Selects: What was Tin Pan Alley?

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1:06Hi everyone, it's me, Josh, and for this week's Select, I've chosen our Tin Pan Alley episode from May 2019. It's one of those topics I knew nothing about, but was pleasantly surprised to find that it's super interesting. It's about the birth of the music industry and the place where a lot of great songs that are still really great today were produced. Hope you enjoy this episode.

1:32Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

1:41Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Tuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there. And this is Stuff You Should Know, the superstar edition. The old-timey superstar edition. Yeah, man. I thought this was super cool. Tin Pan Alley. Yeah, this is one of those things where I sort of knew what Tin Pan Alley was. And you always have heard that term thrown around. But I never really, really got it until this episode. Yeah, same here. And it's pretty cool. The term Tin Pan Alley, T-I-N, full stop, P-A-N, Alley. You forgot a second full stop there. Full stop. I just want to make sure people know it's not one word like tin pan.

2:27Right. It's two words. Right. But that is, linguistically speaking, that's a synecdoche. What? It is. You know what that is, right? I've seen the movie. Man, that movie. Jeez. You're talking about the Charlie Kaufman thing, right? Sure, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Synecdoche, New York. Yeah, so a synecdoche is when a specific place stands in for a broader term, like Wall Street. Like Wall Street's a real street, but Wall Street also means like the finance industry. Right. Or Hollywood. Hollywood's a real place. Oh, okay. This makes a lot more sense than the Charlie Kaufman movie. Yeah, so Tin Pan Alley is a bunch of things.

3:14It was a place. Right. in New York City, which we'll get to in a second, like exactly where. And it was also referred to sort of the beginnings of the music publishing industry and genre as well. Yep. There's kind of a lot of things, but it stems from the root of a tin pan, like a tin pan was a cheap piano. Like if you had a really cheap piano, you would say it sounds tin panny. Right, because that's what the hammer on the piano's hitting is tin pans rather than strings. Yeah, it sounds just like a real tinny tone, like you're beating on a tin pan. So that's where the term originally came from.

3:52And depending on who you ask, this area of New York was called Tin Pan Alley because perhaps a journalist first wrote about it. All the sounds coming from the songwriters from these buildings on this one block sounded like Tin Pan Alley. Right. It's no exaggeration to say Tin Pan Alley, specifically this little stretch in New York, like a block or so, maybe less than a block, I think. It's a block. Okay. Was the place where the American popular music industry was born? Yeah. So it's specifically 28th Street between 6th and Broadway, kind of between Chelsea and Kipps Bay, a little northwest of like the Flatiron Building.

4:35Gotcha. And it's interesting to think that the beginnings of music distribution wasn't pre-phonograph and pre-records. There was still music distribution, but it was sheet music. Right, right. So I think, Chuck, we should get back in the Waveback Machine and go to an indeterminate part of the mid-19th century in the United States. Let's do it.

5:05so like you said there's horse poop everywhere there's a lot of it um it's like you said if you wanted to hear music you had basically two choices you could go hear it played live somewhere everywhere from a barbershop quartet to maybe an orchestra um or on board right or you could have a family member who knew how to play music and buy a piano and have it in your home. Those were your two ways to hear music because everywhere there was no such thing as radio. Let's just say it, everybody. There was no radio. There wasn't. And if you think about it, radio was, you know, we take it so much for granted today, but it was a huge watershed change in the way that Americans in the world heard their music.

5:58You could just hear it at home being played by professionals, like the most, the greatest musicians you've ever heard, you could just sit around and listen to it at your home. Whereas just years before, a few years before, you had to listen to your 12-year-old try to bang out some song on the piano that you just bought. And that was your option aside from going to hear it live. And so this whole idea of the music industry being born is basically predicated on two things, Chuck. One was the fact that pianos were starting to become ubiquitous in American houses. Yeah. And people were learning how to play those pianos.

6:35So music instruction became kind of widespread. And then secondly, copyright law started to really solidify in the United States in the 19th century. And so that sheet music became much more valuable than it was before. Yeah, like if you can't, like I can't read sheet music. I can't either. Yeah, I learned to play guitar by ear. And kind of, I guess every friend I know that's a musician, except for a couple, learned by ear. If you came up formally through high school band or something like that, or maybe just private music instruction, then you may be able to read music. But back in the day, if you could not, and still today, if you could not play by ear, the only way to do so was through sheet music.

