Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Irving Berlin is really, to me amazing example of the kind of story that the United States likes to tell about itself as a nation. So the whole idea of being a melting pot and a land of opportunity and a place where immigrants can make a better life for themselves. And also he's simultaneously an amazing example of just how complicated and imperfect and incomplete that very idealized story can be, because he was a Jewish immigrant from Russia who went on to become a colossally famous songwriter and an enormous contributor to what's own is the Great American Songbook. So that's a loosely defined collection of jazz standards and popular songs from the early twentieth century that have just had a really enduring appeal and are still being sung decades later. So just a few of Irving Berlin's contributions to the Great American Songbook, or the songs White Christmas, God Bless America, putting on the Ritz, Easter Parade and anything you can Do I can do better from the Broadway musical any Get Your Gun. I found working on this really challenging because I kept stopping what I was doing to go watch YouTube videos of people singing these songs, including watching a video of Laura Austiness and Sentino Fontana singing anything you Can Do, which I did in the middle literally of writing this paragraph. And if you're like Tracy, why why that version in particular one, I'd never seen it before too. I miss Crazy Ex Girlfriend, which which Santino Fontana was on. But in addition to all those things that I just said, Irving Berlin also worked in an industry that discriminated against people of color, while also drawing inspiration from and even appropriating musical styles and traditions that were developed by those same people, and also writing and performing musical numbers that could be really offensive to them. So while I originally envisioned this as a winter holiday slash Christmas episode thanks to the song White Christmas and the nineteen fifty film by the same name, this instead turned into a two parter that's not really about Christmas that much at all. It's more about the musical and cultural context of Irving Berlin's work. So today we are going to talk about his life and work through World War One, and then in part two we will pick up in the years between the two World Wars and go through the rest of his career. Irving Berlin's family immigrated to the U s. In eighte from Tolequin in what's now Belarus, which at the time was part of the Russian Empire. There are some variations in the spelling and pronunciation of their name. It would have been written using either the Hebrew alphabet or Cyrillic script, so English speaking officials creating things like ship manifests and immigration records, we're basically making their best guests at writing down the name that they heard in English. When talking to journalists and biographers. Berlin's descendants have also used two slightly different pronunciations of the family's last name, Balin and Baleine. Yes, they're very similar, but just different enough to go wait, subble accents shift. Yeah, So we don't know much detail about their lives before they immigrated. Irving Berlin was born Israel Bilin, also known as Izzy, on May eleven, eight and some accounts give his place of birth as a stuttle in Siberia. He was the youngest of eight children born to Leah and Moses Bullim. Moses was a canceler and also worked as part of the kosher butchering process. Sources contradict about exactly what his role was in that process, whether he actually conducted the slaughtering or whether he was inspecting and certifying that this process had been carried out according to Jewish law. The family moved to the US because they were trying to escape widespread programs and other anti Semitic persecution. Czar Alexander the Second had been assassinated in eight and although his assassin was not Jewish, rumors had spread that Jews were responsible for it. Massive anti Semitic violence followed, and the Bailin family left when it was still at its peak. They arrived in New York City aboard the s s Rhineland on September when Izzy five. While the US would have been physically safer for a Jewish family than the Russian Empire was at that point, the nation was also in the middle of an economic crisis. Multiple factors had fed into the Panic of eighteen ninety three, which started months before the family's arrival and continued until eight This economic depression affected virtually every industry and people lost all their money as stock prices collapsed and banks failed. So after arriving in the US, Izzie's father struggled to find work, like literally any work. Eight members of the family wound up living together in a window lists three room tenement with no running water. That's not three bedrooms, to be clear, that is three total rooms, and they all tried to make ends meet however they could, including renting out their beds to night shift workers so they could sleep there during the day. By the age of eight, is he was doing his part by selling newspapers. Beyond that, we really don't know very much about his childhood. We know that his first language was Yiddish and that he didn't have a lot of formal education. As an adult, he tended to tell the same very few stories about his early years, including that he learned about Christmas from Irish neighbors whose tiny, very scraggly Christmas tree seemed just magical to him. A lot of articles described this as like the Charlie Brown Christmas tree. I think that's probably what most of us envisioned. As you were saying, they're already difficult. Financial situation actually got even worse in nineteen o one, when Izzie's father died at the age of fifty three. Izzie had just turned thirteen, and soon he left home. Some accounts attribute this to his feeling that as a growing teen, he had become a liability to his family. He also described it as a challenge to be the only boy in a home that was otherwise over crowded with women and girls. Soon he was trying to earn a living by busking, including singing in saloons, and he was living mostly in low rent boarding houses. As I got some musical experience, he started trying to find work in tin Pan Alley, which was a place and an umbrella term for the music that was broadly popular in the US and the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and a name for the composers and performers and publishers and others who were all part of making that music. The exact place shifted somewhat over the decades, but it started out on West twenty Street. Today West twenty between Broadway and sixth Avenue is known as tin Pan Alley. The source of that name is also a little bit vague. One popular theory is that it came from the sheer cacophony of different songs being played simultaneously on multiple upright pianos. Some were played by aspiring songwriters hoping to find a publisher for their work, and some by people employed as song pluggers, who were basically musical demonstrators, playing songs to try to entice people to buy the sheet music from them. I can imagine what this sounded like in my head and why people might have equated it to the sound of tin pans being banged around. At this point, sheet music was really at the heart of the economic model for the music business in the United States. The phonograph had been invented in the nineteenth century, and Thomas Edison had unveiled his version in eighteen seventy seven, so by the early nineteen hundreds this was still a really new and still developing technology. Phonographs themselves could be expensive, and the wax cylinders they played can only hold a couple of minutes of sound at first. The cylinders also had to be recorded one at a time, so musicians had to play the same thing over and over, and that meant the finished product was also expensive. Even as mass production techniques improved, they still just did not sound very good. Meanwhile, pianos were seen as almost a requirement for middle class families. They had become a marker of both social status and respectability. Many boarding houses had a piano in a common