Whitcomb After the Ball

Pop Music from Rag to Rock
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-29933-1
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 330 Seiten

First published in 1972, Ian Whitcomb's After the Ball is an exuberant account of the origins and explosion of popular music, informed by the author's store of experience in the field as a pop sensation of The Sixties. 'Brash, learned, funny and perspicacious.... The author of this free-wheeling, diverting history was a student at Trinity College, Dublin, when he created a rock hit 'You Turn Me On,' and experienced a brief, bewildering season as a touring rock celebrity. This book... is his effort to explain that experience to himself, and, well-educated man that he is, he goes all the way back to the first pop bestseller (in sheet music, of course), 'After The Ball,' and all the way forward to the 1960s.' New Yorker 'One of the best books on popular music to come along in the last few years.... Whitcomb's own involvement with music constantly surfaces to make the book both revealing and highly enjoyable.' Seattle Times

Ian Whitcomb

Autoren/Hrsg.

Whitcomb, Ian

Leseproben

How Pop Music Began

At the dawn of the century Chas K. Harris published a little red book of rules and secrets called How to Write a Popular Song. Just inside there was a picture of him – a dignified figure with his wax moustache, wing collar and frozen tweed suit. Not unlike a trading Kaiser Wilhelm. He was very proud of the business to which he belonged: song manufacturing.

So well had he studied his craft that he knew in advance how many sheet music copies his songs would sell. To his readers he advised:

Look at newspapers for your story-line.

Acquaint yourself with the style in vogue.

Avoid slang.

Know the copyright laws.

If the reader did all this he (or she) might become rich and famous in the world of popular music. It was a trade both respectable, profitable and artistic. Had not Mme Adelina Patti, the noted high-class singer, ended a recent concert with ‘The Last Farewell’? And who wrote it? Chas K. Harris!

Rich and famous and working in New York, nerve-centre of world show business, he was a pillar of the pop music establishment. Pop – short for ‘popular’ and a trade term not for public use. Other pillars included the publishers Isadore Witmark, Jos. Stern & Ed Marks, Jerome Remick, Shapiro-Bernstein, Leo Feist. All were red-blooded Americans, hustling and bustling and jostling together in a couple of blocks they called ‘Tin Pan Alley’, feeding the near-by vaudeville theatres with all kinds of songs, flooding the western world with their wares: a million dollar business. We shall examine the workings of Tin Pan Alley in a later chapter. Meanwhile we must delve around in nineteenth-century America in order to find out how pop music originated. First there was a wide-open country, then there was the city, the mass, the hunger for leisure-pleasure, the bold men who supplied its music, and finally ragtime!

Chas K. had been one of the first pop publishers to move from the hinterland into New York. In the early 1880s, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he had had a little shop with a sign advertising ‘SONGS WRITTEN TO ORDER’. His work tool was a banjo and on it he carpentered songs for births, deaths, marriages, junkets – anything. Maximum price: 20 dollars. He worked hard, like a real Horatio Alger hero, and one day he arranged for his three-verse story ballad ‘After the Ball’ to be inserted into the variety show ‘A Trip to Chinatown’. Inserted. The song had nothing to do with Chinatown, but insertion was getting to be standard practice. Good ‘exposure’ for your song, and if it ‘clicked’ then everyone was happy. Some shows were ‘sure-fire’ for years on the strength of one ‘hit’.

‘After the Ball’ was an instant hit from the very first night. Harris, of course, was publisher as well as author/composer. He wasn’t singer though. That was the job of actor J. Aldrich Libbey and he got a ‘cut’ of the ‘royalties’. Within a year ‘Ball’ was bringing in 25,000 dollars a week; within twenty years sheet sales topped 10 million. It was translated into every known language. Harris had hardly another such hit – but he could live nicely off this single work. In 1929, at the end of his life and still in his wing collar, he sang the old song in an early sound film (helped out by a cartoon cat who called him ‘Charlie’).*

‘After the Ball’, written and published by Harris in 1892 was the first million seller to be conceived as a million seller, and marketed as a million seller. Harris’s head was in the twentieth century, but his heart was in the nineteenth. The story and melody of ‘After the Ball’ were thoroughly Victorian: a little maiden climbs an old man’s knee and asks him why he has no babies and no home. He replies that he had a sweetheart once but he caught her kissing another at a ball. He couldn’t forgive her, wouldn’t listen to her explanation. Years later, after her death, the man he caught her kissing tells him that he was her brother. That’s why the old man is lonely, no home at all, because he broke her heart after the ball.