7:21And that was the first commodity in the music business was literally just selling sheet music to people. Right. It's hard to wrap your head around now, but that was the commodity. It is hard to wrap your head around, but if you think about sheet music as basically the predecessor to the cassette or the record or the CD or the MP3, it's the exact same thing. It's just to hear it, like that is what you went and bought at the store, and then you came home and played it rather than listening to somebody else playing it. Yeah, and like they sold a lot of them. Like the very first hit that Tin Pan Alley put out, and this was a period, I mean, this was in 1881 when Wait Till the Clouds Roll By was put out.

8:03So Tin Pan Alley generally was early 1880s till early 1920s or so. I saw like late 1920s. Was it early? Yeah. Yeah. I guess, you know, you can never say when it was dead, dead. Right. But in one month, in 1881, they sold 75 ,000 copies of sheet music to Wait Till the Clouds Roll By. Right. That's amazing. Yeah, because it was a good song, and people wanted to hear the song, so they went and bought the sheet music. Yeah. So that was one thing, right? So there was sheet music. That was how you got this stuff out. But even before Wait Till the Clouds Roll By, which it seems like was probably America's first number one smash hit.

8:45Yeah. Pop music. Prior to that, there was plenty of sheet music to be sold, but it was largely like church hymns. Bloring. There was a lot that were sold for schools. Yeah. And like I said, copyright law changed. It allowed Tim Panale to develop, and it did so in two ways. One, the court started taking copyrights for music seriously in the second half of the 19th century. so you could actually enforce your copyright against people who were infringing on it. And then secondly, the Supreme Court specifically said, hey, if you wrote a song outside of America, when it comes to America, it enjoys, you can copyright it in America too, which means that the music publisher's source of free sheet music, which was just basically stealing foreign music, printing it out in sheet music form, and then selling it and not paying any royalties because it enjoyed no copyright protection, that source dried up.

9:50And so all of a sudden, this American music that they had to pay for now seemed a lot more attractive because now they had to pay for the music generated overseas too. So this copyright law and the fact that more and more people were learning to play piano and so you had an actual market for sheet music, those two things came together. All right, let's take a break. I feel like that's a pretty good setup. Okay. And we'll come back and talk a little bit about who these music publishers were and how they went about their work early on in the Tin Pan Alley era, right after this.

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13:02All right, so we've been throwing around the term music publishers a lot, and that sort of means a different thing now than it did back then. But back then, music publishers, some of them wrote songs, to be sure, but generally they did not. A lot of the early publishers out of Tin Pan Alley had backgrounds as salespeople. So there was a guy named, a very successful publisher named Isidore Whitmark. He started out selling water filters. Another one named Leo Feist sold corsets. Another one named Joe Stern and Edward B. Mark sold neckties and buttons. And a lot of these people, I guess we should point out too, came over from Europe.

13:44A lot were Jewish. Some African-American songwriters, like, they were minorities kind of for the most part early on, it feels like. Right. And they saw a huge opportunity in this music business that was starting to coalesce. Because prior to this, I mean, there were music publishers, but it was basically some guy who worked at a printer who had a friend who could transpose music by ear. and they would just take some song that they heard and turn it into sheet music and start selling it. Or they worked at the music store and the music store basically did the exact same thing. And so everyone was ripping off everyone else's songs and anybody could be a music publisher.

14:29But when those copyrights started to become enforced, it became much more valuable to invest in original music because you could make a lot more money off of it. So a lot of those Jewish immigrants and a lot of the African-American songwriters and composers kind of coalesced into New York. They came from Boston and Detroit and Atlanta and St. Louis and all over the country. And all those towns lost their publishing houses and they all moved to New York. And they very specifically moved to this one little stretch on 28th Street. and it became Tim Pan Alley. Yeah, and it's really interesting to look at how it worked back then and how it sort of mirrored how music grew out of that model, really, and changed in some ways, but kind of stayed the same in a lot of ways, too.

