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The B Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song Paperback – December 1, 2015

by Ben Yagoda (Author)

71 customer reviews

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From an acclaimed cultural critic, a narrative and social history of the Great American Songwriting era.

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, 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. Among them are the battle between ASCAP and Broadcast Music, Inc.; the revolution in jazz after World War II; the impact of radio and then television; and the bitter, decades-long feud between Mitch Miller and Frank Sinatra.

The B Side is about taste, and the particular economics and culture of songwriting, and the potential of popular art for greatness and beauty. It’s destined to become a classic of American musical history.

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Editorial Reviews

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Praise for The B Side:

“Yagoda writes so engagingly, and has put in so much time and effort, that one closes his book with the feeling that he has made a significant contribution... [his] distillation of it all is a lovely way to help perpetuate a most precious commodity.” — The New York Times
"[A] spirited history of American popular music." — The New Yorker

“Yagoda lubricates the gears of history with both his own humor and colorful anecdotes.” — Entertainment Weekly

“Wow, what a piece of work! I love it. The B Side is A PLUS.” — Dave Frishberg

“A provocative, consistently engaging counternarrative to the conventional wisdom that rock 'n' roll killed Tin Pan Alley.” — Kirkus Reviews

"A great many books celebrate the pre-rock Great American Songbook. Ben Yagoda’s highly original and shrewdly argued The B-Side isn’t one of them. It tells how the Songbook emerged, but is more intent on dissecting its meretricious demise, and the way a new songbook emerged from the rubble. It is anecdotal, illuminating, and persuasive." — Gary Giddins, author of Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams and Visions of Jazz

"[The B Side is] an entertaining and thoroughly researched exploration of America’s songwriting history. With deftness of pen and skill, Yagoda has produced a work that will appeal to both musicologists and fans." — Library Journal

"Essayist Yagoda energetically conducts a journey through the development of popular music in this vibrant piece of cultural history” — Publishers Weekly

“Actually, this wonderful chronicle is a B-side. . .This will be one big revelation for anyone steeped in a rock-centric understanding of pop history, and validation for those who treasure the Songbook in all its glory. And since these songs comprise so many strains of America’s cultural DNA, everyone stands to walk away from this richly told saga with not only a song in her/his heart, but also fresh knowledge about how it got there.” — PopMatters

“The B-Side is a must-read for anyone interested in the rise of rock and the shockwaves it sent through the American music business….Yagoda also poignantly conveys the pain of the generation pushed aside in the process.” — BookForum

About the Author

Ben Yagoda is a journalism professor at the University of Delaware. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of twelve books, including About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made; How to Not Write Bad; Memoir: A History; and Will Rogers: A Biography. 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, among other publications. Yagoda lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, with his wife.

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Product details

Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Riverhead Books; Reprint edition (December 1, 2015)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1594634092
ISBN-13: 978-1594634093
Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 71 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #670,612 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #270 in Books > Arts & Photography > Music > Theory, Composition & Performance > Songwriting
- #1795 in Books > Humor & Entertainment > Sheet Music & Scores > Forms & Genres > Popular
- #1924 in Books > Arts & Photography > Music > Biographies > Rock

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Wolfmantim_2001

I enjoyed the book but there were some disappointments

October 3, 2016

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I enjoyed the book but there were some disappointments. The book seemed to lose focus in the last half, almost as the writer was rushing to meet a publication deadline and started throwing in his unstructured notes, ending inexplicably on the Beatles (who have nothing to do with the subject). I did however greatly enjoy learning about the sweet versus the hard jazz bands, and the inadvertent negative side to the integration of song lyrics deeply into the story line of 1940's an 1950's Broadway musicals (the songs thus becoming semi-operatic, similar to the pre-Gershwin era, and thus less portable to jazz interpreters such as Sinatra, Ella, Miles, and Bill Evans). Speaking of Bill Evans, I was disappointed he was not even mentioned in the book despite his being one of greatest interpreters and torch carriers of the great American song book (a little less about Mitch Miller and his atrocious songs would have been nice). I wish Ben Yagoda had taken more time to structure this book better since I sense it could have been an authoritative classic on this great subject.

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Son of Flintstone Munchausen

(Insert '50s pop vocalist name here) SINGS BROADWAY'S GREATEST HITS

March 23, 2015

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A decent overview with some nice background information from a few pre-rock 'n roll era writers, but not very specific information about A&R choices in the 1947-55 era.

I'm fascinated by the bad taste element of assembly-line 1950-55 era pop ditties, and Mitch Miller as ground zero in particular. The opening chapter, "1 Mr. Miller and Mr. Schwartz" (pp. 13-29) opens with a bang --Mitch Evil Genius Miller solicits kickbacks for song placements-- but the book peters out after the payola hearings and mention of folk to "folk" music and the birth of Beatlemania, roughly about page 220.

