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Irving Berlin : American troubadour

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Item details
Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	ML410.B499 J33 1999	Off-site

Description

viii, 406 pages : illustrations; 25 cm

Summary

Although he could play piano in only one key and never learned to read music, or to transcribe it, Irving Berlin wrote some 1,500 songs, dozens of them part of the enduring body of Broadway lore.
Irving Berlin was born in czarist Russia in 1888. His family immigrated to America in 1893 and settled in a tenement on New York's Lower East Side. Running away from home at age thirteen, he worked as a busker in the flamboyantly disreputable Bowery bars. He tried his hand on Broadway, was a singing waiter in Chinatown, and was also hired as a song plugger and lyricist for a Tin Pan Alley music publisher.
So begins one of the biggest success stories of twentieth-century popular music. Berlin's first writing credit was for the lyrics of the 1907 song "Marie from Sunny Italy." His first landmark hit came in 1911 with the publication of "Alexander's Ragtime Band," and in 1919 Berlin celebrated the formation of his own music publishing firm with "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody." Irrepressible classics that followed include "Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee," "Cheek to Cheek," "This Is the Army, Mr.
Jones," and "There's No Business Like Show Business." These and many more were part of his output for Hollywood and Broadway. Among his film credits are three Astaire and Rogers romps - Top Hat, Follow the Fleet, and Carefree - and his Broadway shows include As Thousands Cheer, This Is the Army, Annie Get Your Gun, and Call Me Madam.

Subject

Bibliography (note)

"The songs of Irving Berlin": p. 335-362.
Includes discography (p. 362-367), filmography (p. 367-369), bibliographical references (p. 377-378), and index.

ISBN

0805040773 (hb : alk. paper)

LCCN

98003058

OCLC

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries