay, is it
surrender parentheses? I want you to Want Me? Yeah, that's
the one. I've heard that song, but it's funny. At
the one in Atlanta, there's uh, you know the DJ
English Nick. No? Wait, was he on like the radio
like radio DJ? Yeah, he still has English Nick. In Atlanta,
(34:14):
he hosted and he is the the emergency back up
if you're no good, because being bad at karaoke is
no fun, but being bad at live bank karaoke it's
really no fun for anyone. So he stands back there
and if you're not very good, he's singing along with
you and he will just give the signal to sort
of do a little upping of his vocals and lowering
(34:37):
of the other vocals. Is it like the the slice
across your neck like that? No? I mean I think
it's just like an eye signal. And uh, I remember
being nervous. I was like, oh, man, if they 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. But oh you got the nod
from English Nick. Yeah, that means a lot. I have
(34:58):
the opposite story. What happened. I went to Claremont Lounge
to do karaoke years back, chose to do Darling Nikki.
Oh interesting. In the middle, the karaoke DJ breaks in
and goes, It's like William Shatton are singing, isn't it?
Oh my god? You was their supporting dancing just but
(35:20):
but really just hanging on by her fingernails. You know,
you gotta stopped an insulted mid song, mid song, but
I finished Buddy Good. Yeah. I would literally pay a
hundred dollars to have seen that. I wager that it
would have been worth two fifty. Okay, it was pretty
pretty bad. Do we have anything else on Tin Pan Alley?
(35:43):
I forgot what's what we were talking about, Chuck, Well,
we should. We're not gonna get into it here. We
should do a full show on ASCAP though. Yeah, because
yet another thing that early Irving Berlin did was create
as CAP, the American Society of Composers and Performers, Right,
I think producers, producers Okay, man, I didn't even have
it in front of me, but um, they basically protect
(36:04):
and register copyrights for artists. Yeah, it's so convoluted to
these days. Yeah, yeah, I think it definitely deserves its
own thing. But that was another thing that was born
out of Tim pan Alley. 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
(36:24):
not having one that I can play wirelessly throughout all
the speakers in my home. Oh, isn't that amazing? That
is the future for sure, that you can 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 dred CDs to get records. He was like,
(36:49):
I'll give you a hundred and thirty bucks for the
lot and I was like, fine, fine, just get these
stupid nineties CDs away from me. Now. They were great,
but it was just I felt like I should pay
him to take all these off my hands. Did you
still have the jewel cases? Oh? Yeah, they were all
something that 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
(37:11):
traveling and make it a point to go into local
record stores again. I think that's great. I really really
had a good time thumbing through records. It was a
lot of fun. I'll go with you, text me, yeah,
let's do it. Okay. I think that's it for tim Panale.
R I p Tim Panale. Depending on your viewpoint, I
guess yeah, there needs to be a great Another was
a movie in the forties called tin Panale. But someone
(37:33):
should do a really good uh look at the early
burgeoning film I'm sorry movie into almost oh boy music
industry about tin Panalely it'd be oh yeah, that would
be great. There's so many characters involved. Just put Hugh
Jackman in a Sharknado in it. And and by the way,
you got called out for bringing back bread. I did.
(37:56):
I said in it was some episode that I think
the diving bell up is so that we should bring
bread back. And I guess that's what the kids all say. Now.
I didn't realize that, but like at least ten people
emailed and said, yeah, millennials are talking about getting that bread.
It's like they are. I guess so. I like to
think that I had absolutely nothing to do with that.
But but you were the seed do you think so?
(38:18):
You never know? Man, that'd be cool. Before we go
to the chuck, I do have one more thing. I
have to give a shout out to what I considered
the greatest song to come out of Tim Panaley Um.
And I believe it was an Irving Berlin song. Yeah
it was Let's have another cup of coffee? Have you
heard that we use that for something? Didn't we? I
don't remember. We probably did because it's prominent in one
(38:41):
of my favorite movies of all time, Paper Moon. That
was a great song. I love that song so much. Um.
