![]() Yagoda, a veteran journalist and the author of books exploring language, the history of The New Yorker and vaudeville star Will Rogers, digs deep into the archives of the music industry trade papers for his detective work. ![]() ![]() In what sometimes feels like three-fourths time, the author glides through an elegant anecdotal history of the Great American Songbook, and the stage and screen musicals that produced the songs we now consider to be “standards,” from “Stardust” and “Skylark” to “My Favorite Things.” The rise of Tin Pan Alley, the music publishers’ row on New York’s West 28th Street, gets at least as much air time as its demise. But although he seems to be looking to lay some blame, the real reasons-changing tastes, greater inclusion, the dismantling of the notion that songwriters had to be “professionals”-might, in fact, be more complicated. Yagoda sets out to learn just why the well-crafted songs of Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael, Richard Rodgers, and their contemporaries found themselves, by the 1950s, in the doghouse. ![]() Miller is portrayed, not for the first time, as a leader of the death squad for the elegant popular music of the early 20th century in Ben Yagoda’s new book, The B-Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song. ![]()
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