The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: jazz songs, New York, World War, Van Heusen (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Sheed (Office Politics), who won a 1987 Grammy Award for Best Album Notes (for Sinatra's The Voice), spoke over the decades with many of these Great American Songbook creators and their families. In this book, he employs an informal, anecdotal approach as he looks back at the top tunesmiths of Tin Pan Alley, Broadway and Hollywood. Composer Arthur Schwartz recalled that he dashed off the tune in 20 minutes after lyricist Howard Dietz casually remarked, What is life but dancing in the dark? Beginning with Gershwin and Irving Berlin, Sheed quotes numerous lyrics throughout his lilting, witty profiles (of Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington, Frank Loesser, Johnny Mercer, Richard Rodgers and others), plus brief comments on 57 more. Since Hurricane Katrina, Louis Alter's Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? has served as a national anthem, so the curt dismissal of Alter (more a swinging musician than a songwriter proper) is curious amid the many choruses of praise. Sheed soars on the wings of song with scintillating, lyrical writing. (July 3)
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From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

In December 1952, Fred Astaire joined an all-star jazz group led by the pianist Oscar Peterson to record more than three dozen songs associated with the great dancer during his long career on Broadway and in Hollywood.

In the notes he wrote for the album, which he called "a sequence in song starting around 1926 and carrying on to about 1944," Astaire said: "It was my good fortune that Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Arthur Schwartz, Howard Dietz, and others, supplied the music for these various films and stage shows. . . . Yes indeed, that was a fine lot of material to fall into one's lap."

Which of course is sublime understatement, that being no surprise, since sublime understatement was Astaire's stock-in-trade. No performer, Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland included, has had so many brilliant songs written especially for him or her as did Fred Astaire, and into the bargain he reached his peak at the moment when what we now think of as classic American popular song was reaching its own peak. As Wilfrid Sheed puts it in his exuberant tour d'horizon of "this musical Mount Rushmore," Astaire "was of course a phenomenon unto himself. Every writer did his best work for Fred, because, among other reasons, he asked for it." The results were, and are, simply astonishing. From Berlin: "Puttin' on the Ritz," "Cheek to Cheek," "Steppin' Out With My Baby," "Top Hat, White Tie and Tails." From

Gershwin: " 'S Wonderful," "Nice Work If You Can Get It," "They Can't Take That Away From Me," "A Foggy Day." From Porter: "I Concentrate on You,"

"Night and Day," "So Near and Yet So Far." From Kern: "The Way You Look Tonight," "I Won't Dance," "A Fine Romance." From Schwartz and Dietz: "Dancing in the Dark," "New Sun in the Sky," "I Love Louisa."

Et cetera. But, great as the songs tailored for Astaire were, they were only a tiny percentage of the writers' output. A good case can be made that this music, combined with its symbiotic partner, jazz, was the great American cultural achievement of the 20th century, a body of work, as Sheed says, "about the whole country, concerning which [these songs] provide maybe the most trustworthy record we have." It is music that reflects America as vividly and truly as anything the country has created, yet the irony is that it was largely produced by members of two groups of outsiders, Jews and blacks. "The standards have actually been referred to as a Jewish response to black music," Sheed writes, "but this definition is a loaded compliment that neither party has rushed to claim." He continues:

"Music is not produced by whole groups, but by one genius at a time, and it may be significant that the two families that gave us Irving Berlin and George Gershwin both fled Russia on the same great wave of czarist pogroms, only to find American black people not only singing about a similar experience, but using the Hebrew Bible as their text."

The one certainty is that all of these people had to come to America in order to write this music. No other place inspired anything remotely similar, as a quick survey of the (mostly feeble) British musical comedy makes plain. In no composer's career is this more evident than in that of Irving Berlin, nee Israel Baline, the son of the impoverished Lower East Side who spent his entire, astonishingly long career capturing in music the essence of the country to which his parents immigrated in 1893, when he was

5 years old. Berlin, who lived to be 101 and became rich many times over, never lost his wonder at what a poor boy could do here or his gratitude that so much had been given to him. Like it or not (and musical snobs don't), he wrote the real national anthem, "God Bless America," and the Norman Rockwell-esque "White Christmas," and a zillion other tokens of his love.