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, yea and pie. Okay,
now that's it. Now I've got nothing else. If you
want to know more about tim pan aale uh, you
(39:03):
can go read up on it and maybe follow whether
it's going to get designated as in New Story Clan
mark or not. We'll find out. In the meantime, it's
time for a listener mail. So this is just a
very sweet email from someone. Hey, guys, I'm sure you're
ceving emails like this all the time, but I would
be remiss if I didn't thank you for all the
(39:23):
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.
Thank you for keeping me calm and educated, and thank
you for making me feel safe even in perilous 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,
(39:47):
I surely would be lost. I 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 accinctly as you guys do your superheroes and
rock Star. From the bottom of my heart, thank you
for the wonderful work you do. You've truly saved me.
Kindest and warmest regards, Georgia. And that's really lovely, Georgia.
(40:08):
If we're ever in a town near you, you are
guests listed. Yes, Wow, Chuck, I think that was a
really good, good idea. Thanks a lot, Georgia. That was
very sweet email. We appreciate it. We're glad we could
help in some some small measure. Thank you very much
for the kudos. Uh, if you want to send us kudos,
we love that kind of thing, including kudos. The candy bar. Yeah,
(40:29):
I remember that the kudos. They were great. Yeah. Um.
Actually I don't know if if somebody sent us one,
if it would still be so great. Are they not around? No?
I think like they would have been manufactured in six
or something like then. I don't keep up with the
candy bar scene. That's what I'm saying. They're not around anymore,
you know, I know. Okay, so uh wow, that was
(40:51):
a little sidetrack on kudos whatnot. If you want to
get in touch with us, you can go onto stuff
you Should Know dot com and find all of our
social links there, and you can also send us an
email to stuff podcast at I heart radio dot com.
M Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart
Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
(41:12):
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. H
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of My
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and
there's Jerry over there. And this is Stuff you Should Know,
the Superstar Edition, the old timey Superstoff Edition. Yeah. Man,
(00:25):
I thought this was super cool. Tin pan Alley. Yeah,
this is one of those things where I've sort of
knew what tin pan alley was, and you always have
heard that term thrown around, but I never really really
got it until this episode. Yeah. Same here. Uh, and
it's pretty cool, like the term tin pan alley, t
I n full stop p A n alle You forgot
(00:50):
a second full stop full stop. Um. I just want
to make sure people know it's not one word like
tin pan It's two words. But that is linguistically speaking,
that's a senecto key what it is? You know what
that is? Right? I've seen the movie Man, that movie
geez Um about the Charlie Kaufman thing, right, Yeah, yeah, um,
(01:14):
senecta senect to key New York. Yeah, So a senect
the key is, uh, it's when a specific place stands
in for a broader term like Wall Street, like wall
streets are real street, but Wall Street also means like
the finance industry or Hollywood. Hollywoods a real place. Okay,
this makes a lot more sense than the Charlie Kaufman movie. Yeah,
(01:36):
so so tin pan Alley is uh is a bunch
of things. It was a place and in New York City,
which what we'll get to in a second, like exactly
where um. And it was also referred to sort of
the beginnings of the music publishing industry and a genre
(01:57):
as well. There's kind of a lot of things, but
it stems from the root of a tin pan, like
a tin pan or a it was a cheap piano,
Like if he had a really cheap piano, you would
say it sounds tin panty, right, because like that's what
the hammer on the piano's hitting is tin pans rather
than strings. Yeah, it sounds just like a real tinny tone,
(02:18):
like you're beating on a tin pan. So that's where
the term originally came from. And depending on who you ask,
this area of New York um was called tin pan
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 tin pan Alley. Right, it's
no exaggeration to say tin pan Alley. Specifically this little
(02:42):
stretch in New York like block or so maybe less
than a block. It's a it's a block, okay. Um
was the place where the American popular music industry was born. Yeah,
so it's specifically street between six and Broadway. Um, kind
of between Chelsea and Kipps Bay, a little northwest of
(03:03):
like the flat Iron building and Um. 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 music right right,
So I think, Chuck, we should get back in the
way back and go to an indeterminate part of the
(03:25):
mid nineteenth century in the United States. Let's do it. So,
like you said, everywhere, there's a lot of it. Um.
