Tin Pan Alley is the name given to the
collection of New York City music
publishers and songwriters who dominated
the popular music of the United States
in the late 19th century and early 20th
century. The name originally referred to
a specific place: West 28th Street
between Fifth and Sixth Avenue in
Manhattan, and a plaque on the sidewalk
on 28th Street between Broadway and
Sixth commemorates it.
The start of Tin Pan Alley is usually
dated to about 1885, when a number of
music publishers set up shop in the same
district of Manhattan. The end of Tin
Pan Alley is less clear cut. Some date
it to the start of the Great Depression
in the 1930s when the phonograph and
radio supplanted sheet music as the
driving force of American popular music,
while others consider Tin Pan Alley to
have continued into the 1950s when
earlier styles of American popular music
were upstaged by the rise of rock &
roll, for which the Brill Building
served much the same role as Tin Pan
Alley had.
The origins of the name "Tin Pan Alley"
are unclear. One account claims that it
was a derogatory reference to the sound
of many pianos resembling the banging of
tin pans. Another version claims the
name stemmed from the way that
songwriters modified their pianos so
that they had a more percussive sound.
After many years, the term came to refer
to the U.S. music industry in general.
Origin of the name
Various explanations have been advanced
to account for the origins of the term
"Tin Pan Alley". The most popular
account holds that it was originally a
derogatory reference by Monroe H.
Rosenfeld in the New York Herald to the
collective sound made by many "cheap
upright pianos" all playing different
tunes being reminiscent of the banging
of tin pans in an alleyway.
Simon Napier-Bell quotes an account of
the origin of the name which was
published in a 1930 book about the music
business. In this version, popular
songwriter Harry von Tilzer was being
interviewed about the area around 28th
Street and Fifth Avenue, where many
music publishers had their offices. Von
Tilzer had modified his expensive
Kindler & Collins piano by placing
strips of paper down the strings to give
the instrument a more percussive sound.
The journalist told von Tilzer, "Your
Kindler & Collins sounds exactly like a
tin can. I'll call the article 'Tin Pan
Alley'."
With time, this nickname was popularly
embraced and came to describe the
American music publishing industry in
general. The term "Tin Pan Alley" is
also used to describe Denmark Street in
London's West End. In the 1920s the
street became known as "Britain's Tin
Pan Alley" because of its large number
of music shops.
Origin of song publishing in New York
City
In the mid-19th century, copyright
control of melodies was not as strict,
and publishers would often print their
own versions of the songs popular at the
time. With stronger copyright protection
laws late in the century, songwriters,
composers, lyricists, and publishers
started working together for their
mutual financial benefit.
The commercial center of the popular
music publishing industry changed during
the course of the 19th century, starting
in Boston and moving to Philadelphia,
Chicago and Cincinnati, Ohio before
settling in New York City under the
influence of new and vigorous publishers
which concentrated on vocal music, such
as Frank Harding, T. B. Harms and the
Witmark family. Naturally, these firms
were located in the entertainment
district, which, at the time, was
centered around Union Square. Witmark
was the first publishing house to move
to West 28th Street as the entertainment
district gradually shifted uptown, and
by the late 1890s most publishers had
followed their lead.
The biggest music houses established
themselves in New York City, but small
local publishers – often connected with
commercial printers or music stores –
continued to flourish throughout the
country, and there were important
regional music publishing centers in
Chicago, New Orleans, St. Louis, and
Boston. When a tune became a significant
local hit, rights to it were usually
purchased from the local publisher by
one of the big New York firms.
In its prime
The song publishers who created Tin Pan
Alley frequently had backgrounds as
salesmen. The background of Isadore
Witmark was selling water filters. Leo
Feist had sold corsets, and Joe Stern
and Edward B. Marks had sold neck-ties
and buttons respectively. The music
houses in lower Manhattan were lively
places, with a steady stream of
songwriters, vaudeville and Broadway
performers, musicians, and "song
pluggers" coming and going.
Aspiring songwriters came to demonstrate
tunes they hoped to sell. When tunes
were purchased from unknowns with no
previous hits, the name of someone with
the firm was often added as co-composer,
or all rights to the song were purchased
outright for a flat fee. Songwriters who
became established producers of
successful songs were hired to be on the
staff of the music houses. The most
successful of them, like Harry Von
Tilzer and Irving Berlin, founded their
own publishing firms.