area, so did community gathering places like churches, schools, and hotels. So a lot of people bought sheet music so they could play and sing popular music for themselves. Often that sheet music was printed with a colorful, illustrated cover and a list of other music available from the same publisher on the back, and from a lot of publishers. It wasn't just the notes on the page that you're buying. It was sort of this nice thinges kind of so. Fourteen year old Izzy Bailen got his start in this industry as a song plugger, hired by songwriter and music publisher Harry von Tilzer in nine two. This was a job that Izzy pursued for himself in spite of the fact that he did not know how to read music or play a piano. He sang. He performed fon tills or songs to the public, and two people in the music industry and for this he was paid five dollars a week. A couple of years later, he was hired as a singing waiter at Mike Salter's Pelham Cafe in Chinatown. The venue in its proprietor both had a nickname that included a racist slur, because while Salter was of Russian Jewish descent, he also had dark skin. At Pelham Cafe is he made seven dollars a week plus tips. This was an overnight job. The cafe was open from eight pm until six am, which seems to have set the stage for Irving Berlin's lifelong habits as a night owl and his chronic insomnia. Unsurprisingly, given this establishments hours, the crowd tended to be on the courser side. They were often inebriated and loud. The waiters were nicknamed nickel kickers because those tips that they got came in the form of throne coins, which the waiters had to chase after as they rolled across the floor. Is He had already figured out that he had a knack for writing lyrics during his early years as a busker. He had found ways to put his own twist on songs that he was singing, and when he improvised. His lyrics were usually clever or funny, and then that usually got him bigger tips. And he also seemed to have an instinct for picking out a good melody, one that was simple and memorable and often already felt familiar to people, so something that was grounded and established tunes and patterns, but also which he managed to turn into something new. So he started trying to write new songs of his own. Again, he had no formal musical training. He probably would have been exposed to music at home, but he had not been formally taught anything. He didn't know how to read or write music. He did not know how to play the piano. He would hear a melody in his head and then pick it out in the key of F sharp major, which on a piano F sharp major scale is played almost exclusively on the black keys of the piano. This required a lot of trial and error and a lot of craftsmanship and revision, and for the rest of his professional life he would talk about working on songs through the night to get them exactly right. On May seven, a couple of days before his nineteenth birthday, is He Bilin published his first song, Marie from sunny Italy. This was certainly not his greatest work as a lyricist. Some of his later work features delightfully clever phrasing that doesn't quite rhyme, but in this song it's more like, please come out tonight, my queen. Can't you hear my mandolin? But just to say this started getting his name out there. The name he was getting out there was not Israel Bilin though. Instead the cover of this sheet music read words by I Berlin, music by M. Nicholson. M Nicholson was Mike Nicholson, pianist at Pelham Cafe. Some sources describe I Berlin as a printer's error, and others as more of a reflection of how people were pronouncing his last name by that point. Still others, though, say that he was looking for a name for himself that was less recognizably Jewish, and that, in addition to the shift from Berlin to Berlin, that he had been thinking about adopting the name Irving for a while. Regardless of exactly how the name change came about, soon is he Bylin was professionally known as Irving Berlin. And we'll talk more about that after we take a quick sponsor break. As Irving Berlin published his first song, the entertainment industry in New York City was growing and shifting. New York's first subway line opened on October n four, and one of the stations on that first line was at Times Square, by the intersection of Broadway and Fort Street. Soon the surrounding area was developing into a theater district. When Marie from Sunny Italy was published, Berlin was still working at Pelham Cafe, but he was fired from that job that year. Reportedly, he fell asleep while he was supposed to be tending the cash register and at the end of the night was missing from the till Berlin got another job pretty quickly, though, and it was a step up. It was at Jimmy Kelly's Folly, where his wages were a little better the clientele was a little more upscale. He earned enough money that he was able to afford to rent a place with his friend and colleague Max Winslow, rather than staying in low rent boarding houses. He started meeting and making more connections and friendships with other entertainers, including past podcast subject Fanny Bryce, and he kept trying to publish songs, often as the lyricist at that point with somebody else writing the music. If you look up music from this era, whether it's by Irving Berlin or by someone else, you're going to find a lot of stuff that's offensive or at the very least insensitive by today's standards. And there were people who pointed out its offensiveness at the time. For example, black face had become an established part of popular entertainment, with white actors wearing exaggerated black makeup and adopting a heavily stereotypical way of speaking and singing. Black Face has multiple roots, including white performers appropriating the music and dance styles of black communities and using them to make money, while also largely excluding black performers from the same industry. Black Face had become so widespread and popular that there were also black actors who performed in black face, although that of core added additional layers of nuance to their performances. By the time Irving Berlin started writing songs, people had been criticizing white performers use of black face for decades. For example, Frederick Douglas was a vocal critic as early as the eighteen forties, so like six decades worth of criticism. Yeah, and this is something that was always racist, but was incredibly normalized at this point. Some of the music that came out of Tin pan Alley was essentially audio blackface songs that were written and sung by white performers that leaned really heavily into racist stereotypes of how black people spoke and acted, and in a lot of ways, Tin pan Alley took a very similar approach to other racial and ethnic groups. Music and lyrics and the accents that were adopted to sing them reflect really stereotypical perceptions of immigrants from Italy and Ireland and particular, as well as perceptions of Jewish immigrants from various parts of Europe and of indigenous people in North America. Basically, if there is a group you can stereotype, there was music that played into those stereotypes. And feeding into all of this was a broad fascination with anything that white people thought of as exotic. Because entertainment was one of the industries that was open to Jewish immigrants, many of Tin Paney's songwriters and composers were Jewish immigrants themselves or were the children of Jewish immigrants. They knew that they could make money through these exotic sized depictions, whether they were of their own community or someone else's and as is the case today, another big money maker was sex, or at least innuendo, which means a lot of these songs could also lean into stereotypes around gender and relationships. Irving Berlin's first really big money maker was My Wife's Gone to the country hooray hooray, and which hooray is spelled like hurrah in the sheet music, which I find kind of delightful. He co wrote this with George Whiting and Ted Snyder. Ted Snyder was a music publisher who also published the sheet music for this song. As that title suggests, this song is about a man whose wife says she