The New American Songbook.

TheBig3 · 05-14-2010, 02:31 PM

For those who don't know, the Great American Song book is...

Quote:

The Great American Songbook is a construct that seeks to represent the best American songs of the 20th century [1][2][3] principally from Broadway theatre, musical theatre, and Hollywood musicals, from the 1920s to 1960, including dozens of songs of enduring popularity. The Great American Songbook became (and remains) a vital part of the repertoire of jazz musicians, who describe such songs simply as "jazz standards".

It also pulled heavily in many cases from Tin Pan Alley...

Quote:

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

But the days of Cole Porter and Dizzy Gillespie are long gone. As our parents are poised to become Grandparents, people born at that time are being less and less available. While the songs live on, music has shifted drastically to bring in many elements that would have normally existed outside of the medium: poetry, experimentation, philosophy.

But then, as it is today, the Songbook took not the kitschy, gimmicky, or oddball - it took the pure strains of emotion that songs could embody and said "for those of us who lived then, this is the best of what we produced."

Lets set, as an arbitrary point, 1970 as the begining. Since the last took into account roughly 40 years, what has the last 40 years in Americas ragged landscpae produced worthy of time's merit, that when our grandchildren put the last of us in the dirt, they can still look back and say "those guys really could write."

Criteria: I'm going to sit with this for a bit, but feel free to put in here songs that have/can be redone a million times and always carry that chracter of what made them brilliant.