"Song pluggers" were pianists and
singers who made their living
demonstrating songs to promote sales of
sheet music. Most music stores had song
pluggers on staff. Other pluggers were
employed by the publishers to travel and
familiarize the public with their new
publications. Among the ranks of song
pluggers were George Gershwin and Harry
Warren. A more aggressive form of song
plugging was known as "booming": it
meant buying dozens of tickets for
shows, infiltrating the audience and
then singing the song to be plugged. At
Shapiro Bernstein, Louis Bernstein
recalled taking his plugging crew to
cycle races at Madison Square Garden:
"They had 20,000 people there, we had a
pianist and a singer with a large horn.
We'd sing a song to them thirty times a
night. They'd cheer and yell, and we
kept pounding away at them. When people
walked out, they'd be singing the song.
They couldn't help it."
When vaudeville performers played New
York City, they would often visit
various Tin Pan Alley firms to find new
songs for their acts. Second- and
third-rate performers often paid for
rights to use a new song, while famous
stars were given free copies of
publisher's new numbers or were paid to
perform them, the publishers knowing
this was valuable advertising.
Initially Tin Pan Alley specialized in
melodramatic ballads and comic novelty
songs, but it embraced the newly popular
styles of the cakewalk and ragtime
music. Later on jazz and blues were
incorporated, although less completely,
as Tin Pan Alley was oriented towards
producing songs that amateur singers or
small town bands could perform from
printed music. In the 1910s and 1920s
Tin Pan Alley published pop-songs and
dance numbers created in newly popular
jazz and blues styles
Influence on law and business
A group of Tin Pan Alley music houses
formed the Music Publishers Association
of the United States on June 11, 1895,
and unsuccessfully lobbied the federal
government in favor of the Treloar
Copyright Bill, which would have changed
the term of copyright for published
music from 24 to 40 years, renewable for
an additional 20 instead of 14 years.
The bill would also have included music
among the subject matter covered by the
Manufacturing clause of the
International Copyright Act of 1891.
The American Society of Composers,
Authors, and Publishers was founded in
1914 to aid and protect the interests of
established publishers and composers.
New members were only admitted with
sponsorship of existing members.
Contributions to World War II
During the Second World War, Tin Pan
Alley and the federal government teamed
up to produce a war song that would
inspire the American public to support
the fight against the Axis, something
they both "seemed to believe… was vital
to the war effort." The Office of War
Information was in charge of this
project, and believed that Tin Pan Alley
contained “a reservoir of talent and
competence capable of influencing
people’s feelings and opinions” that it
“might be capable of even greater
influence during wartime than [George M.
Cohan's " Over There" during World War
I]." The song "Over There" can be said
to be the most popular and resonant
patriotic song associated with World War
I. Due to the large fan base of Tin Pan
Alley, the government believed that this
sector of the music business would be
far-reaching in spreading patriotic
sentiments.
In the United States Congress,
congressman quarrelled over a proposal
to exempt musicians and other
entertainers from the draft in order to
remain in the country to boost morale.
However, this was contested by those who
strongly believed that only those who
provided more substantial contributions
to the war effort should benefit from
any draft legislation.
As the war progressed, those in charge
of writing the would-be national war
song began to understand that the
interest of the public lay elsewhere.
Since the music would take up such a
large amount of airtime, it was
imperative that the writing be
consistent with the war message that the
radio was carrying throughout the
nation. In her book, God Bless America:
Tin Pan Alley Goes to War, Kathleen E.R.
Smith writes that “escapism seemed to be
a high priority for music listeners,”
leading “the composers of Tin Pan Alley
[to struggle] to write a war song that
would appeal both to civilians and the
armed forces." By the end of the war, no
such song had been produced that could
rival hits like "Over There" from World
War I.
Whether or not the number of songs
circulated from Tin Pan Alley between
1939 and 1945 was greater than during
the First World War is still debated. In
his book The Songs That Fought the War:
Popular Music and the Home Front, John
Bush Jones cites Jeffrey C. Livingstone
as claiming that Tin Pan Alley released
more songs during World War I than it
did in World War II. Jones, on the other
hand, argues that “there is also strong
documentary evidence that the output of
American war-related songs during World
War II was most probably unsurpassed in
any other war.”
Composers and lyricists
Leading Tin Pan Alley composers and
lyricists include:
Notable hit songs
In popular culture
In the 1959–1960 television season, NBC
aired a sitcom Love and Marriage, based
on the fictitious William Harris Music
Publishing Company set in Tin Pan Alley.
William Demarest, Stubby Kaye, Jeanne
Bal, and Murray Hamilton co-starred in
the series, which aired 18 episodes.