can't stand the heat anymore, so she's taking the children out to the country. It's chorus goes, my wife's gone to the country, hooray, hooray. She thought it best I need a rest, That's why she went away. She took the children with her. Hooray, hooray. I don't care what becomes of me. My wife's gone away. This man is so excited that his wife and kids are gone that he puts an ad about it in the paper announcing it and also looks up a pretty girl he used to know named Molly if she listens to a recording of this song. It's generally recorded in a way that sounds exuberantly gleeful. Uh. And it was a huge hit. Three hundred thousand copies of the sheet music were sold, and Irving Berlin made a penny per copy that added up to three thousand dollars, which was more money than he had ever seen in his life. He used some of the proceeds to move his mother and one of his sisters out of their Lower East Side tenement to a place in the Bronx where he lived as well. He also bought his mother a rocking chair, and he bought a transposing piano, one that used a lever to change the key so he could keep picking out the melodies enough sharp major while then hearing what they sounded like in a different key. This is so fascinating to me. Yeah. Uh. In Irving Berlin became both a Freemason and a Shriner. The Shriners are connected to Freemasonry, and while not all Freemasons become Shriners, a man has to become a master Mason before becoming a Shriner. A year later, Berlin published what's often cited as his first international hit, Alexander's Ragtime Band. This definitely was not his first song to sell internationally, but in the course of a single year, more than two million copies of the sheet music were sold, earning Berlin roughly forty dollars. We mentioned earlier that Earling Berlin was a night owl, and in particular, he often talked about working through the night in just a grueling effort to finish a song, or sometimes more struggling to write a song until the very last minute, and then having to pack all that same effort into a very short window to hit a deadline. Alexander's Ragtime Band was an exception to that. It came together for him really quickly. Berlin biographer James Kaplan describes this song as quote a joyous tribute to African American musical genius, the first great and lasting one in American popular song from a Jewish American musical genius us. Kaplan also calls the song a celebration of America itself. There are some ironies involved in this song and its success. It introduced a lot of people to the idea of ragtime, like its musical successor, jazz, ragtime is a style of music initially developed by black musicians and performers before becoming popular among white performers and songwriters. The name ragtime comes from the syncopated rhythms and ragged rhymes that are hallmarks of the style. But even though Alexander's Ragtime Band included the word ragtime in the title and celebrated ragtime and in some ways introduced ragtime to a broader audience, it is not really a rag This song is often described really more as a march, and ragtime did have roots in marches, but it's a little bit different. Uh. Before long, rumors were also spreading that Berlin had stolen the work of a black musician in writing this song. Some people gave the credits to composer and songwriter Lukey Johnson, who said he didn't have anything to do with it and counter quote, I wish I had written that song. Decades later, Lottie Stokes Joplin, the widow of Scott Joplin, who was known as the King of Ragtime, said that Berlin had stolen the tune from her late husband, But scholars who have compared Alexander's Ragtime Band to various pieces of Joplin surviving work, have not found a clear example of like definite copying. Irving Berlin would face other accusations of plagiarism during his career, including accusations of plagiarizing the work of black performers. He vigorously denied these allegations, sometimes in a way that could sound really dismissive toward the performers or communities whose work he was allegedly copying. He absolutely drew influence from things like folk songs and commonlities as well as from other people's work, and some of his work can definitely be seen as appropriating other cultures and musical traditions. But there are not really clear cut examples of lifting other people's entire songs note for note. Most of the examples that have been brought up are sequences of four or five notes that are part of a longer piece. Yeah, I saw descriptions that were like, if people had heard this song before, they might recognize these four notes as the same as those four notes, which is not as obvious as something like taking the entire baseline of under pressure and using it to make ice ice baby, which is like a thing that jumps out to me, is like a clear example of musical copying. Well, that's considered a sampling though, isn't it. Yeah, But it wasn't acknowledged when it originally came out, I think, which was the problem, right, I mean that was when like the concept of sampling was still dead. Um. But like that's a more direct obvious this thing turned into this thing than most of the examples that people are like, what's It's more like, okay, they're the sequence of four notes is the same as this other sequence of four notes. In February of nineteen twelve, Irving Berlin married Dorothy Gets, and their marriage was tragically short. She died on July sevent of that same year. She likely died as a result of typhoid, which she contracted during their honeymoon in Cuba. Berlin wrote the ballad When I Lost You after her death, and that is a song that's often described as really the most personal one that he ever wrote. It took a while for Berlin to really start writing again after his wife's death, and when he did, his next career move was writing for Broadway. And we'll get into that after a sponsor break. As we said earlier, Irving Berlin started working for Ted Snyder in nineteen o nine. Into the nineteen teens, he became more involved with that business, with Ted Snyder, Henry Watterson, and Irving Berlin eventually coming together to become Waterson, Berlin and Snyder, which became one of the most prominent sheet music publishers in the US in the early twentieth century. During these years, Berlin had also started working with his first musical secretary, Cliff Hess, who the Snyder Company hired in nineteen thirteen. Berlin and Hess worked together extensively over the next five years, with Hess even moving into Berlin's apartment to keep up with his work. Through the night writing habits. Berlin routinely woke up at noon, ate breakfast, and started working, going to bed at five o'clock the next morning, which I will just say sounds like a dream schedule, I think for him it was until life intervenes to make it deeply inconvenient to be on that schedule. Hess was the first of several musical secretaries and arrangers who Berlin worked with during his career, which really helped him compensate for the fact that he didn't know how to read or write music, or really to play the piano. These were skills that he only started to develop much later, and even then most accounts say he was never really proficient at them. Often Berlin would sing a melody or pick it out on his transposing piano, and his musical secretary would play it back, adding in the harmonies and other musical elements. People described Berlin as being able to point out spots where his secretary had used different notes or chords than what Berlin had intended, because while he could not read the notes on the page, he could hear them in his mind. He also had a sharp business sense, both for his own work and for the industry in en. He was one of the co founders of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers or as CAP, along with other prominent composers and publishers. As CAP has its own history that we are not going to get into, but at its founding, the purpose was to help members to copyright and license their music, making it easier to protect their work and earn money from it. Berlin's first full Broadway score was for Watch Your Step, which opened at the New