Book Review: The House That George Built - With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty by Wilfrid Sheed

“Hey, kid, that new song of yours is a pip.”
--George Gershwin to Harold Arlen

From New York’s Lower East Side to West Coast soundstage, the development of American song from 1900 to 1950 from songwriters who crafted it for Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood, radio and records, largely constituted the evolution of the American standard and masterfully assured its place in art and popular culture.

In The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty, author Wilfrid Sheed takes a leisurely, witty, and knowledgably enthusiastic approach to the history of American popular music, running the Golden Age gamut that includes Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Jerome Kern, and later arrivals such as Harry Warren, Jimmy Van Heusen, Johnny Mercer, Frank Loesser, Burton Lane, and Cy Coleman.

While there’s really no consistently applied methodology to his mad fun—Sheed is as likely to say that seldom have there “been dumber words” than those of “The Man I Love” as he is to discuss “the natural affinity between black and Jewish sensibilities” and the musical distinctions between eastern and western Europeans—when it comes to the question of whether to focus on the writer of music or the lyricist, Sheed’s emphasis is on the music. A debatable disproportion, perhaps—think of Rodgers without Hart, let alone the comparison of Hart with Hammerstein—Sheed arguing that “So long as there are ears to hear, there will be tongues to wag and wit to flail.”

Of course, Irving Berlin—along with Cole Porter, who came along later—was a beast to both the words and music burdens, but as he was broke and bustling and taking in the black jazz and blues of New York’s Lower East Side immigrant life, becoming a one-man operation came with the territory. The melodic resourcefulness for pre-World War I dance, stage and slight syncopation could be easily matched by his seat-of-his-pants street smarts as a “scavenger of talk,” with a natural affinity for turns of phrase and wordplay that could manage—Berlin’s daughter Mary Ellin remembers—to find its way into chorus or verse. The “swell beaus / Rubbin' elbows” in “Puttin’ On The Ritz” has always been a particular favorite of mine.

Berlin’s no-nonsense hard-knocks career climbing called for a few short cuts and detours, which Sheed duly notes—his primitive pianism, a serious middle-age slump, an historically hindsighted revisionist twist or two—but there can be no doubt that Berlin, who once told his friend Cole Porter “Never apologize for a song that sells a million copies,” claimed to write for commercial success more than art. That’s where the ambitious, generous, tragic phenomenon George Gershwin comes in, a man who not only adventurously fluctuated between his pop impulses and his classical ones—he's “Got Rhythm” and “Rhapsody in Blue”—but didn’t always understand the genesis for either: “What comes out of that piano frightens me,” he’s alleged to have once said, and that was only regarding the musical fun and games at other people’s parties.

Article Author: Gordon Hauptfleisch

Gordon Hauptfleisch is Blogcritics Books Editor, freelance writer, and book reviewer for the San Diego Union Tribune. For many years he worked in and managed bookstores and record stores. Email him and he'll stop talking in the third-person.
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