It's like you said, if you wanted to hear music,
you had basically two choices. You could go here it
(03:46):
played live somewhere everywhere, from a barbershop quartet to maybe
an orchestra um or right, or you could have a
family member who knew how to play music and buy
a piano and of it in your home. Those were
your too, two ways to to hear music because, um,
everywhere there was no such thing as radio. Let's just
(04:11):
let's just say it everybody, Yeah, there was no radio.
There wasn't And if you think about it, radio was was.
You know, we 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
(04:31):
the most the greatest musicians you've ever heard. You could
just sit 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. Um,
and that was your option aside from going to hear
it live. And so this this whole idea of uh
(04:51):
the music industry being born, it was basically predicated on
two things, Chuck. One was the fact that pianos were
starting to become ubiquity in American houses and people were
learning how to play those pianos, so music instruction became
kind of widespread. And then Secondly, copy copyright law started
to really solidify in the United States in the nineteenth century,
(05:14):
and so that sheet music became much more valuable than
it was before. Yeah, like, if you can't, like I
can't read sheet music, I learned, Yeah, I learned to
play guitar by ear um and kind of I guess
every friend I know that it's a musician except for
a couple learned by ear um. If you came up
formally through high school band or something like that, um,
(05:37):
or maybe just private music instruction, then you may be
able to read music. 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 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
(05:57):
head around now, but that was the commodity. It's hard
to wrap your head around. 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 too to hear it,
Like that is what you went and bought at the
store and then you came home and played it rather
(06:18):
than listening to somebody else playing it. Yeah, and like
they sold a lot of them, like the very first
hit that Tin Panaley put out, And this was a period.
I mean, this was an eighty one when Wait Till
the Clouds Roll By was put out, So Tin Panaley
generally was early eighteen eighties till early nineteen twenties or
so I saw, like late nineteen twenties, was it really Yeah, yeah,
(06:41):
I guess you know, you can never say when it
was dead dead um. But in one month in eighteen
eighty one, they sold seventy five thousand copies of sheet
music to Wait Till the Clouds Roll By. 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
(07:02):
the sheet music. So that was one thing, right, So
there was sheet music. That was how you got this
stuff out. And but even before Wait Till the Clouds
Roll By, which it seems like it was probably America's
first number one smash hit, prior to that, there was
plenty of sheet music to be sold. Um, but it
was a largely like church hymns. Um. It was it was.
(07:27):
There was a lot that were sold for schools um
and like I said, copyright law changed. It allowed tim
penalty to develop, and it did so in two ways. One,
it's like the courts 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
(07:50):
on it. And then secondly, the courts, the Supreme Court
and specifically said, hey, if you wrote a song outside
of America, when it comes to him Erica it enjoys
you can copyright it in America too, which means that
the music publishers source of free sheet music, which was
just basically stealing foreign music, printing it out in sheet
(08:12):
music form and then selling it and not paying any
royalties because it enjoyed no copyright protection, that source dried up,
and so all of a sudden, this American music that
they they had to pay for now seemed a lot
more attractive because now they had to pay for them.
The music generated overseas too, So this copyright law and
(08:32):
the fact that more and more people were learning to
play piano and so you had an actual market four
sheet music, those two things came together all right, let's
take a break. I feel like that's a pretty good
set up, 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 Tin
penn Alley era right after this. All right, So we've
(09:06):
been throwing around the term music publishers a lot, and
that sort of means a different thing now than it
did back then. Um. But back then music publishers. Some
of them wrote songs, to be sure, but generally they
did not. UM. A lot of the early publishers out
of Tin pan Alley had backgrounds as salespeople. So there
(09:27):
was a guy named very successful publisher name is Ador
wit Mark. He started out selling water filters. Another one
named Leo Feist sold corsets, another one named Joe Stern
and Edward B. Mark sold neckties and buttons. Uh. And
a lot of these people, I guess we should point
out to uh came over from Europe. A lot were Jewish, UM.