But to see Berlin through the prism of his two most famous songs is to grasp only a minuscule part of him. Sheed: "At least a part of Irving Berlin was an intuitive jazzman who had once heard the sounds of Harlem as clearly as those of Hester Street and had, so to speak, finally hatched out the embryonic sounds of his early rags into the swinging majesty of 'Cheek to Cheek.' " He wrote what may well be America's most famous love song, "Always," and then he wrote what is almost certainly its best, "How Deep Is the Ocean." He wrote "Blue Skies" and "Easter Parade" (talk about

Americana!) and "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm" and, speaking of Americana, the entire score of "Annie Get Your Gun." Inasmuch as he was the first of these composers, and his work influenced each and every one of them, it's something of a mystery that Sheed ascribes the construction of this "house" of American music to Gershwin. Yes, probably Gershwin was the greater musician, but it was Berlin who laid the foundation and put up the frame, as in fact Sheed acknowledges when he says that "if there had been no Irving Berlin, there would have been nothing, for instance, quite like Harold Arlen either, or Jimmy Van Heusen, or even Cole Porter in quite the same form."

Certainly, this isn't to disparage Gershwin, whose only real rival within this pantheon for breadth and depth of accomplishment is Duke Ellington, but to make the point that if we're going to use the image of house construction, let's get the foundation right. On the subject of Gershwin, Sheed is especially good because he emphasizes his singular generosity to other composers and musicians, and because he eloquently defends Gershwin against his highbrow critics: "George did not consider Tin Pan Alley a curse at all, but a gold mine into which one could probably invest all one's time and talent, including one's classical talent, in hopes of finding a genuine new American art. So he went his serene way, alternately writing songs and concert pieces that ran together into a single sound that could be played in a pinch by a jazz band or a symphony orchestra, or by some fusion of both that didn't yet exist."

Okay. If Gershwin isn't the foundation, he's all the outer walls, within which reside Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Johnny Mercer, Frank Loesser, all of whom -- along with heaven knows how many others -- contributed to this incredible outpouring of distinctly, irrefutably American music. The one person about whom Sheed writes who doesn't really fit into this house is Ellington. A favorite phrase of his own, "beyond category," is the most apt description of Ellington himself, and it suggests the difficulty of trying to fit him into this songwriting club that Sheed has assembled. One reason, as Sheed in so many words acknowledges, is that Ellington wasn't a songwriter in the received sense of the word. Not to put on airs or anything, but he was a composer. People came along to attach words to some of his best compositions -- "Mood Indigo," "Sophisticated Lady," "I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good," "I'm Beginning to See the Light" -- but almost all of them seem like afterthoughts, and Ellington himself seemed to regard them as such.

Be that as it may, all of this is in the realm of opinion, conjecture and taste. It baffles me, for example, that Sheed relegates Fats Waller to an appendix, that he discusses Cy Coleman yet ignores his lovely musical "I Love My Wife," and that he gives only a single aside to the incomparable Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who were chiefly lyricists and scriptwriters but whose influence on American music was huge. But in raising these objections I'm simply indulging my own prejudices, or preferences, just as Sheed is fully entitled to his own.

Sheed has been well known for more than four decades as literary critic, novelist, memoirist and baseball fan. His knowledge of classic American popular song came as news to me, but The House That George Built is written with authority and enthusiasm. It is "a labor of love, not of scholarship, which means that I have been researching it for most of my life without knowing it -- starting at the family piano, singing and memorizing Irving Berlin's ragtime spin-offs, and ending with the last phone conversation with the last fellow addict fifteen minutes ago." This music is, well, easy to love, but it's not so easy to write well about, which is just what Sheed does.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Random House; First edition. edition (July 3, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400061059
• ISBN-13: 978-1400061051
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #305,007 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

76 of 79 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A song in his heart , July 5, 2007

