As you will read in Chapter 4, this period marks a high point for Tin Pan Alley both in terms of its economic and artistic success. The song forms became fairly standardized, and the songs themselves tended to stick to stories of optimistic and romantic love. As the text notes, the songs also reflected the middle-class audiences’ desire for privacy and personal domestic space, in the form of home ownership. Listen to “My Blue Heaven” and “April Showers (1932 version)” on your CDs and follow along with the analyses in the book. These two examples represent the more sentimental side of Tin Pan Alley, but songwriters also cultivated upbeat, jazz-influenced tunes like “I Got Rhythm.”
Tin Pan Alley also had a symbiotic relationship with both the Broadway musical and the film industry, and a number of Tin Pan Alley hits, including “I Got Rhythm,” “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” and many others were promoted by being placed in vaudeville shows or musical revues. Early on, the songs didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the plot, and new songs could be cycled in without much fuss. The hits often outlasted these shows. Eventually, Broadway musicals began to become more fully realized, with the music integrated fully into the narrative in works by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. The film industry also became an important part of Tin Pan Alley promotional strategies, especially during the hey-day of the Hollywood musical. The video excerpt "Walk on By: The Story of Popular Song" introduces us to the song “My Funny Valentine,” a hit from the 1937 musical Babes in Arms, and details the creative struggles behind “Over the Rainbow,” one of the most lasting movie tunes from this time period, and the evolution of the Broadway musical in the hands of Rodgers & Hammerstein and Leonard Bernstein.
Tin Pan Alley is essentially the model for the music industry in the 20th century, regardless of whether it sold sheet music or recordings. In most cases, the main customers for Tin Pan Alley songs were middle-class white adults, at least in part because they could afford pianos and other musical instruments, and Tin Pan Alley provided them with music that celebrated domestic life and happiness. Although musical styles from the African-American and Latin-American streams filter in, particularly in the syncopated rhythms of tunes like “I Got Rhythm,” these markets were not a primary concern of Tin Pan Alley. However, the music was also designed specifically to appeal to as broad an audience as possible, and its dominance of the mainstream music industry from the late 19th century through the 1940s ensured that Tin Pan Alley’s influence eventually reached into practically every nook and cranny of America.
In Tin Pan Alley, we can see the genesis of pop music in the latter half of the 20th century as well, even if the products change somewhat. By the 1950s and 60s, the focus shifts to squeaky-clean teen idols like Frankie Valli, Connie Francis, the Osmonds, and The Beatles (at least at first), many of whom sang similarly romantic and optimistic fare about cars, love, and having fun. Even today, we can see that pop stars like Taylor Swift, Michael Buble, and most of the American Idol winners are essentially working within the Tin Pan Alley mold, even if the musical style has changed over the years. However, we can also note that music from the African-American and Latin-American streams, particularly jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, and rap, has made the mainstream considerably less “bleached” than it was over the first half of the 20th century.