Tin Pan Alley

Tin Pan Alley was the name given to the collection of New York City-centered music publishers and songwriters who dominated the popular music of the United States of America in the late 19th century and the early 20th century.

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The music houses in lower Manhattan were lively places, with a steady stream of songwriters, Vaudeville and Broadway performers, musicians, and song pluggers coming and going.

Related Topics:
Vaudeville - Broadway - Musician

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Aspiring songwriters came to demonstrate tunes they hoped to sell. When tunes were purchased from unknowns with no previous hits, the name of someone with the firm was often added as co-composer (in order to keep a higher percentage of royalties within the firm), or all rights to the song were purchased outright for a flat fee (including rights to put someone else's name on the sheet music as the composer). Songwriters who became established producers of commercially successful songs were hired to be on the staff of the music houses; the most successful of them, like Harry Von Tilzer and Irving Berlin, went on to found their own music publishing firms.

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Song pluggers were pianists and singers who made their living demonstrating songs in order to promote sales of sheet music. Most music stores had song pluggers on staff; other pluggers were employed by the publishers to travel around and make the public familiar with their new publications.

Related Topics:
Pianists - Singers

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When Vaudeville performers played New York City, they would often visit various Tin Pan Alley firms in order to find new songs to add to their acts. Second and third rate performers often would pay for rights to use a new song, whereas famous stars would be given free copies of publisher's new numbers or even paid to publicly perform them, for the publishers knew this was valuable advertising.

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Initially Tin Pan Alley specialized in melodramatic ballads and comic novelty songs, but it quickly embraced the newly popular styles of the Cakewalk and Ragtime music. Later on elements of jazz and the blues were incorporated as well, although less completely, as Tin Pan Alley was oriented towards producing songs that any amateur singer or small town band could perform from printed music. Since improvisation, blue notes, and other characteristics of jazz and blues could not be captured in conventional printed notation, Tin Pan Alley manufactured jazzy and bluesy pop-songs and dance numbers. Much of the general public in the late 1910s and the 1920s did not know the difference between these contrived commercial products and authentic jazz and blues.

Related Topics:
Cakewalk - Ragtime music - Jazz - Blues - Blue note - 1920s

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