Amsterdam Theater in Berlin wrote the music and the lyrics, and this was the first time that a tin pan alley composer made the move to Broadway. This drew a lot of influence from Ragtime, and one of its best remembered songs is the overlapping duet play, a simple melody which listeners of a certain age may remember from when Jane Stapleton and Fozzy Bear sang it on The Muppet Show. It is so charming, It's a very delightful song. In the seven years that had passed since his first song publication in seven Berlin had published roughly one ninety other songs as either a composer or a lyricist. While he had mostly been writing the lyrics for his first songs, over time that had shifted until he was almost always responsible for both of those nineties songs published over seven years, he had written both the music and lyrics to about two thirds of them. This was a lot part of his creative process involved just churning out a huge amount of material, knowing that only some of it would be really great. In one story, somebody complimented him at a party saying, no one has written as many hits as you have. His response was, I know there's no one who has written so many failures. During these years, Berlin had honed his songwriting style and craft. He was really focused on getting just the right melody, often a very simple melody, and just the right lyrics, which again were often really simple, but tucked in with that simplicity returns of phrase and patterns and rhymes they were very catchy and evocative. This work drew from a lot of musical influences, including ragtime and blues in the earliest years of jazz. As a musical style, his work was sometimes described as jazz. He definitely incorporated some elements that were really common in jazz, including the syncopated beats that were also part of ragtime, but he didn't really incorporate the more improvisational elements that are often found in jazz. At the same time, as was the case with Alexander's Ragtime Band, introducing the idea of ragtime to a white audience without actually being a rag his jazz like work became an entry point for a lot of white audiences and in some cases even defined for those audiences what jazz was all about. World War One started in nineteen fourteen, following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenburg. In the face of war and a growing sense of isolation and xenophobia in the US, Berlin started the process of becoming US citizen in nineteen seventeen. The United States became involved in World War One. In early nineteen eighteen, Irving Berlin took his oath of citizenship and he was also drafted at the age of thirty. He was almost too old to be drafted. The cutoff was thirty one, and he was really surprised that he passed. As physical. In addition to the chronic insomnia that we already talked about, he was also chronically ill with what's usually described as nervous indigestion, and that affected him for his whole life. There are some accounts of all this that make it sort of sound like he started his citizenship process in spite of the war, thinking that he wouldn't be drafted because of his health. But like the draft applied to people regardless of whether they were citizens or not, like it applied to all men living in the United States, so whether he was a citizen or not was not part of whether he was going to be drafted. In May of nineteen eighteen, Berlin became a private in the U. S Army and was stationed at Camp Upton in yap Hank, New York. Work he was intensely patriotic, and he seems to have really wanted to serve his adopted country, but he also found life in the army very difficult. In particular, he hated how early he had to get up, which really is not surprising given his tendency to go to bed at five in the morning and get up at noon. He described himself as hating revelie so much that he would lie awake at night thinking about it. I felt this so much in my bones, in my bones. He wrote a song about this, called Oh How I Hate to get up in the morning, and that song started to catch on around Camp Upton. Soon. Berlin proposed writing a musical about army life to be used to raise funds that would be sort of along the lines of George Cohen's song Over There, which came out in nineteen seventeen, as well as a musical review that the US Navy had staged the previous spring. Exactly how this all came about is a little bit fuzzy, but the result was Yip Yip Yap Hank, which was a review with a cast of army recruits. It was performed at Camp Upton before moving to the Century Theater in New York City and running for thirty two performances. This was a vaudeville style review with music and dance and acrobatics, and a black face number and a drag number. Berlin, who at this point had been promoted to sergeant, performed Oh How I Hate to Get up in the morning himself. After the end of World War One, Berlin looked back at his career and tried to figure out what his next step should be. While his name was still part of Waterson, Berlin and Snyder, he wasn't really working with that company anymore. Ultimately, he established his own publishing house, Irving Berlin, Inc. So he could control the copyrights and the royalties to his own music. Two years later, he wrote fourteen musical numbers for the Zigfield Follies. He went on to do various work with the Follies in the years that followed. In one he teamed up with Joseph M. Shank and Sam Harris to establish his own Broadway theater, The Music Box. This was a colossally expensive and difficult venture with technically complicated stage equipment, including an elevator. His work and his name recognition continued to grow in the early nineteen twenties, and he also fell in love again. And that is where we are going to pick up next time. Do you have some yummi listener mail to tide us over until our next episode? I do. This is from Angela and Angela wrote after our recent episode on Charles Drew and blood banking. Angela said, Hi, Holly and Tracy. I'm sure you recorded the behind the scenes about blood banks before this news came out, but I thought I would put out the p s A that the deferral for donating blood if you were in Europe during Mad Cow has been lifted. Blood donation is very important to me and has been a regular part of my life since I turned eighteen. I won't say how old I am, but I have recently gotten my six gallon pin and that doesn't include the different places I donated when I was younger. Since I have loved many people who have benefited from blood donation. Anything that makes it so more people can donate makes me happy. I'm glad the f d A is constantly going back and reevaluating the policy is to try to maximize the number of people who can donate, but I do agree with you that it seems like there are some in place for the wrong reasons. Thank you, as always for your continued work to keep listeners informed of the past and its impact today, Angela, Thank you so much Angela for this update. So yeah, the last time that I gave blood, before writing that episode and doing the behind the scenes UM, the f d A had actually issued new guidance UM, but the Red Cross had not incorporated that new guidance into their process yet. So when I gave blood at that point, folks who had lived in Europe during the big Mad Cow outbreak, we're still excluded from donating. UM. They actually changed. They announced that they were changing the policy UM shortly before we recorded this episode, and also shortly before the next time I gave blood. But I'm pretty sure that was still in the questionnaire that day. It's not in the questionnaire anymore. UM. This directly affects people I know who either like lived in the UK for a period while they were in college or grad school, or folks I know who moved from the UK to the United States. So yeah, that that rule has changed from what was in place for a very long time. So thank you Angela for letting me know about that. A couple of folks I know who this applies to also said something like, within two or three days of getting this email that we're like, hey, I can give blood again and we're very excited about it. 