By	Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

This is a book about the composers of America's most popular popular music, the music that came into being from roughly 1920 to 1950. It is not a formal treatise or scholarly study but rather a kind of fan's notes ramble, an enthusiastic exuberant high- spirited riff. English- born novelist, essayist Sheed shows great love for , and tremendous knowledge of American popular song. He writes with worshipful insight of the two greatest of the founding fathers of this particular American genre, George Gershwin and Irving Berlin. Both of these children of Russian Jewish parents found in black Blues and American jazz a fundamental inspiration. Both inspired many others and Gershwin particularly was a magnanimous helpful friend to other composers. Sheed cares for the Music above all and gives preeminence to those who create it - the lyrics are significant but secondary. Sheed writes not only about the major figures, Kern, Berlin, Gershwin, Cole Porter but also about fifty others. One special one for him is someone he knew personally , Harry Warren. Warren the composer of "I only have eyes for you' was a modest figure in the background but for Sheed a friend and great composer to whom he dedicates the book.
All the readers of this book I know of have spoken of what great pleasure they had in reading it. The songs of these great composers entered Sheed's heart and his writing is his song of appreciation back to them.

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars He knows the score (but that's not quite enough any more)., August 18, 2007

By	Samuel Chell (Kenosha,, WI United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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Sheed is a witty, but not self-indulgently or distractingly so, prose "stylist," not a musician. In that capacity he's "like" a jazz musician riffing on a familiar theme (it's tough to come up with new material about the Great American Songbook and its composers) and of particular use to those readers who love the music and wish to express what it means to them as much as it expresses its meanings to them. Sheed is such a reader's "voice," and probably a more welcome one than that of the historians, musicologists, composers and lyricists.

I don't think he's disparaging the musicians by showing us their flaws and vices. A Charlie Parker or Miles Davis is certainly no less an artist to me because of his drug habit or even, as in the case of Bird, his selfish, childish, and exploitive ways. If anything, the unpleasant behaviorisms of artists ranging from Buddy Rich to William Faulkner make it easier to relate to them as well as to sustain interest. If they were any better as human beings, their overwhelming talent and, even genius, would simply be too much to bear. Sheed also knows that while it's misguided to judge a book by its cover, in the case of the creative artist the book would no doubt be entirely different, most likely inferior, were the cover not what it is.

As for the melody vs. lyric flap, he's right. The most recorded popular song in American music history--"Body and Soul"--has an embarassingly bad lyric ("My love a wreck you're making, My heart is yours for the taking"--"ouch!" many times over). What counts most in the language of music is the notes, not the words. A song has to be able to stand on its own, apart from the lyrics (and John Coltrane certainly felt that Rodgers' music for Hammerstein did just that). Since the '60s we've been inundated by little more than bad recitative (ask any bar pianist or Saturday night saxophone player). On the other hand, great lyrics can 1. make a great melody an even richer experience; 2. help "shape" an infectious melody (for example, Porter's repetition of melodic motifs to fit the theme of "obsession" in countless numbers of his tunes); 3. bring to the melody the attention that it deserves if not requires to become a "standard." "Body and Soul" got lucky--a great melody and set of chord changes performed by an artist (Coleman Hawkins) whom every great player wanted to emulate.

All of the composers Sheed chooses to discuss are deserving, though it would be nice to have fuller consideration of Van Heusen, Styne, McHugh, Victor Young ("When I Fall in Love," "My Foolish Heart," "Stella by Starlight), and greater focus on isolated sublime melodies that have become jazz standards (e.g. Bronislaw Kaper's "On Green Dolphin Street"). If I had to limit myself to a single comprehensive yet surprisingly detailed book on great American popular music and its composers (their styles between the bars of the staff paper as well as in assorted bars about town), it would have to be Gerald Mast's "Can't Help Singing," which can be read for pleasure or used as a definitive reference work. What the music could use at this stage is a Ken Burns or another director's 20-part PBS series about these leading composers of "American music" and their songs. Just as Burns' jazz series showed us as much about race, ethnicity, and adversity as the music, the history of American song, with all of the Jewish immigrants who either worked their way up to Tin Pan Alley or were forced by economic necessity to temper their aspirations as "serious" composers, is equally fascinating and of no less significance. The Great American Songbook us an essential complement to the African-American "classical" music (jazz) that is America's "gift" to the arts; it's the indigenous real deal--an art form, not a "folk" expression--and for far too long it's either been taken for granted or simply dismissed as inconsequential elitist tripe.

