American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950 by Alec Wilder (review)

Reviewed by: American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950 by Alec Wilder John Check American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950. 3rd ed. By Alec Wilder. Edited and revised by Robert Rawlins. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. xi, 564 p. ISBN 9780190939946 (hardcover), 135; ISBN 9780190939953 (paperback), 43. 99; also available as ebook (ISBN and price vary). Music examples, bibliography, index. Alec Wilder's American Popular Song, first published in 1972, touched up and reissued posthumously in 1990, is presented in a new edition under the editorship of Robert Rawlins. A professor of music theory at Rowan University and the author of numerous books on jazz and US popular music, Rawlins brings to his task a comprehensive knowledge of the songs from the first half of the twentieth century and an insider's knowledge of the ways they have been used by singers, musicians, and entertainers. His editorial work will be addressed below, but first, it is well to consider the scope of Wilder's project and his approach. The central part of the book contains individual chapters devoted to noteworthy US popular-song composers: Jerome Kern, Irving Belin, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, and Harold Arlen. These chapters are followed by a pair of chapters that survey the contributions of Vincent Youmans and Arthur Schwartz; and Burton Lane, Hugh Martin, and Vernon Duke. Then comes a chapter ("The Great Craftsmen") that gives a taste of the work of a dozen composers ranging from Richard Whiting to Jimmy Van Heusen. The next chapter concentrates on isolated songs, arranged chronologically, from 1920 to 1950; these are sometimes treated in passing, and other times in detail. Wilder's book is an act of appreciation written from the perspective of a practitioner. His opinions are strong, acute, and stylishly conveyed. For instance, he can pinpoint moments when a composer gets something exactly right. In Kern's "All the Things You Are, " he admires the enharmonic hinge between the end of the bridge and the return of the opening melody, calling it "not only very ingenious, but very daring" (p. 79). He can be contradictory. "Through the Years" may well have been the favorite song of Youmans, its composer, but "I can't say that it's mine" (p. 302). He can be funny, as when he remarks about Berlin's "Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning": "I believe this song could have been Berlin's platform had he run for high office at that time" (p. 101). He can also be candid, as when he puzzles over the pickup notes to Rodgers's "Isn't It Romantic? , " wondering why he finds them so appealing: "I would like to pull a musical rabbit out of a hat, but I can't" (p. 196). He can be generous in summarizing a song's total effect: "You Do Something to Me, " by Porter, strikes him as "both musically and lyrically without guile or cynicism" (p. 227). However varied and various Wilder's opinions may be, they successfully cohere in a settled point of view. Rawlins adds footnotes that amplify, clarify, and occasionally correct Wilder's observations. Amplifying a point about the Fulton McGrath song "Mandy Is Two, " Rawlins allows that Wilder "hated its printed sheet music score, " End Page 693 riddled as it was with errors, adding that Wilder, in a 1977 radio broadcast, said that "the piano copy was made by a village idiot" (p. 484, n. 24). Clarifying a remark about the way singers "never" perform certain written pitches of the Brooks Bowman song "East of the Sun, " Rawlins contrasts the practice of Frank Sinatra early in his career, when he too altered the pitches, and later in his career, when he didn't (p. 463, n. 14). Rawlins refutes Wilder's assertion about the supposedly simple harmony of "Whispering, " by the team of John Schonberger, Richard Coburn, and Vincent Rose: Rawlins notes that it is "among only a handful of tunes" opening with a tonic chord that is neighbored by a dominant seventh chord rooted on the leading tone. He adds that Dizzy Gillespie "thought enough of the harmony of 'Whispering' to use is as. . .