(09:50):
Some African American songwriters like they were minorities. Um kind
of for the most part, early on, it feels like, right,
and they they saw a huge opportunity in this music
business that was starting to coalesce because prior to this,
I mean, there were there were music publishers, but it
was basically some guy who worked at a printer who
(10:14):
had a friend who could transpose music by ear and
they would just take some song that they heard and
turn it 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 become enforced, um,
(10:36):
it became much more valuable to invest in original music
because you could make a lot more money off of it. So, um,
those 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
(10:56):
and Atlanta and St. Louis and all over the country,
and all those towns lost their publishing houses, um, and
they all moved to New York, and they very specifically
moved to this one little stretch on street UM, and
it became tim Pan Alley. And it's really interesting, um
to look at, like how it worked back then, and
(11:18):
how it sort of mirrored how music like music grew
out of that model really and change in some ways,
but kind of stayed the same in a lot of
ways too. Um. Like you always hear about music contracts
and how terrible they are for rock musicians or pop musicians,
and it was kind of the same way back then.
These these publishers got together, they created this songwriting factory
(11:40):
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. Uh. Sometimes they would have the right
to throw one of the other more I guess once
(12:02):
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 gonna buy them
from you, and we're gonna try and make them pop.
Like you couldn't put them on the radio, so we're
gonna try and get them popular by getting them onto
vaudeville and on stage and sending not moles, I guess.
(12:23):
But it was almost like early Paola, uh, sending these
performers into vaudeville to sing these songs and perform these songs,
and people are like, wow, that's pretty catchy. I want that, right.
That's how they that's how they marketed it, and that
was like the whole thing, like if if you, It
was the first time that the music became an industry
(12:43):
because there was almost an assembly line field to it
where they would have feelers out to find out like
what people were into a music at the time. One
of the one of the early transitions that Tim Panali
underwent was when it started, Um it was a it
was a factory churning out like comedic, often deeply racist songs,
(13:05):
UM lots of ballads, uh, just what you think of
a super old timey songs, right, And then the public
started to get kind of bored with that and they
decided that they kind of like this ragtime thing that
the Scott Joplin fella has um has started to create.
And so Tim Panaley this is classic. Tim Panalty went
(13:25):
out figured out how to play ragtime, started co opting
the ragtime genre and created pop music. So they took
what was a really difficult um kind of music. It's
called syncopated rhythm where you've got a melody within a rhythm, right, So, um,
you know ragtime, right, Okay, So they figured out how
(13:48):
to take this very difficult thing and kind of popify
it to make it easy for uh, 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 to record it and distribute
(14:08):
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 barbershop cortets, or so
that the twelve year old at home could play it
for the rest of their family. And so that is
(14:29):
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. Yeah, and they would, um,
there were these musicians called song pluggers. So how it
would work is a music publisher and Tin Panaley would
(14:51):
um buy a song or the rights to a song
off of them 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 was a
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. Uh, and it was it was crazy.
(15:13):
These song pluggers got money. Irving Berlin started out as
a song plugger, right and so um, 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 and you'll say, oh, this
this cheese with this cracker tastes really good. I'm gonna
go buy this cheese and these crackers. This is the
exact same thing, except you would say, oh, this song
(15:35):
sounds really good, I'm going to buy the sheet music.
That's what music pluggers were for. That's how they got
the word out. They that's how they advertised the music
was to play them. And then another way to do
it check 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 to help
(15:58):
get them out that way too, so that audiences would
go hear these things. So you could hear him in
the music shop, you could hear him at the theater.
Um you uh, you might hear them. Um well, it's
basically it is the theater in the music shop where
the two main venues less I'm forgetting what yeah, and
they would That was the plugging, But there was also booming. So,
(16:20):
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 uh, you would buy like tickets
to a show. You would have the plugger up there
playing the song, and then those twenty five people were
(16:42):
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 in you know, nineteen ten in New York City
is hearing people around you singing it and you're thinking,
how have I been missing out on this thing? And
that may be the first time it was ever performed
in public, and it was all just a big, kind
(17:04):
of a big scam. 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 the sheet music, I guess, um So,
so there's there was this process to all this, and
like you said, like you could be a like a
no name composer who would show up at Tim Panaley
(17:25):
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 um hired composers I think, like you
were saying to where they were they were they had
they had a few hits under their belts, so they
(17:46):
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 jazz and this blues stuff.
Make me some bluesy kind of stuff that I can
turn around and sell. And the competition was really fierce
(18:07):
among 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 you had to basically audition your
song to see whether it made it to the next level.