15:25Like you always hear about music contracts and how terrible they are for rock musicians or pop musicians, and it was kind of the same way back then. These publishers got together. They created this songwriting factory on this block of buildings through different companies. And they would recruit songwriters to come in. They had different arrangements. Sometimes they would just buy it outright from you, including the rights to change the name of who wrote it. Sometimes they would have the right to throw one of the other more, I guess, once they had established themselves, another co-author's name on there.

16:03But they would just, you know, say, write these songs, write these songs, and we're going to buy them from you. And we're going to try and make them pop. Like, you couldn't put them on the radio. So we're going to try and get them popular by getting them onto vaudeville and on stage and sending, not moles, I guess, but it was almost like early payola. Right. Sending these performers into vaudeville to sing these songs and perform these songs. And people are like, well, that's pretty catchy. I want that. Right. Right. That's how they marketed it. And that was like the whole thing. Like if you, it was the first time that music became an industry because there was almost an assembly line feel to it where they would have feelers out to find out like what people were into as music at the time.

16:49One of the early transitions that Tim Pan Alley underwent was when it started, it was a factory for churning out like comedic, often deeply racist songs. Yeah. Lots of ballads. Just what you think of as super old timey songs, right? And then the public started to get kind of bored with that. And they decided that they kind of like this ragtime thing that the Scott Joplin fella has started to create. And so Tim Pan Alley, this is classic Tim Pan Alley, went out, figured out how to play ragtime, started co-opting the ragtime genre and created pop music. So they took what was a really difficult kind of music.

17:34It's called syncopated rhythm where you've got a melody within a rhythm, right? So, you know ragtime, right? Sure. Okay, so they figured out how to take this very difficult thing and kind of popify it to make it easy for the audience to play. Because again, here's the thing. They're not saying, hey, you're the best of the best studio musician. We've got this really tough song over here that sounds great, but it's really tough to play. We want to pay you to come play it. We're going to record it and distribute it onto the radio. That didn't exist yet. They had to figure out how to take difficult songs, kind of dumb them down into something catchy and memorable and importantly, easy to play so that they could sell that sheet music to local musicians or those barbershop quartets or so that the 12 year old at home could play it for the rest of their family.

18:25And so that is how they kind of started to take popular music and make it even more popular. They decided what music was popular based on what America was starting to get into at the time. Yeah, and there were these musicians called song pluggers. So how it would work is a music publisher in Tin Pan Alley would buy a song or the rights to a song off of a musician who wrote it. maybe put their own name on it and then they would give that song to a song plugger who is a musician who would go and perform this at a music shop that maybe sold pianos or something like that. And this was pre-radio how they got the music out in the public.

19:09And it was crazy. These song pluggers got money. Irving Berlin started out as a song plugger. Right. And so it's kind of like if you, you know how you go to a grocery store on a Saturday and they'll be sitting there giving out samples of something? Sure. And you'll say, oh, this cheese with this cracker tastes really good. I'm going to go buy this cheese and these crackers. This is the exact same thing, except you would say, oh, this song sounds really good. I'm going to buy the sheet music. That's what music pluggers were for. That's how they got the word out. That's how they advertised the music was to play them.

19:40And then another way to do it, Chuck, is like you were saying, they would set vaudeville shows up or musical reviews or Broadway shows, whatever, with these popular songs and these songwriters. to help get them out that way too so that audiences would go hear these things. So you could hear them in the music shop. You could hear them at the theater. You might hear them, well, that's basically it. It's the theater and the music shop were the two main venues, unless I'm forgetting one. Yeah, and that was the plugging, but it was also booming. So like I said, you had Irving Berlin and like George Gershwin started out as a song plugger.

20:21Al Sherman started out as a song plugger. But if you wanted to be more aggressive than that even, you would do something called booming, which is you would buy like 25 tickets to a show. You would have the plugger up there playing the song. And then those 25 people were plants, basically, that already knew the song that would sing along to it. And then everyone, you know, the only thing better than hearing a great song for the first time in, you know, 1910 in New York City is hearing 25 people around you singing it and you're thinking, how have I been missing out on this thing? Right. And that may be the first time it was ever performed in public.