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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Irving Berlin is really, to me amazing example of the kind of story that the United States likes to tell about itself as a nation. So the whole idea of being a melting pot and a land of opportunity and a place where immigrants can make a better life for themselves. And also he's simultaneously an amazing example of just how complicated and imperfect and incomplete that very idealized story can be, because he was a Jewish immigrant from Russia who went on to become a colossally famous songwriter and an enormous contributor to what's own is the Great American Songbook. So that's a loosely defined collection of jazz standards and popular songs from the early twentieth century that have just had a really enduring appeal and are still being sung decades later. So just a few of Irving Berlin's contributions to the Great American Songbook, or the songs White Christmas, God Bless America, putting on the Ritz, Easter Parade and anything you can Do I can do better from the Broadway musical any Get Your Gun. I found working on this really challenging because I kept stopping what I was doing to go watch YouTube videos of people singing these songs, including watching a video of Laura Austiness and Sentino Fontana singing anything you Can Do, which I did in the middle literally of writing this paragraph. And if you're like Tracy, why why that version in particular one, I'd never seen it before too. I miss Crazy Ex Girlfriend, which which Santino Fontana was on. But in addition to all those things that I just said, Irving Berlin also worked in an industry that discriminated against people of color, while also drawing inspiration from and even appropriating musical styles and traditions that were developed by those same people, and also writing and performing musical numbers that could be really offensive to them. So while I originally envisioned this as a winter holiday slash Christmas episode thanks to the song White Christmas and the nineteen fifty film by the same name, this instead turned into a two parter that's not really about Christmas that much at all. It's more about the musical and cultural context of Irving Berlin's work. So today we are going to talk about his life and work through World War One, and then in part two we will pick up in the years between the two World Wars and go through the rest of his career. Irving Berlin's family immigrated to the U s. In eighte from Tolequin in what's now Belarus, which at the time was part of the Russian Empire. There are some variations in the spelling and pronunciation of their name. It would have been written using either the Hebrew alphabet or Cyrillic script, so English speaking officials creating things like ship manifests and immigration records, we're basically making their best guests at writing down the name that they heard in English. When talking to journalists and biographers. Berlin's descendants have also used two slightly different pronunciations of the family's last name, Balin and Baleine. Yes, they're very similar, but just different enough to go wait, subble accents shift. Yeah, So we don't know much detail about their lives before they immigrated. Irving Berlin was born Israel Bilin, also known as Izzy, on May eleven, eight and some accounts give his place of birth as a stuttle in Siberia. He was the youngest of eight children born to Leah and Moses Bullim. Moses was a canceler and also worked as part of the kosher butchering process. Sources contradict about exactly what his role was in that process, whether he actually conducted the slaughtering or whether he was inspecting and certifying that this process had been carried out according to Jewish law. The family moved to the US because they were trying to escape widespread programs and other anti Semitic persecution. Czar Alexander the Second had been assassinated in eight and although his assassin was not Jewish, rumors had spread that Jews were responsible for it. Massive anti Semitic violence followed, and the Bailin family left when it was still at its peak. They arrived in New York City aboard the s s Rhineland on September when Izzy five. While the US would have been physically safer for a Jewish family than the Russian Empire was at that point, the nation was also in the middle of an economic crisis. Multiple factors had fed into the Panic of eighteen ninety three, which started months before the family's arrival and continued until eight This economic depression affected virtually every industry and people lost all their money as stock prices collapsed and banks failed. So after arriving in the US, Izzie's father struggled to find work, like literally any work. Eight members of the family wound up living together in a window lists three room tenement with no running water. That's not three bedrooms, to be clear, that is three total rooms, and they all tried to make ends meet however they could, including renting out their beds to night shift workers so they could sleep there during the day. By the age of eight, is he was doing his part by selling newspapers. Beyond that, we really don't know very much about his childhood. We know that his first language was Yiddish and that he didn't have a lot of formal education. As an adult, he tended to tell the same very few stories about his early years, including that he learned about Christmas from Irish neighbors whose tiny, very scraggly Christmas tree seemed just magical to him. A lot of articles described this as like the Charlie Brown Christmas tree. I think that's probably what most of us envisioned. As you were saying, they're already difficult. Financial situation actually got even worse in nineteen o one, when Izzie's father died at the age of fifty three. Izzie had just turned thirteen, and soon he left home. Some accounts attribute this to his feeling that as a growing teen, he had become a liability to his family. He also described it as a challenge to be the only boy in a home that was otherwise over crowded with women and girls. Soon he was trying to earn a living by busking, including singing in saloons, and he was living mostly in low rent boarding houses. As I got some musical experience, he started trying to find work in tin Pan Alley, which was a place and an umbrella term for the music that was broadly popular in the US and the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and a name for the composers and performers and publishers and others who were all part of making that music. The exact place shifted somewhat over the decades, but it started out on West twenty Street. Today West twenty between Broadway and sixth Avenue is known as tin Pan Alley. The source of that name is also a little bit vague. One popular theory is that it came from the sheer cacophony of different songs being played simultaneously on multiple upright pianos. Some were played by aspiring songwriters hoping to find a publisher for their work, and some by people employed as song pluggers, who were basically musical demonstrators, playing songs to try to entice people to buy the sheet music from them. I can imagine what this sounded like in my head and why people might have equated it to the sound of tin pans being banged around. At this point, sheet music was really at the heart of the economic model for the music business in the United States. The phonograph had been invented in the nineteenth century, and Thomas Edison had unveiled his version in eighteen seventy seven, so by the early nineteen hundreds this was still a really new and still developing technology. Phonographs themselves could be expensive, and the wax cylinders they played can only hold a couple of minutes of sound at first. The cylinders also had to be recorded one at a time, so musicians had to play the same thing over and over, and that meant the finished product was also expensive. Even as mass production techniques improved, they still just did not sound very good. Meanwhile, pianos were seen as almost a requirement for middle class families. They had become a marker of both social status and respectability. Many boarding houses had a piano in a common