And so in tim Panaley, and this is where it
got its name, there would be you know, no name composers,
(18:28):
house composers, vaudeville acts um 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 tim
Panaley and there'd be a dozen or scores of different
songs all being played on these pianos, streaming out of
the windows onto the street at the same time. And
(18:48):
that's where that that reporter Monroe Rosenfeld came up with
the idea of tim Panale said when he was walking
down the street, he was kind of describing what that
was like. He said, it sounded like, you know, a
bunch of tim pants being struck at once. Yeah, and
this this whole area of New York, this one block
just really became like a creative well. There were uh,
(19:09):
vaudeville theaters, there were play theaters, like it was sort
of the earliest incarnation of the theater district before it
moved towards Times Square. Uh. And then other parts of
the entertainment industry obviously are drawn to that area. UM
Variety Magazine that's where it first popped up on that
block when it was called the Clipper. Uh. The William
Morris Talent Agency had an office on that block, and
(19:30):
it was just sort of the you know, after I
think Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, and I think one other city
kind of where the early seats of the early music industry.
It all roundly landed in New York and just such
a creative area and era. It's so neat to think about, too,
because that's happened in places before. Where if you take
(19:53):
a bunch of creative people and jam them into a
small area, just amazing stuff of 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. There's genres underneath pop music, you know,
where something that big can happen when you get that
(20:14):
many creative people together in one place. Should we take
another break? Sure? Alright, let's take another break, and we'll
talk about some of these songs of these composers. Uh
in the Great American Songbook right after this. Alright, So
(20:41):
there's money being made, yeah, dad, a lot of money,
even for early on. I mean, I can't imagine what
sheep music costs, but they were selling so much of it,
um it added up um. Irving Berlin, I mean he
went on to start his own music publishing business, but
early on, when he was just pumping out tunes and
nineteen seventeen, he made about a hundred thousand dollars a
(21:03):
year in royalties. Yeah, that's that's dollars too, right, Yeah,
And these songs like these are some standards. You know.
It's what's known as the Standard American Songbook. Um, just
like it's an unofficial designation, but they're considered to be
like the classics of the earlier early twentieth century. Like,
(21:24):
I mean, we all still know these songs, stuff like uh,
Ain't She Sweet? I don't know. Ain't she sweet? You're
mucking down the street? What you don't know? That song? No,
that one I've not heard. Oh boy, do you know
baby face? Yes, got the cutest little baby face. Yes.
(21:44):
I love that song. It makes me smiling by the
light of the silvery moon. Give my regards to Broadway.
Happy days are here again over there. A lot of
this had to do with like wartime, early wartime stuff.
Sweet Georgia Brown, Take Me out to the ball game? Yeah,
and that that in particular, we gotta say that was
written by two guys, um Jack Norworth and Albert von
(22:06):
tilser Um and they've never they've never seen a ball
game before. Well maybe that's what they were saying, but though, yeah,
take me out to the ball game because I've never
been exactly, And they changed that line. But that was
so tim panale, like where it's like everybody's into baseball
right now, so let's make a song about baseball. YouTube.
We've never seen a baseball game, it doesn't matter. Make
(22:27):
make me a song. And that's that's how to take
Me Out to the ball Game was formed. Yeah, and
I think under one of the like you said earlier,
some of the earliest 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
always thought was kind of funny when I was a kid.
It's a little funny, and I guess I still do
if I'm being honest. Um. There was also uh yeah,
(22:52):
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 stand alone. A lot of them,
like I said earlier, were created for musical reviews. Um,
America the Beautiful was written by Irving Berlin for a
musical review called Yip Yip Yap Hank, which no one
(23:15):
has heard of. No one does that anymore, but um,
it was. It was meant to be performed and produced
by soldiers that had an eight show run. But um,
the song, obviously, America the Beautiful has survived long beyond
that because it became an American standard. So like these
these vehicles that were built around to kind of get
(23:37):
the song out there to the public faded away, but
the songs themselves have stood the test of time. Yeah. Absolutely,
I think he pulled it from that production or was
it in the original production or did he pull it.
I think it was in the original one. Well, he
eventually pulled it out of the production then because he
thought it was too sentimental. And then that song went
(23:58):
on to be the one that everyone remembers. 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. Um, he was a quintessential rags
to riches story for Tim Panaley, where he was like
a waiter in a cafe. Um became a song plugger,
(24:19):
one of those guys who plays songs to basically his marketing.
