Music: Old Corn Is Best

Tin Pan Alley was becoming a deadend street. More new songs were being published, played and plugged than ever before—but four of last week’s top ten songs on Billboard’s hit parade were at least 16 years old.*

Popular-music fans who wanted to wear the New Look were prying into piano benches for faded copies of All of Me, I’m in the Mood for Love, Have You Ever Been Lonely? Record companies rushed out new versions of My Blue Heaven, and Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams.

Last week the dean of the Alley’s songwriters, who never had more than two years’ schooling, put a finger on the trouble. Said Irving Berlin: present-day songwriters are, or think they are, too sophisticated to write simple songs. One of Berlin’s newest songs, Kate, which sounds very much like some of the 800 other songs he has written, is climbing up the best-seller lists. Annie Get Your Gun, featuring 15 songs he wrote, is still playing to standing-room-only crowds after a year and a half on Broadway. And White Christmas, Berlin’s sugary, singable hit (over 6,000,000 records) is about to receive its annual exhuming. At 59, Berlin is off to Hollywood to put the finishing touches on a new movie which will have eight new new Berlin songs and eight old ones. Berlin, who can’t read music and plays beer-hall-style piano by ear, tries out his tunes on a trick piano which transposes the only key he knows (F sharp) to any key that he wants.

Said he: “In the old days, we used to write songs for singers. The songs were personal, and the public felt that. Now they write songs for publishers. You could write a song about ‘My Dear Old Mother’ or ‘I Love You’ in a way that seems like terrible corn today. But today songwriters have become too selfconscious. They are afraid of being hooted out of town for writing that kind of thing. Actually, you know,” he added in his scratchy, rapid-fire tenor, “corn of itself is always good. If it’s bad, it’s just bad writing.”

*The four: That’s My Desire (1931), Peg O’ My Heart (1913), I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now (1909), When You Were Sweet Sixteen (1898).