area, so did community gathering places like churches, schools, and hotels. So a lot of people bought sheet music so they could play and sing popular music for themselves. Often that sheet music was printed with a colorful, illustrated cover and a list of other music available from the same publisher on the back, and from a lot of publishers. It wasn't just the notes on the page that you're buying. It was sort of this nice thinges kind of so. Fourteen year old Izzy Bailen got his start in this industry as a song plugger, hired by songwriter and music publisher Harry von Tilzer in nine two. This was a job that Izzy pursued for himself in spite of the fact that he did not know how to read music or play a piano. He sang. He performed fon tills or songs to the public, and two people in the music industry and for this he was paid five dollars a week. A couple of years later, he was hired as a singing waiter at Mike Salter's Pelham Cafe in Chinatown. The venue in its proprietor both had a nickname that included a racist slur, because while Salter was of Russian Jewish descent, he also had dark skin. At Pelham Cafe is he made seven dollars a week plus tips. This was an overnight job. The cafe was open from eight pm until six am, which seems to have set the stage for Irving Berlin's lifelong habits as a night owl and his chronic insomnia. Unsurprisingly, given this establishments hours, the crowd tended to be on the courser side. They were often inebriated and loud. The waiters were nicknamed nickel kickers because those tips that they got came in the form of throne coins, which the waiters had to chase after as they rolled across the floor. Is He had already figured out that he had a knack for writing lyrics during his early years as a busker. He had found ways to put his own twist on songs that he was singing, and when he improvised. His lyrics were usually clever or funny, and then that usually got him bigger tips. And he also seemed to have an instinct for picking out a good melody, one that was simple and memorable and often already felt familiar to people, so something that was grounded and established tunes and patterns, but also which he managed to turn into something new. So he started trying to write new songs of his own. Again, he had no formal musical training. He probably would have been exposed to music at home, but he had not been formally taught anything. He didn't know how to read or write music. He did not know how to play the piano. He would hear a melody in his head and then pick it out in the key of F sharp major, which on a piano F sharp major scale is played almost exclusively on the black keys of the piano. This required a lot of trial and error and a lot of craftsmanship and revision, and for the rest of his professional life he would talk about working on songs through the night to get them exactly right. On May seven, a couple of days before his nineteenth birthday, is He Bilin published his first song, Marie from sunny Italy. This was certainly not his greatest work as a lyricist. Some of his later work features delightfully clever phrasing that doesn't quite rhyme, but in this song it's more like, please come out tonight, my queen. Can't you hear my mandolin? But just to say this started getting his name out there. The name he was getting out there was not Israel Bilin though. Instead the cover of this sheet music read words by I Berlin, music by M. Nicholson. M Nicholson was Mike Nicholson, pianist at Pelham Cafe. Some sources describe I Berlin as a printer's error, and others as more of a reflection of how people were pronouncing his last name by that point. Still others, though, say that he was looking for a name for himself that was less recognizably Jewish, and that, in addition to the shift from Berlin to Berlin, that he had been thinking about adopting the name Irving for a while. Regardless of exactly how the name change came about, soon is he Bylin was professionally known as Irving Berlin. And we'll talk more about that after we take a quick sponsor break. As Irving Berlin published his first song, the entertainment industry in New York City was growing and shifting. New York's first subway line opened on October n four, and one of the stations on that first line was at Times Square, by the intersection of Broadway and Fort Street. Soon the surrounding area was developing into a theater district. When Marie from Sunny Italy was published, Berlin was still working at Pelham Cafe, but he was fired from that job that year. Reportedly, he fell asleep while he was supposed to be tending the cash register and at the end of the night was missing from the till Berlin got another job pretty quickly, though, and it was a step up. It was at Jimmy Kelly's Folly, where his wages were a little better the clientele was a little more upscale. He earned enough money that he was able to afford to rent a place with his friend and colleague Max Winslow, rather than staying in low rent boarding houses. He started meeting and making more connections and friendships with other entertainers, including past podcast subject Fanny Bryce, and he kept trying to publish songs, often as the lyricist at that point with somebody else writing the music. If you look up music from this era, whether it's by Irving Berlin or by someone else, you're going to find a lot of stuff that's offensive or at the very least insensitive by today's standards. And there were people who pointed out its offensiveness at the time. For example, black face had become an established part of popular entertainment, with white actors wearing exaggerated black makeup and adopting a heavily stereotypical way of speaking and singing. Black Face has multiple roots, including white performers appropriating the music and dance styles of black communities and using them to make money, while also largely excluding black performers from the same industry. Black Face had become so widespread and popular that there were also black actors who performed in black face, although that of core added additional layers of nuance to their performances. By the time Irving Berlin started writing songs, people had been criticizing white performers use of black face for decades. For example, Frederick Douglas was a vocal critic as early as the eighteen forties, so like six decades worth of criticism. Yeah, and this is something that was always racist, but was incredibly normalized at this point. Some of the music that came out of Tin pan Alley was essentially audio blackface songs that were written and sung by white performers that leaned really heavily into racist stereotypes of how black people spoke and acted, and in a lot of ways, Tin pan Alley took a very similar approach to other racial and ethnic groups. Music and lyrics and the accents that were adopted to sing them reflect really stereotypical perceptions of immigrants from Italy and Ireland and particular, as well as perceptions of Jewish immigrants from various parts of Europe and of indigenous people in North America. Basically, if there is a group you can stereotype, there was music that played into those stereotypes. And feeding into all of this was a broad fascination with anything that white people thought of as exotic. Because entertainment was one of the industries that was open to Jewish immigrants, many of Tin Paney's songwriters and composers were Jewish immigrants themselves or were the children of Jewish immigrants. They knew that they could make money through these exotic sized depictions, whether they were of their own community or someone else's and as is the case today, another big money maker was sex, or at least innuendo, which means a lot of these songs could also lean into stereotypes around gender and relationships. Irving Berlin's first really big money maker was My Wife's Gone to the country hooray hooray, and which hooray is spelled like hurrah in the sheet music, which I find kind of delightful. He co wrote this with George Whiting and Ted Snyder. Ted Snyder was a music publisher who also published the sheet music for this song. As that title suggests, this song is about a man whose wife says she