UM couldn't reach eat music, knew everything by ear Um
had a friend transposed the songs he came up with
into into actual written music. A little factoid there that
Irving Berlin couldn't read or write music, right, Um. And
then he became a well known composer. And then he
(24:41):
became such a well known composer he opened his own
publishing house and then started making a hundred thousand dollars
a year in royalties. There was another guy named Charles K.
Harris who was one of the earlier success stories. I
think in eight nine three or two, he had a
song called After the Ball, and he just knew it
was a gem because he offered to a publisher and
they offered him a price for it that he was like,
(25:03):
that's way too low. I'm going to set up my
own publishing house. And he did, and he started selling
it um and was making something like twenty five thousand
dollars a week eighteen nineties money, which is like seven
hundred grand a week. This guy just went from nobody
to seven grand a week, ended up selling five million
copies of his song After the Ball. And if you
(25:24):
listen to it now, it's not that good. Frankly, it's
not but but bully for him, you know, it's no
ancient suite. No, uh yeah, it's amazing, man. People like
popular music hit the world like, you know, like a
lightning bolt from the beginning. Yes, because it was so
(25:45):
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. He was an
African American. A lot of people thought he was white.
Still to this day, a lot of people think he
was white. I think because of his his name frankly um.
And it was the predecessor ragtime was the predecessor to jazz.
(26:10):
And it had like a real like feel to a
real soul that everybody's heard, like some of the original
ragtime music, like the entertainer Maple Leaf rag And if
you can't immediately bring those to mind, just go to
YouTube and you'll be like, Okay, of course I get that. Um.
But the idea that that Tim Panaley could just kind
of come along and take this cool, deep soulful music
(26:33):
and popify it basically to make it palatable to audiences,
in particular white audiences who had the most money at
the time. Um, that was why it would why why
it became so successful. It was almost dumbed down. It
was music that was dumbed down in a way to
make it appealed to as many people as possible. Yeah,
(26:56):
or even worse, uh, by white publish shows 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. Yes, So there's a real debate
going on now about the legacy of tim Panale in
(27:16):
some ways, um, and some people point to it and say, look,
these guys were churning out the most eye popping lee
racist songs that the America has ever come up with.
They were they were coming, they were selling them to
the masses, and in doing this, because this was the
(27:38):
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
so in this in this respect, the tim Panale doesn't
deserve to be revered or respected or to be made
(28:00):
it as a historical landmark as the real fight. Yeah.
That that's like as recently as like late last month,
I believe, Chuck, there was a Landmark Commission City Landmark
Commission meeting where this was being debated, right. 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, uh, an ethnic minority.
(28:21):
So many of them were African American songwriters, and tim
Panaley was also the home to the first black owned
and operated music publishing business in the country. Yeah, some
people are saying, look like, yes, it was taken and
co opted to be popular, but so were operettas and ballots,
like that's just what they did. It wasn't it wasn't
meant to be offensive to UM African Americans. And as
(28:43):
a matter of fact, it was basically these Jewish immigrants
saying I kind of identify with your plate. I want
to preserve and celebrate this and expose this music to
as many people as possible. And that some people pointed
this process in tim panale as the way that um,
the African American arts became um exposed to the larger
(29:07):
the larger population of America at the time. Yeah, it's
pretty interesting. Yeah, so that that debates going on, that's
where the idea of whether or not this area should
be designated as an historic landmark is falling, right. Yeah,
And like you said, it's kind of hard to pinpoint
an actual death date of tin Pan Alley because these
(29:27):
things like that happened gradually over time, but technology, like
uh it has so many other times kind of killed
the notion of Tin Pan Alley, didn't it. Well, that's
a really good point right, the radio. It was the
radio radio killed the old timey sheet music star, and
the video killed the radio star right exactly. So again,
(29:50):
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, people quit buying piano those
And yeah, it's kind of sad, it is said. 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, But that's I mean. Once
(30:12):
the radio came along, everybody said, so long cheap music.