20:58That's awesome. And it was all just a big, kind of a big scam. It was. It's hilarious, though, that that's how you just look around and suddenly be overcome with FOMO. So you'd be into this new song and run out and buy the sheet music, I guess. Early FOMO. So there was this process to all this. And like you said, like you could be like a no-name composer who would show up at Timpan Alley with the song that you're trying to sell. And if it was good, the publisher might buy it. But like you said, you would get some sort of terrible contract or they would buy it outright, take your name off of the composition and put their own name on there.

21:35but they also hired composers I think like you were saying too where they were they were they had they had a few hits under their belt so they had a steady gig at the music publisher and their contract was a little better but they were not in creative control for the most part to where the music publisher would say hey everybody's into this ragtime make me some ragtime songs everybody's into this jazz and this blues stuff make me some bluesy kind of stuff that I can turn around and sell. And the competition was really fierce among the in-house composers because just because you composed a song doesn't mean it was going to be turned around and transcribed into sheet music and then people would buy it.

22:14Like you had to basically audition your song to see whether it made it to the next level. And so in Timpan Alley, and this is where it got its name, there would be, you know, no-name composers, house composers, vaudeville acts, all running around playing music from these open windows because there wasn't air conditioning back then. And so at any given time, you'd walk down Timpan Alley and there'd be a dozen or scores of different songs all being played on these pianos streaming out of the windows onto the street at the same time. And that's where that reporter Monroe Rosenfeld came up with the idea of Timpan Alley.

22:50He said it when he was walking down the street, he was kind of describing what that was like. He said it sounded like, you know, a bunch of timpans being struck at once. Yeah. And this whole area of New York, this one block just really became like a creative well. There were vaudeville theaters, there were play theaters, like it was sort of the earliest incarnation of the theater district before it moved toward Times Square. And then other parts of the entertainment industry, obviously are drawn to that area. Variety Magazine, that's where it first popped up on that block when it was called The Clipper.

23:24The William Morris Talent Agency had an office on that block. And it was just sort of the, you know, after I think Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, and I think one other city kind of were the early seats of the early music industry. It all roundly landed in New York and just such a creative area and era. It's so neat to think about, too, because that's happened in places before where if you take a bunch of creative people and jam them into a small area, just amazing stuff happens. Like you can do something as big as birth a genre of music or like pop music, which is like an umbrella. It's not even a genre.

24:07There's genres underneath pop music, you know, where something that big can happen when you get that many creative people together in one place. Should we take another break? Sure. All right, let's take another break, and we'll talk about some of these songs, some of these composers, and the Great American Songbook right after this.

24:31Hi, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally. And I'm Hari Kondabolu. It's a new year, and on the podcast Health Stuff, we're resetting the way we talk about our health. Which means being honest about what we know, what we don't know, and how messy it can all be. I like to sleep in late and sleep early. Is there a chronotype for that or am I just depressed? We talk to experts who share real experiences and insight. You just really need to find where it is that you can have an impact in your own life and just start doing that. We break down the topics you want to know more about. Sleep, stress, mental health, and how the world around us affects our overall health.

25:09We talk about all the ways to keep your body and mind, inside and out, healthy. We human beings, all we want is connection. We just want to connect with each other. Health stuff is about learning, laughing, and feeling a little less alone. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, this is Dr. Jesse Mills, director of the Men's Clinic at UCLA Health and host of the Mailroom Podcast. Each January, guys everywhere make the same resolutions. Get stronger, work harder, fix what's broken. But what if the real work isn't physical at all? To kick off the new year, I sat down with Dr.

25:47Steve Poulter, a psychologist with over 30 years' experience helping men unpack shame, anxiety, and emotional pain they were never taught to name. In a powerful two-part conversation, we discuss why men aren't emotionally bulletproof, why shame hides in plain sight, and how real strength comes from listening to yourself and to others. Guys who are toxic, they're immature, or they've got something they just haven't resolved. Once that gets resolved, then there comes empathy and some compassion. If you want this to be the year you stop powering through pain and start understanding what's underneath, listen to The Mailroom on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.