can't stand the heat anymore, so she's taking the children out to the country. It's chorus goes, my wife's gone to the country, hooray, hooray. She thought it best I need a rest, That's why she went away. She took the children with her. Hooray, hooray. I don't care what becomes of me. My wife's gone away. This man is so excited that his wife and kids are gone that he puts an ad about it in the paper announcing it and also looks up a pretty girl he used to know named Molly if she listens to a recording of this song. It's generally recorded in a way that sounds exuberantly gleeful. Uh. And it was a huge hit. Three hundred thousand copies of the sheet music were sold, and Irving Berlin made a penny per copy that added up to three thousand dollars, which was more money than he had ever seen in his life. He used some of the proceeds to move his mother and one of his sisters out of their Lower East Side tenement to a place in the Bronx where he lived as well. He also bought his mother a rocking chair, and he bought a transposing piano, one that used a lever to change the key so he could keep picking out the melodies enough sharp major while then hearing what they sounded like in a different key. This is so fascinating to me. Yeah. Uh. In Irving Berlin became both a Freemason and a Shriner. The Shriners are connected to Freemasonry, and while not all Freemasons become Shriners, a man has to become a master Mason before becoming a Shriner. A year later, Berlin published what's often cited as his first international hit, Alexander's Ragtime Band. This definitely was not his first song to sell internationally, but in the course of a single year, more than two million copies of the sheet music were sold, earning Berlin roughly forty dollars. We mentioned earlier that Earling Berlin was a night owl, and in particular, he often talked about working through the night in just a grueling effort to finish a song, or sometimes more struggling to write a song until the very last minute, and then having to pack all that same effort into a very short window to hit a deadline. Alexander's Ragtime Band was an exception to that. It came together for him really quickly. Berlin biographer James Kaplan describes this song as quote a joyous tribute to African American musical genius, the first great and lasting one in American popular song from a Jewish American musical genius us. Kaplan also calls the song a celebration of America itself. There are some ironies involved in this song and its success. It introduced a lot of people to the idea of ragtime, like its musical successor, jazz, ragtime is a style of music initially developed by black musicians and performers before becoming popular among white performers and songwriters. The name ragtime comes from the syncopated rhythms and ragged rhymes that are hallmarks of the style. But even though Alexander's Ragtime Band included the word ragtime in the title and celebrated ragtime and in some ways introduced ragtime to a broader audience, it is not really a rag This song is often described really more as a march, and ragtime did have roots in marches, but it's a little bit different. Uh. Before long, rumors were also spreading that Berlin had stolen the work of a black musician in writing this song. Some people gave the credits to composer and songwriter Lukey Johnson, who said he didn't have anything to do with it and counter quote, I wish I had written that song. Decades later, Lottie Stokes Joplin, the widow of Scott Joplin, who was known as the King of Ragtime, said that Berlin had stolen the tune from her late husband, But scholars who have compared Alexander's Ragtime Band to various pieces of Joplin surviving work, have not found a clear example of like definite copying. Irving Berlin would face other accusations of plagiarism during his career, including accusations of plagiarizing the work of black performers. He vigorously denied these allegations, sometimes in a way that could sound really dismissive toward the performers or communities whose work he was allegedly copying. He absolutely drew influence from things like folk songs and commonlities as well as from other people's work, and some of his work can definitely be seen as appropriating other cultures and musical traditions. But there are not really clear cut examples of lifting other people's entire songs note for note. Most of the examples that have been brought up are sequences of four or five notes that are part of a longer piece. Yeah, I saw descriptions that were like, if people had heard this song before, they might recognize these four notes as the same as those four notes, which is not as obvious as something like taking the entire baseline of under pressure and using it to make ice ice baby, which is like a thing that jumps out to me, is like a clear example of musical copying. Well, that's considered a sampling though, isn't it. Yeah, But it wasn't acknowledged when it originally came out, I think, which was the problem, right, I mean that was when like the concept of sampling was still dead. Um. But like that's a more direct obvious this thing turned into this thing than most of the examples that people are like, what's It's more like, okay, they're the sequence of four notes is the same as this other sequence of four notes. In February of nineteen twelve, Irving Berlin married Dorothy Gets, and their marriage was tragically short. She died on July sevent of that same year. She likely died as a result of typhoid, which she contracted during their honeymoon in Cuba. Berlin wrote the ballad When I Lost You after her death, and that is a song that's often described as really the most personal one that he ever wrote. It took a while for Berlin to really start writing again after his wife's death, and when he did, his next career move was writing for Broadway. And we'll get into that after a sponsor break. As we said earlier, Irving Berlin started working for Ted Snyder in nineteen o nine. Into the nineteen teens, he became more involved with that business, with Ted Snyder, Henry Watterson, and Irving Berlin eventually coming together to become Waterson, Berlin and Snyder, which became one of the most prominent sheet music publishers in the US in the early twentieth century. During these years, Berlin had also started working with his first musical secretary, Cliff Hess, who the Snyder Company hired in nineteen thirteen. Berlin and Hess worked together extensively over the next five years, with Hess even moving into Berlin's apartment to keep up with his work. Through the night writing habits. Berlin routinely woke up at noon, ate breakfast, and started working, going to bed at five o'clock the next morning, which I will just say sounds like a dream schedule, I think for him it was until life intervenes to make it deeply inconvenient to be on that schedule. Hess was the first of several musical secretaries and arrangers who Berlin worked with during his career, which really helped him compensate for the fact that he didn't know how to read or write music, or really to play the piano. These were skills that he only started to develop much later, and even then most accounts say he was never really proficient at them. Often Berlin would sing a melody or pick it out on his transposing piano, and his musical secretary would play it back, adding in the harmonies and other musical elements. People described Berlin as being able to point out spots where his secretary had used different notes or chords than what Berlin had intended, because while he could not read the notes on the page, he could hear them in his mind. He also had a sharp business sense, both for his own work and for the industry in en. He was one of the co founders of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers or as CAP, along with other prominent composers and publishers. As CAP has its own history that we are not going to get into, but at its founding, the purpose was to help members to copyright and license their music, making it easier to protect their work and earn money from it. Berlin's first full Broadway score was for Watch Your Step, which opened at the New