In the song "Bob Dylan's Blues" from Bob
Dylan's 1963 album The Freewheelin' Bob
Dylan, he introduces the song, saying,
"Unlike most of the songs nowadays that
have been written up town in Tin Pan
Alley, that's where most of the folk
songs come from nowadays, this, this is
a song, this wasn't written up there,
this was written down somewhere in the
United States."
In the song "Bitter Fingers" from the
1975 autobiographical "concept album"
Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt
Cowboy, Elton John refers to himself and
his longtime song-writing partner,
lyricist Bernie Taupin, as the "Tin Pan
Alley Twins".
Tin Pan Alley is mentioned in the song
It Never Rains by Dire Straits
The Bob Geddins blues song "Tin Pan
Alley", recorded by Jimmy Wilson, was a
top 10 hit on the R&B chart in 1953 and
became a popular song among West Coast
blues performers. The song was also
covered by Stevie Ray Vaughan
The song "Tin Pan Alley" by The Apples
in Stereo.
See also
Brill Building
Music Row
Printer's Alley
Radio Row
The Tin Pan Alley Rag
Denmark Street - known as "Britain's Tin
Pan Alley"
References
Notes
Bibliography
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Singers, the Songwriters, and the Songs.
New York: Black Dog and Leventhal, 2005.
ISBN 1-57912-448-8 OCLC 62411478
Charlton, Katherine. Rock music style: a
history. New York: McGraw Hill.
Forte, Allen. Listening to Classic
American Popular Songs. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2001.
Furia, Philip. The Poets of Tin Pan
Alley: A History of America’s Great
Lyricists. ISBN 0-19-507473-4. .
Furia, Philip and Lasser, Michael. The
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Goldberg, Isaac. Tin Pan Alley, A
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Hajduk, John C. "Tin Pan Alley on the
March: Popular Music, World War II, and
the Quest for a Great War Song." Popular
Music and Society 26.4: 497-512.
Hamm, Charles. Music in the New World.
New York: Norton, 1983. ISBN
0-393-95193-6
Jasen, David A. Tin Pan Alley: The
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Their Times. New York: Donald I. Fine,
Primus, 1988. ISBN 1-55611-099-5 OCLC
18135644
Jasen, David A., and Gene Jones.
Spreadin’ Rhythm Around: Black Popular
Songwriters, 1880–1930. New York:
Schirmer Books, 1998.
Marks, Edward B., as told to Abbott J.
Liebling. They All Sang: From Tony
Pastor to Rudy Vallée. New York: Viking
Press, 1934.
Morath, Max. The NPR Curious Listener’s
Guide to Popular Standards. New York:
Penguin Putnam, Berkley Publishing, a
Perigree Book, 2002.
Napier-Bell, Simon. Ta-ra-ra-Boom-de-ay:
The Beginning of the Music Business.
ISBN 978-1-78352-031-2. 
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and Its Business: The First Four Hundred
Years, Volume III, From 1900 to 1984.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Sanjek, Russell. From Print to Plastic:
Publishing and Promoting America’s
Popular Music, 1900–1980. I.S.A.M.
Monographs: Number 20. Brooklyn:
Institute for Studies in American Music,
Conservatory of Music, Brooklyn College,
City University of New York, 1983.
Smith, Kathleen E. R. God Bless America:
Tin Pan Alley Goes to War. Lexington,
Ky: University Press of Kentucky, 2003.
ISBN 0-8131-2256-2 OCLC 50868277
Tawa, Nicholas E. The Way to Tin Pan
Alley: American Popular Song, 1866–1910.
New York: Schirmer Books, 1990.
Whitcomb, Ian. After the Ball: Pop Music
from Rag to Rock. New York: Proscenium
Publishers, 1986, reprint of Penguin
Press, 1972. ISBN 0-671-21468-3 OCLC
628022
Wilder, Alec. American Popular Song: The
Great Innovators, 1900–1950. London:
Oxford University Press, 1972.
Zinsser, William. Easy to Remember: The
Great American Songwriters and Their
Songs. Jaffrey, NH: David R. Godine,
2000. ISBN 1-56792-147-7 OCLC 45080154
Further reading
Scheurer, Timothy E., American Popular
Music: The nineteenth century and Tin
Pan Alley, Bowling Green State
University, Popular Press, 1989
Scheurer, Timothy E., American Popular
Music: The age of rock", Bowling Green
State University, Popular Press, 1989
External links
Parlor Songs: History of Tin Pan Alley
