Everybody knows and loves the American Songbook. But it’s a bit less widely understood that in about 1950, this stream of great songs more or less dried up. All of a sudden, what came over the radio wasn’t Gershwin, Porter, and Berlin, but “Come on-a My House” and “How Much Is that Doggie in the Window?” Elvis and rock and roll arrived a few years later, and at that point the game was truly up. What happened, and why?
In THE B SIDE: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song, acclaimed cultural historian Ben Yagoda answers those questions in a fascinating piece of detective work. Drawing on previously untapped archival sources and on scores of interviews—the voices include Randy Newman, Jimmy Webb, Linda Ronstadt, and Herb Alpert—the book illuminates broad musical trends through a series of intertwined stories. THE B SIDE is about taste, the particular economics and culture of songwriting, and the potential of popular art for greatness and beauty.
About the Author:
Ben Yagoda is a journalism professor at the University of Delaware. He is the author, coauthor or editor of eleven books, including How to Not Write Bad, Memoir: A History; Will Rogers: A Biography; When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech, for Better and/or Worse; The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing; The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism (coedited with Kevin Kerrane); and About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made. He contributes to The Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Lingua Franca” blog and has written for Slate, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and The American Scholar. Yagoda lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, with his wife.