Amsterdam Theater in Berlin wrote the music and the lyrics, and this was the first time that a tin pan alley composer made the move to Broadway. This drew a lot of influence from Ragtime, and one of its best remembered songs is the overlapping duet play, a simple melody which listeners of a certain age may remember from when Jane Stapleton and Fozzy Bear sang it on The Muppet Show. It is so charming, It's a very delightful song. In the seven years that had passed since his first song publication in seven Berlin had published roughly one ninety other songs as either a composer or a lyricist. While he had mostly been writing the lyrics for his first songs, over time that had shifted until he was almost always responsible for both of those nineties songs published over seven years, he had written both the music and lyrics to about two thirds of them. This was a lot part of his creative process involved just churning out a huge amount of material, knowing that only some of it would be really great. In one story, somebody complimented him at a party saying, no one has written as many hits as you have. His response was, I know there's no one who has written so many failures. During these years, Berlin had honed his songwriting style and craft. He was really focused on getting just the right melody, often a very simple melody, and just the right lyrics, which again were often really simple, but tucked in with that simplicity returns of phrase and patterns and rhymes they were very catchy and evocative. This work drew from a lot of musical influences, including ragtime and blues in the earliest years of jazz. As a musical style, his work was sometimes described as jazz. He definitely incorporated some elements that were really common in jazz, including the syncopated beats that were also part of ragtime, but he didn't really incorporate the more improvisational elements that are often found in jazz. At the same time, as was the case with Alexander's Ragtime Band, introducing the idea of ragtime to a white audience without actually being a rag his jazz like work became an entry point for a lot of white audiences and in some cases even defined for those audiences what jazz was all about. World War One started in nineteen fourteen, following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenburg. In the face of war and a growing sense of isolation and xenophobia in the US, Berlin started the process of becoming US citizen in nineteen seventeen. The United States became involved in World War One. In early nineteen eighteen, Irving Berlin took his oath of citizenship and he was also drafted at the age of thirty. He was almost too old to be drafted. The cutoff was thirty one, and he was really surprised that he passed. As physical. In addition to the chronic insomnia that we already talked about, he was also chronically ill with what's usually described as nervous indigestion, and that affected him for his whole life. There are some accounts of all this that make it sort of sound like he started his citizenship process in spite of the war, thinking that he wouldn't be drafted because of his health. But like the draft applied to people regardless of whether they were citizens or not, like it applied to all men living in the United States, so whether he was a citizen or not was not part of whether he was going to be drafted. In May of nineteen eighteen, Berlin became a private in the U. S Army and was stationed at Camp Upton in yap Hank, New York. Work he was intensely patriotic, and he seems to have really wanted to serve his adopted country, but he also found life in the army very difficult. In particular, he hated how early he had to get up, which really is not surprising given his tendency to go to bed at five in the morning and get up at noon. He described himself as hating revelie so much that he would lie awake at night thinking about it. I felt this so much in my bones, in my bones. He wrote a song about this, called Oh How I Hate to get up in the morning, and that song started to catch on around Camp Upton. Soon. Berlin proposed writing a musical about army life to be used to raise funds that would be sort of along the lines of George Cohen's song Over There, which came out in nineteen seventeen, as well as a musical review that the US Navy had staged the previous spring. Exactly how this all came about is a little bit fuzzy, but the result was Yip Yip Yap Hank, which was a review with a cast of army recruits. It was performed at Camp Upton before moving to the Century Theater in New York City and running for thirty two performances. This was a vaudeville style review with music and dance and acrobatics, and a black face number and a drag number. Berlin, who at this point had been promoted to sergeant, performed Oh How I Hate to Get up in the morning himself. After the end of World War One, Berlin looked back at his career and tried to figure out what his next step should be. While his name was still part of Waterson, Berlin and Snyder, he wasn't really working with that company anymore. Ultimately, he established his own publishing house, Irving Berlin, Inc. So he could control the copyrights and the royalties to his own music. Two years later, he wrote fourteen musical numbers for the Zigfield Follies. He went on to do various work with the Follies in the years that followed. In one he teamed up with Joseph M. Shank and Sam Harris to establish his own Broadway theater, The Music Box. This was a colossally expensive and difficult venture with technically complicated stage equipment, including an elevator. His work and his name recognition continued to grow in the early nineteen twenties, and he also fell in love again. And that is where we are going to pick up next time. Do you have some yummi listener mail to tide us over until our next episode? I do. This is from Angela and Angela wrote after our recent episode on Charles Drew and blood banking. Angela said, Hi, Holly and Tracy. I'm sure you recorded the behind the scenes about blood banks before this news came out, but I thought I would put out the p s A that the deferral for donating blood if you were in Europe during Mad Cow has been lifted. Blood donation is very important to me and has been a regular part of my life since I turned eighteen. I won't say how old I am, but I have recently gotten my six gallon pin and that doesn't include the different places I donated when I was younger. Since I have loved many people who have benefited from blood donation. Anything that makes it so more people can donate makes me happy. I'm glad the f d A is constantly going back and reevaluating the policy is to try to maximize the number of people who can donate, but I do agree with you that it seems like there are some in place for the wrong reasons. Thank you, as always for your continued work to keep listeners informed of the past and its impact today, Angela, Thank you so much Angela for this update. So yeah, the last time that I gave blood, before writing that episode and doing the behind the scenes UM, the f d A had actually issued new guidance UM, but the Red Cross had not incorporated that new guidance into their process yet. So when I gave blood at that point, folks who had lived in Europe during the big Mad Cow outbreak, we're still excluded from donating. UM. They actually changed. They announced that they were changing the policy UM shortly before we recorded this episode, and also shortly before the next time I gave blood. But I'm pretty sure that was still in the questionnaire that day. It's not in the questionnaire anymore. UM. This directly affects people I know who either like lived in the UK for a period while they were in college or grad school, or folks I know who moved from the UK to the United States. So yeah, that that rule has changed from what was in place for a very long time. So thank you Angela for letting me know about that. A couple of folks I know who this applies to also said something like, within two or three days of getting this email that we're like, hey, I can give blood again and we're very excited about it. 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