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New York's Tin Pan Alley in Two and a Half Songs: Immigrants and the New York Music Industry between the 1890s and 1910s

image of New York's Tin Pan Alley in Two and a Half Songs: Immigrants and the New York Music Industry between the 1890s and 1910s

Immigrants were part of the early music publishing industry in New York, centered around Tin Pan Alley. They were both on the producing side as composers and lyricists and part of the lyrics as (oftentimes stereotypical) characters. Based on three so-called “sheet songs”, the article shows Irish and Jewish views on New York at the turn of the last century as well as an outsider's perspective on the (seemingly) exotic Chinatown, its residents, and visitors.

Keywords: Chinatown ; Chinese Americans ; immigrants ; Irish Americans ; Jewish Americans ; music and exoticism ; music publishing industry ; novelty songs ; sheet music ; Tin Pan Alley

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References

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References

  1. Altman, Hyman (1910), ‘Die New Yorker Trehren’ [sheet music], New York: S. Goldberg.
     [Google Scholar]
  2. Appell, Glenn and Hemphill, David (2006), American Popular Music: A Multicultural History, Belmont: Thomson Wadsworth.
     [Google Scholar]
  3. Flynn, Peter (2012), ‘Screening the Stage Irishman: Irish Masculinity in Early American Cinema, 1895–1907’, The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, 12:2 (Fall), pp. 121–47.
     [Google Scholar]
  4. Garrett, Charles Hiroshi (2004), ‘Whose Chinatown? Defining America's Borders with Musical Orientalism’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 57:1 (Spring), pp. 119–74.
     [Google Scholar]
  5. Goldmark, Daniel (2015), ‘“Making Songs Pay”: Tin Pan Alley's Formula for Success’, The Musical Quarterly, 98:1&2 (Spring–Summer), Special Issue: ‘Tin Pan Alley’, pp. 3–28.
     [Google Scholar]
  6. Gottlieb, Jack (2004), Funny, It Doesn't Sound Jewish: How Yiddish Songs and Synagogue Melodies Influenced Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood, Albany: State University of New York Press.20
     [Google Scholar]
  7. Granshaw, Michelle (2007), ‘Beyond the Caricature: Harrigan, Hart, and Braham's Music and the Construction of New York Irish Identity’, The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, 19:3 (Fall), pp. 51–78.
     [Google Scholar]
  8. Hamm, Charles (1979), Yesterdays: Popular Song in America, New York and London: W. W. Norton.
     [Google Scholar]
  9. Harrigan, Edward and Braham, David (1879), ‘The Babies on Our Block’ [sheet music], New York: Wm. A Pond.
     [Google Scholar]
  10. Heskes, Irene (1984), ‘Music as Social History: American Yiddish Theater Music, 1882-1920’, American Music, 2:4 (Winter), Special Issue: ‘Music of the American Theater’, pp. 73–87.
     [Google Scholar]
  11. Jerome, William and Schwartz, Jean ([1906] 1910), ‘Chinatown, My Chinatown’ [sheet music], New York: publisher unknown.
     [Google Scholar]
  12. Lawlor, Charles B. and Blake, James W. ([1894] 1904), ‘The Sidewalks of New York’ [sheet music], New York: Richmond-Robbins [original publisher: New York: Howley, Haviland & Co].
     [Google Scholar]
  13. Lecklider, Aaron S. (2011), ‘H. T. Tsiang's Proletarian Burlesque: Performance and Perversion in “The Hanging on Union Square”’, Melus, 36:4, Special Issue: ‘Asian American Performance Art’ (Winter), pp. 87–113.
     [Google Scholar]
  14. Merwin, Ted (2006), In Their Own Image: New York Jews in Jazz Age Popular Culture, New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  15. Miller, Karl H. (2010), Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  16. Moon, Krystyn R. (2005), Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s–1920s, New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  17. Saguisag, Lara (2017), ‘Anxious Encounters: Picturing the Street Child in On the Sidewalk of New York’, in E. O'Sullivan and A. Immel (eds), Imagining Sameness and Difference in Children's Literature: From Enlightenment to the Present Day, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 169–86.
     [Google Scholar]
  18. Suisman, David (2021), Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  19. Sullivan, Steve (2013), Encyclopedia of Great Popular Song Recordings, vol. 1, Lanham, Toronto and Plymouth: Scarecrow Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  20. Tsou, Judy (1997), ‘Gendering Race: Stereotypes of Chinese Americans in Popular Sheet Music’, Repercussions, 6:2, pp. 25–62.
     [Google Scholar]
  21. Wickes, Edward M. (1916), Writing the Popular Song, Springfield: The Home Correspondence School.
     [Google Scholar]
  22. Zheng, Su (2010), Claiming Diaspora: Music, Transnationalism and Cultural Politics in Asian/Chinese America, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
     [Google Scholar]

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