I hated you all along, but you are 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 I
want to listen to their their music. And not only
did technology killed Tim Panale in this sheet music publishing industry,
(30:32):
but it also changed the genre a little bit. It
kind of skewed it more into swing and um some
of this yeah big band, some of the stuff that
came out of the thirties onward, Um, or that was
really kind of where that transition went. Yeah, have you
ever been somewhere where they have a public piano and
(30:53):
seeing someone just walk by and sit down and blow mines?
Didn't you see Greg Allman do that? God? No, if
you know someone who saw that, please try and remember
who it was, because I need to hear that story.
I'll try to remember. I can't remember who it was.
That's pretty amazing. Okay, I don't think I'm making this up.
Let me, let me, let me go specific mental role
(31:16):
of decks. But have you ever seen that? 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, while someone uh New York does this from
time to time, they'll have them on a sidewalker in
a park or something. And in Atlanta they have one
over in Atlantic Station. I've seen people do it there, uh,
and it's always just really cool. And that makes me
(31:37):
miss the fact that piano, Like a lot more people
used to learn piano than they do now. I think
I would love to know how to play the piano
to for that very reason, because I'd love to be
able to sit down and just want to be that
guy so bad, right, someday, it's not too late. I
remember the first time I saw it was that a
student council retreat in high school. That was this one. Uh.
(32:01):
You know, all the student councils from the county get
together over the course of a weekend or a weekend
do stupid stuff um, and learned about leadership um. But
there was this there's always like this one guy on
student council at another school. You're like, man, he didn't
seem like a student council type. He seems like he's thirty.
And this guy did uh, and he was on student
council at some other school. But he was like, you know,
(32:24):
I had like the rat T shirt and it was
just sort of a like a dirty metal head bad
boy of student counts. He totally was. And there was
a piano and one of the lobbies of the dormitories
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
(32:45):
seeing the girls in the room and thinking that guy
has got it. All going on, like that's the key
man and that boy and the rat t shirt grew
up to be Greg allman. Have you have you ever
been to a sig Goold's Request Room? Um? You His
(33:07):
friend Joe McGinty owns it, he's co owner of it,
and he plays piano there. It's just like sing along
piano karaoke and it is amazing. I cannot believe you
haven't been there yet. You have? So does one person
play the piano and everyone sings along? Joe McGinty plays,
and then no, they 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. Okay,
(33:29):
well I've done I've done the rock and Roll Live
Man karaoke before. Oh yeah here in Atlanta, which is
a lot of fun. Um, what do you what do
you do that? Uh? Somewhere in the Highlands I think
the Dark Horse maybe. Okay, yeah, that sounds right. Yeah.
I went for my birthday a couple of years ago
and did Cheap Tricks Surrender and uh did a pretty
good job, if I may say so. Is that surrender parentheses?
(33:52):
Dream Police those are two different songs. Okay, is it
surrender parentheses? I want you to Want Me? Yeah, that's
the one. I've heard that song, but it's funny. At
the one in Atlanta, there's uh, you know the DJ
English Nick. No? Wait, was he on like the radio
like radio DJ? Yeah, he still has English Nick. In Atlanta,
(34:14):
he hosted and he is the the emergency back up
if you're no good, because being bad at karaoke is
no fun, but being bad at live bank karaoke it's
really no fun for anyone. So he stands back there
and if you're not very good, he's singing along with
you and he will just give the signal to sort
of do a little upping of his vocals and lowering
(34:37):
of the other vocals. Is it like the the slice
across your neck like that? No? I mean I think
it's just like an eye signal. And uh, I remember
being nervous. I was like, oh, man, if they 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. But oh you got the nod
from English Nick. Yeah, that means a lot. I have
(34:58):
the opposite story. What happened. I went to Claremont Lounge
to do karaoke years back, chose to do Darling Nikki.
Oh interesting. In the middle, the karaoke DJ breaks in
and goes, It's like William Shatton are singing, isn't it?
Oh my god? You was their supporting dancing just but
(35:20):
but really just hanging on by her fingernails. You know,
you gotta stopped an insulted mid song, mid song, but
I finished Buddy Good. Yeah. I would literally pay a
hundred dollars to have seen that. I wager that it
would have been worth two fifty. Okay, it was pretty
pretty bad. Do we have anything else on Tin Pan Alley?