The chorus, in waltz time, went:

After the ball is over,

After the break of morn,

After the dancers’ leaving,

After the stars are gone.

Many a heart is aching,

If you could read them all;

Many the hopes that have vanished,

After the ball.

Story ballads like ‘After the Ball’ were Harris’s speciality. They were written for middle-class ladies to perform at home on the piano, only ‘Ball’ strayed much farther. Genteel parlour music had its origins in Europe but by the early years of the nineteenth century had found its glory in America. The piano, a triumph of engineering and a solid piece of furniture, was a sure sign that an American was doing well and going up. But he didn’t play it. American musical men were considered effeminate. The playing of ballads was left to ladies, mostly young spinsters, or to touring performers from Europe.

There were more pianos in America than anywhere else in the world and there seemed to be more lady pianists. Novelist Anthony Trollope, jotting down his North American experiences, remarked that hotel drawing rooms invariably contained a piano played by a ‘forlorn lady’. The instrument seemed louder, harsher and more violent than the European kind. Female voices ‘rang and echoed through the lofty corners and round the empty walls’.

Performance was an accomplishment, not to be flaunted and never to be offensive. An 1851 issue of Harper’s gave some ‘Mems For Musical Misses’: they must sit in a simple, graceful manner, never swinging the arms or turning up the eyes; they must aim more at pleasing than astonishing.

This genteel music market continued into Tin Pan Alley time. For example, ‘A Day in Venice’, published in the late nineties, combined business gimmickry with gentility: the purchaser opened the album to find a spread of free doilies.

The man who dreamed up the doily idea was a Harrisian. For this was the go-ahead progressive side of Chas K., inspired partly by the carnival tactics of P. T. Barnum but more by the extraordinary business fervour which filled America at the end of the nineteenth century. Business became ‘life’s greatest adventure’. ‘Furnaces are glowing, spindles are singing their song’, opined a Senator. ‘Books are becoming wiser and music sweeter,’ added a clergyman. All this optimism was made possible by the American Industrial Revolution. That great sweating engine, clanking away since the end of the Civil War, gobbling up the Virgin America so fast that by 1900 the USA had become Number One Industrial Power of the world! Pop music was a branch of that revolution.

The pop branch had worked hard. It had stripped-down catalogues, and complex sales methods. It was geared to scoring a hit. All this was a far cry from the sleepy days of genteel publishers such as Firth, Pond & Co. They had hits true enough – but they didn’t cash in on them. They didn’t plug. They had them almost in a fit of absence of mind. Lowell Mason’s hymn collection did a half million over the years and Stephen Foster’s ‘Old Folks at Home’ did a very slow million. There was no trumpeting and no award-giving.

The old firms had dignity and much too much music (one of them had over 30,000 different pieces). Like an old country store they kept everything somewhere, only they weren’t sure exactly where. They had imported ‘motto’ songs, Swiss yodel songs, overtures, mazurkas, quadrilles, polkas, ‘The Pope He Leads a Happy Life’, funeral tunes, stacks of marches – including ‘The Ocean Telegraph March of 1871’, with a cover depicting the ‘side view of the Atlantic Cable laid bare, showing protection of 18 iron wires, each 7 strands’.

Hymns were extremely popular. America was a collection of small towns with space in between and, until show-business got organized, the church was chief impresario and she liked hymns for her suppers, meetings and get-togethers. As long as the words were uplifting it didn’t matter that the tunes were voluptuous. People sang ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus’ even at work.

But in 1892 a strange thing happened. Not only was this the year of the first self-conscious million seller (‘After The Ball’), but it was also the year in which Coca Cola ceased being advertised as a patent medicine. It was no longer improving. It was now proclaimed a pleasurable soft drink. Fun is taking the place of moral uplift!

Tearful songs were next in popularity to hymns in those days. Tears were considered good and right and natural. And trembling, weeping, swooning were common occurrences. This was not just confined to America: Chancellor Bismarck of Germany wept often with Wilhelm I. Prime Minister Gladstone of England broke down in private and public.

Harris, American but a true Victorian, cried whenever he sang ‘After the Ball’. Fellow songwriter Paul Dresser, a big man, played through his new effort ‘On the Banks of the Wabash’ to his novelist brother Theodore Dreiser and soon both had tears streaming down their cheeks. The nineties were to be called ‘gay’ but they were full of tears …

The pardon came too late, the letter was edged in black, the widower sat on his wife’s grave with blinding tears falling as he sang of his lost pearl, the child asked the switchboard girl for heaven because her mother was there and the...