There's nice but a bit superficicial coverage of the Payola hearings, the BMI vs. ASCAP fight, and congressional hearings about "bad" songs coming out of country music.

As a fan of campy fun bad pop, Mitch Miller gets some decent villain treatment, but the author doesn't follow up setting the hook and reeling in that fish. If you want a fine roughly 2-hour example of just how financially successful and toxically odious Mitch's pop confections ran to, pick up a Columbia Records' Guy Mitchell singles comp Very Best of and keep a bucket nearby. By mid-'54 Miller's choices had sunk SO LOW that the publishers of that Eddie Fisher pseudo-germanic folk song, "Oh My Papa" (RCA/Victor biggie for EF) caught wind that Miller was going to have Gene Klaven cut a german-accent parody of "Oh Mein Papa" that they pulled permission to put out the record with, effectively, a "No, and h*** NO!" Frankie Laine put out some awful but fun stuff, like "The Gandy Dancer's Ball," "The Kid's Last Fight" (a boxing song about winning a prize for his girlfriend and dying afterwards of "fever", an 1890's vibe and an oh, so happy death song!), Rosie Clooney's white & weird pseudo-ethnic stinker hits run pretty low (Irish chick channeling Chico Marx's act? Why not Jerry Vale doing an operatic Italian version of "The Irish Rover"?), and Johnnie Ray over-enunciating his consonants (adding extra vowel syllables in his delivery) that Stan Freberg parodied so well as "Try." Jo Stafford (I'm in love with Jo Stafford, Kay Starr, and Keely Smith) seems to have largely escaped the Miller Midas Touch at Columbia, most likely because her husband, West Coast Columbia A&R album guy Paul Weston, kept his hand in until they both left the label, and looking at a March '62 SING ALONG WITH JONATHAN & DARLENE EDWARDS RCA/Victor Lp "sing along with"jonathan and darlene edwards.1962 LP record. wrecking Mitch's SING-A-LONG assembly-line gold album releases, REALLY paid him back with a tongue & cheek parody of his formula.

The book is a nice intro to the era. Pity there isn't more information in book form about Mitch Miller's ketchup & ice cream A&R shenanigans.

Note: in record nut parlance, a B-side is the tag-along publishing throwaway song. The B-side of a 78/45 single was often a shoddy tune with the songwriting and publishing credit or cut-in to the artist's management or business contacts/cronies. The B-side of a hit got the same mechanical sales royalty as the A-side (2-cents per into the late '50s) of the hit.

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Steve York

Excellent book! I am a professional musician with many ...

July 2, 2017

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Excellent book! I am a professional musician with many songwriting credits and I am very familiar with all the genres and most of the songs covered in this book. It's a huge amount to cover in one book but the authour totally nails the subject with excellent insights. Most books on the subject have had me groaning with dismay at how far they missed the mark. This book does a great job of getting to the real story behind American popular music and had me laughing out loud several times. I was sorry when it ended! Highly recommended!

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Michael R. Kagay

"B-Side" denotes renewal, reboot, or second act

February 21, 2015

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For most of this very interesting book I was mystified by its title. A "B-Side" usually referred to the flip side of a 78 rpm or 45 rpm record, the side that typically contained the (presumed) lesser of its two singles.
Not until the last paragraph of text in the book did the author make his own meaning fully apparent: "The final page had been turned on one songbook. And another was just starting to be written."
Thus "renewal" or "reboot" or "second act" is what's implied. ("Rebirth" is part of he title after the colon.) The songwriters of the 1960s were beginning a NEW American songbook after a transitional period of unsophisticated gimmickry and early rock'n'roll in the 1950s. The new songbook, drawing in part on rural country music and black music like r & b, represented a more inclusive and democratic ethos as compared with the Tin Pan Alley/Broadway/Hollywood origins of the earlier Great American Songbook.
But this "new" American songbook is hastily presented and only thinly analyzed toward the end of the present book. Hopefully, a future book by Yagoda will more fully execute these unfinished tasks.

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F. J. Souder III

Pretty good, but some of the facts a little off.

August 19, 2015

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Interesting take on songwriting and the music business. Much of the information and Ben's take on history is fairly accurate. It does have some mistakes. Irving Berlin's name was changed when he was 18 when he published his first song, that's when the Irving Berlin name first showed up, not at the age of 14. There also was a lever on his piano that changed keys ( transposed ) on his piano which is in the Smithsonian ( which I've seen), not a wheel. There are a few other facts a little off but it is for the most part a very entertaining read. I have an extensive collection of books on songwriting and it's history and that's how I know these things.

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