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Sept. 14, 2007

King of American popular music

Composer churned out dozens of celebrated tunes and yet he had no formal training.
EUGENE KAELLIS

An impossibly poor family of a part-time cantor who is also a part-time shochet, (ritual slaughterer) reluctantly, fearfully, but desperately, leaves a shtetl in Eastern Russia after their house has been burnt down in one of a string of pogroms following the assassination of Czar Alexander II.

This immigrant family, including a skinny kid by the name of Israel, after a long, exhausting journey, arrives almost penniless in New York City in 1893 and settles in a decrepit, crowded tenement on the Lower East Side. The father gets marginal work and, after three years of struggling, working almost around the clock at a few low-paying jobs and enduring extreme privation, contracts pneumonia, collapses and dies.

Israel, now eight, with only two years of schooling – all he will ever get – valiantly hustles to help support himself, his mother and siblings. He assists a blind street performer for a portion of the coins thrown at them, goes on to become a singing waiter and, eventually, without ever learning musical notation or how to play anything but the black keys on a piano (in F# only), writes more than 900 songs, including "Alexander's Ragtime Band," "White Christmas" and "Easter Parade," 19 stage musicals, including Louisiana Purchase, Annie Get Your Gun and Call Me Madam, and the music for 18 movies.

With all this, he becomes extremely wealthy, topping every other composer with the royalties paid for performing his songs, is awarded a special medal by the president of the United States, and one of his songs ("God Bless America") becomes the "official" unofficial national anthem of his adopted country.

Who was it? If you're over 20, you get just one guess.

The answer? Irving Berlin (né Israel Baline, the change due to a clerk's typo).

Berlin was not an imposing man. He was small, slim, wiry and shy, often embarrassed by his lack of formal training. Although he once earned money singing, his voice was a bit high, tremulous and quite thin. He didn't know musical keys and he never bothered to learn them. He used a special piano (called "a faker") with a "gear shift," so he could switch from one key to another by moving a lever. To top it all, he couldn't write music. After he was satisfied with what he'd been singing, including the lyrics, which he almost always wrote himself, he'd pay a transcriber (for one song, it was George Gershwin) to write down the words and notes so he could get his creations published.

But in other things, Berlin wasn't as lucky. In 1913, when he was 25, he married 20-year-old singer Dorothy Goetz. The newlyweds went to Cuba for their honeymoon. While there, Goetz contracted typhoid fever and, in pre-antibiotic days, died the same year.

For a while, Berlin's grief overpowered his talent. His songs became limp and sorry. The joy and ebullience had gone out of them. Gradually, he recovered from his grief and, in 1926, he married Ellin Mackay. The marriage was initially opposed by Mackay's father, a leading Catholic layman and president of the Postal Telegraph Co. She remained a Catholic throughout their marriage of 63 years. When she died, just six months before he did, she was given a requiem mass in New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral.

When the United States entered the First World War, Berlin, already a big name in showbiz, was drafted and served at Camp Upton, Long Island, not far from New York City, an embarkation point for troops leaving for Europe. His army experience inspired him to write "Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning," which had additional personal meaning for Berlin, since he rarely woke before noon after staying up most of the night composing. In the army, he wrote and produced Yip! Yip! Yaphank! with army servicemen as his actors.

When the United States entered the Second World War, Berlin went back to Camp Upton to gather material for yet another all-soldier show, This is the Army, which opened on Broadway, appropriately, on Independence Day (July 4), 1942. It toured most of America's cities and overseas at American army posts. Berlin himself appeared in the show for the three and a half years of its run. It earned $10 million for the Army Emergency Relief Fund.

At the age of 66, Berlin decided it was time to retire, do some fishing, golfing and painting. But, of course, he had no idea that he would live for another 35 years, until he was 101. After a spell of "relaxing," he got bored and went back to composing. The public was waiting. His next show opened in 1962, selling two and a half million dollars in tickets before opening night.

A letter written in 1925 by Jerome Kern to Alexander Woollcott, the critic and writer, contained a line that has become a veritable cliché. "Irving Berlin," Kern wrote, "has no place in American music. He is American music."

The same could be said of Gershwin, Aaron Copeland and Leonard Bernstein. What perhaps made their music quintessentially American and bound them together in spirit was gratitude at the safety and opportunity they enjoyed in the United States, as Jews and immigrants – or the descendants of immigrants – who had fled persecution and poverty.

Could there be another phenomenon like Berlin in present-day America? Unquestionably, only not in the same genre. Berlin's songs, like those of Kern, Gershwin, Hoagy Carmichael and Cole Porter, are too tame for today's young people, too "mushy," perhaps, in their emphasis on romantic love, rather than sex, and certainly not rhythmically intense enough for dancing at a nightclub.

Yet poor inner city kids are, almost overnight, becoming rap kings and queens. Like Berlin, they have little or no education or formal musical training but they appeal to a huge audience of young people of all races and ethnic backgrounds. The songs are sometimes frightening, as is much of today's mood. Their lyrics can be vulgar and sexually explicit, which is perhaps too restrained a word; often they are misogynist and disturbingly violent. Our times are different, and the music reflects it.

There are still popular balladeers in contemporary song and fans of lyrical romantic love may hope that its expression becomes a more significant part of popular music, but that may require a less charged and less violent society.
The stage musicals Berlin wrote were part of a genre that grew up in the States – and was derived from and succeeded vaudeville. Vaudeville had separate, unconnected acts: song, dance, comedy. It evolved into revues, usually having a connecting theme, minimal as it was, and then to stage musicals with an actual cohesive story line.

Musicals are a form that itself is quintessentially American – most of them being inventive, energetic, emotional, imaginative, secure in their sense of rightness and hope and, above all, optimistic: adjectives that described Irving Berlin.

Eugene Kaellis is a retired academic living in New Westminster.

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