Berlin, Irving 1888-1989

BERLIN, IRVING 1888-1989

Songwriter

America's Minstrel

When asked to comment on Irving Berlin's place in American music, Jerome Kern famously declared: "Irving Berlin has no place in American music—he is American music," None of his contemporaries in an era of great songwriters that included Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, and Cole Porter wrote so many standard American songs. His fifteen hundred songs display an extraordinary range of material and moods: "White Christmas," "There's No Business Like Show Business," "Remember," "Always," "Blue Skies," "Cheek to Cheek," "Puttin' on the Ritz."

Immigrant Orphan

This intensely American troubador was born in Russia and arrived in America when he was five. His father died when he was eight, and Israel Baiine took to the streets of New York with less than two years of schooling. Working as a singing waiter in low saloons, he taught himself to pick out tunes on the black keys of the piano in the key of F-sharp. There is disagreement about whether he ever learned to read or write music. For the rest of his life he composed on the black keys ab ad the music taken down by an assistant.

Tin-Pan Alley

His first song lyric, "Marie from Sunny Italy," was published in 1907; a printer's error provided him with the surname Berlin. By 1909 he had his first hit, "My Wife's Gone to the Country, Hurrah! Hurrah!" (with George Whiting and Ted Snyder). Then came "Alexander's Ragtime Band" in 1911, one of the most popular of American songs. Berlin's stint on Tin-Pan Alley, the Manhattan locale for music publishers and song pluggers, was brief. In 1909 he began providing songs for Broadway shows, and in 1914 he wrote his first complete score for Watch Your Step, including "Play a Simple Melody." As a soldier during World War I, he wrote a show for the benefit of the troops, Yip, Yip, Yaphank, which featured "Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning."

Broadway

After the war Berlin wrote "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody" for the Ziegfeld Follies. At this point he was so successful that he was able to build his own theater, The Music Box, for which he wrote a series of annual shows, The Music Box Revues, from 1921 through 1924. His 1933 show, As Thousands Cheer, brilliantly demonstrated Berlin's ability to write in different styles: "Easter Parade," "Harlem on my Mind," "Heat Wave," and "Supper Time," the last a domestic lament for the victim of a lynching. His productivity and the variety of his songs fostered the slander that he had secret collaborators. Berlin became a newspaper celebrity during his 1925 courtship of Ellen Mackay, whose Roman Catholic millionaire father tried to prevent her marriage to a Jew.

Hollywood

With the advent of sound movies, Berlin began writing for the studios in 1928 and during the 1930s was primarily occupied with writing movie musicals. Top Hat (1935), with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, became a classic of the genre. Always grateful to America for the opportunities it had provided him, in 1939 Berlin made a gift to the Girl Scouts of a song that had been cut from Yip, Yip, Yaphank: "God Bless America." During World War II he wrote and performed in This Is the Army. The show toured theaters and military bases; the proceeds were donated to military welfare.

The Last Songsrnith

Irving Berlin was seventy-four when he wrote his last show, Mr. President, in 1962. When he died at 101, Berlin was the last of the group of great American songwriters whose work appealed to the entire nation during the first half of the twentieth century. His songs gave expression to the changing concerns of Americans decade by decade. Some of his colleagues were musically or poetically more sophisticated than Berlin. But no one else put the words and the music together as effectively and recognizably as Israel Baiine. Among his most enduring songs are those about music: "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody," "Say It With Music," "Alexander's Ragtime Band," "I Love a Piano," "Let's Face the Music and Dance," "The Song Is Ended."

Sources:

Laurence Bergreen, As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin (New York: Viking, 1990);

Ian Whitcomb, Irving Berlin and Ragtime America (New York; Lime-light, 1988);

Irving Berlin: 100 Years (Columbia 40035).