(35:43):
I forgot what's what we were talking about, Chuck, Well,
we should. We're not gonna get into it here. We
should do a full show on ASCAP though. Yeah, because
yet another thing that early Irving Berlin did was create
as CAP, the American Society of Composers and Performers, Right,
I think producers, producers Okay, man, I didn't even have
it in front of me, but um, they basically protect
(36:04):
and register copyrights for artists. Yeah, it's so convoluted to
these days. Yeah, yeah, I think it definitely deserves its
own thing. But that was another thing that was born
out of Tim pan Alley. 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
(36:24):
not having one that I can play wirelessly throughout all
the speakers in my home. Oh, isn't that amazing? That
is the future for sure, that you can 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 dred CDs to get records. He was like,
(36:49):
I'll give you a hundred and thirty bucks for the
lot and I was like, fine, fine, just get these
stupid nineties CDs away from me. Now. They were great,
but it was just I felt like I should pay
him to take all these off my hands. Did you
still have the jewel cases? Oh? Yeah, they were all
something that 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
(37:11):
traveling and make it a point to go into local
record stores again. I think that's great. I really really
had a good time thumbing through records. It was a
lot of fun. I'll go with you, text me, yeah,
let's do it. Okay. I think that's it for tim Panale.
R I p Tim Panale. Depending on your viewpoint, I
guess yeah, there needs to be a great Another was
a movie in the forties called tin Panale. But someone
(37:33):
should do a really good uh look at the early
burgeoning film I'm sorry movie into almost oh boy music
industry about tin Panalely it'd be oh yeah, that would
be great. There's so many characters involved. Just put Hugh
Jackman in a Sharknado in it. And and by the way,
you got called out for bringing back bread. I did.
(37:56):
I said in it was some episode that I think
the diving bell up is so that we should bring
bread back. And I guess that's what the kids all say. Now.
I didn't realize that, but like at least ten people
emailed and said, yeah, millennials are talking about getting that bread.
It's like they are. I guess so. I like to
think that I had absolutely nothing to do with that.
But but you were the seed do you think so?
(38:18):
You never know? Man, that'd be cool. Before we go
to the chuck, I do have one more thing. I
have to give a shout out to what I considered
the greatest song to come out of Tim Panaley Um.
And I believe it was an Irving Berlin song. Yeah
it was Let's have another cup of coffee? Have you
heard that we use that for something? Didn't we? I
don't remember. We probably did because it's prominent in one
(38:41):
of my favorite movies of all time, Paper Moon. That
was a great song. I love that song so much. Um.
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, yea and pie. Okay,
now that's it. Now I've got nothing else. If you
want to know more about tim pan aale uh, you
(39:03):
can go read up on it and maybe follow whether
it's going to get designated as in New Story Clan
mark or not. We'll find out. In the meantime, it's
time for a listener mail. So this is just a
very sweet email from someone. Hey, guys, I'm sure you're
ceving emails like this all the time, but I would
be remiss if I didn't thank you for all the
(39:23):
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.
Thank you for keeping me calm and educated, and thank
you for making me feel safe even in perilous 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,
(39:47):
I surely would be lost. I 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 accinctly as you guys do your superheroes and
rock Star. From the bottom of my heart, thank you
for the wonderful work you do. You've truly saved me.
Kindest and warmest regards, Georgia. And that's really lovely, Georgia.
(40:08):
If we're ever in a town near you, you are
guests listed. Yes, Wow, Chuck, I think that was a
really good, good idea. Thanks a lot, Georgia. That was
very sweet email. We appreciate it. We're glad we could
help in some some small measure. Thank you very much
for the kudos. Uh, if you want to send us kudos,
we love that kind of thing, including kudos. The candy bar. Yeah,
(40:29):
I remember that the kudos. They were great. Yeah. Um.
Actually I don't know if if somebody sent us one,
if it would still be so great. Are they not around? No?
I think like they would have been manufactured in six
or something like then. I don't keep up with the
candy bar scene. That's what I'm saying. They're not around anymore,
you know, I know. Okay, so uh wow, that was
(40:51):
a little sidetrack on kudos whatnot. If you want to
get in touch with us, you can go onto stuff
you Should Know dot com and find all of our
social links there, and you can also send us an
email to stuff podcast at I heart radio dot com.
M Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart
Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
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visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
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