In fact, reading books like Sheed's and going back to the songs themselves can't help but lead to an inescapable sense of the enormous influence of African-American cultural traditions (i.e. black music) on virtually all of the major American composers of the first half of the century (examples are too numerous to begin listing, but Berlin never tired of giving a new shape to what were once referred to as "coon songs," and Mercer, Crosby, Astaire loved to recreate minstrel routines (check out the song "Mr. Crosby and Mr. Mercer"); Arlen "escaped" from cantoring at the synagogue to writing shows at the Cotton Club; Gershwin thought he was writing jazz; and even the elitist and very "European" Kern is best remembered for, what else, "Ole Man River" (though seeing Irene Dunne perform Kern's "Can't Help Lovin' That Man" is to discover the indebtedness of the composer not just to spirituals but to the coon song tradition). So deep was the attraction to and love of indigenous African-American music that it's not much of a stretch to think of the most seminal songs of the "Great American Songbook" as primarily "black music." Ironically, the primary exception is Cole Porter who, according to Richard Rodgers, thought he had to learn how to write more Jewish before he'd master the idiom (perhaps contributing to the relative lateness of his first hit, "Let's Do It," in 1928). He'd have done better to put his ear to the ground and go directly to the source (though the effect of Robert Browning's poetry on his original syntax is undeniable).

Whatever, it's a fascinating, fruitful subject and adventure, and it's time to take more people along on it. Only a tiny percentage of us read books like Sheed's and are familiar with and care about the songs and their composers. Most college students I meet in the latter days of civilization as we once knew it have never heard of Crosby (unless it's his association with David Bowie) or Berlin or Gershwin or even "Body and Soul." At best, they just "might" know a single standard--"Somewhere Over the Rainbow." But those bluebirds certainly aren't singing on this side. They don't know any tunes.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars And one more for the road, August 29, 2007

By	Jon Hunt "musician, teacher" (Old Greenwich, Ct. USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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By tackling an almost impossible task...that of categorizing, rating and recounting the lives of songwriters in the first half of the twentieth century, Wilfrid Sheed has given us a book that is literally all over the map. While offering some fine insights, the author has delivered a hodgepodge of information. It's more than a little bewildering.

Written in a kind of gossip column style, Sheed gets off to a good start with chapters on Irving Berlin and George Gershwin. Without these two men leading the way, it's hard to imagine that the songwriting of the 1920s and 1930s....the heyday of American musical culture... could ever have happened. Add in Cole Porter and you have the great triumvirate of composers. It's always a hard choice to know whom else to include in such a broad sweep of biography and Sheed makes some solid but some strange choices as well. Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen certainly, but Cy Coleman? It seems plausible that Coleman was added because Sheed knew him.

"The House That George Built" doesn't exactly drive a straight line from beginning to end. The book has a circular feel to it. There are very few dates listed and it more or less rolls around as if the author stayed too long at a Hollywood party. But it's Sheed's narrative style that can irritate. Just when you expect him to end a sentence he carries on....and on. Where crisp writing is due, he delivers oatmeal.

Sheed does do a service in comparing New York to Hollywood and why certain composers stayed in one place or the other...or tried one place and returned to the other. He points out that collaboration between composers and lyricists often didn't last long, which must make Rodgers and Hammerstein's time together seem like an eon. There are some good quotes....Richard Rodgers said, "I can pee melody". That's as succinct a delivery as one can get and it's right on target. And Cy Coleman, for all the questions about including him in the book, said something that is remarkably true... "It never occurred to me that the songs were written by different people", Coleman states, "they were all just The Radio".

Side appearances are made by Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra (to name just three) and Sheed is good at connecting the dots between their careers and the careers of the men who wrote songs for them. Yet I'm not sure any song would ever have been written without the ever presence of booze. It seemed to fuel every songwriter and broke many a man along the way.

"The House That George Built" has its moments, but Wilfrid Sheed's delivery is too clever and cute by half. By sticking to a more objective stance he would have toned down the narrative and made a more concise read. It's a shame because he knows his stuff.