Gavin B.

The Songcraft Story

I recently saw Robbie Robertson former lead guitarist and chief songwriter for The Band on the Tavis Smiley show. Robbie pointed out that prior to the Beatles, very few rock music performers wrote their own material, but after the Beatles nearly every band began writing their own songs, primarily because it was financially advantageous to do so.

The math is simple: The credited "performer" receives around 3-4% of the royalty cut, while the credited "songwriter" gets a heftier 12-13% of the royalty cut. It made sense for performers to write their own material because they would receive between 15% and 17% of the royalty cut instead of the usual 3-4% a band or musician receives for covering someone else's song.

After the Beatles, performing musicians were expected to write their own original material and the bands that couldn't write their own music were considered lightweight cover bands. With the rise of songwriting bands the nearly 100 year old songcraft tradition that began on Tin Pan Alley died a slow death.

The Rise of Tin Pan Alley

Tin Pan Alley is the name given to the collection of New York City music publishers and songwriters who dominated the popular music of the United States in the late 19th century and early 20th century. The name originally referred to a specific place: West 28th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan where both songwriters and music publishers maintained offices. Tin Pan Alley was the home of the great pop music songwriters of the pre-rock era like Irving Berlin, George & Ira Gershwin, George M. Cohan, Johnny Mercer, Jerome Kern & Cole Porter. Even black musicians like Fats Waller and Scott Joplin had songwriting offices on Tin Pan Alley.


Tin Pan Alley 1910

Stephen Foster: The Father of the American Pop Song

Stephen Foster (1826-1864) was arguably the first popular songwriter in the Tin Pan Alley tradition. Foster's popularity pre-dated era of Tin Pan Alley but he was one of the first songwriters to move to the Lower East Side of Manhattan prior to the rise of the first generation of Tin Pan Alley songwriters a decade later. Foster wrote many of the great pop music classics of the pre-Civil War era like, Camptown Races, Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair, My Old Kentucky Home, Old Folk At Home, Oh! Susanna and Beautiful Dreamer. Foster was also an incorrigible drunk who killed himself at age 37 when he got drunk and fell and hit his head on a wash basin.


Stephen Foster, the father of the American pop music song

Back in the days prior to the invention of the phonograph record player, the primary source of revenue for a songwriter was royalties from sheet music sales. Nearly every middle class family had piano in the parlor and at least one family member could sight read written sheet music. Stephen Foster sold millions of sheet music books of his original songs and was the first American popular music composer to become a household name in the United States. American pop music had it's origins with Stephen Foster and his followers who made Tin Pan Alley the American headquarters of pop music.

The Brill Building

After World War II songwriters began migrating from Tin Pan Alley to the Brill Building located further uptown at 1619 Broadway on 49th Street in the Manhattan, just north of Times Square. The greatest songwriters of the pre-Beatles pop music era maintained office space in the Brill Building, including Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Sonny Bono, Neil Diamond, Leiber & Stoller, Doc Pomus, Laura Nyro, Phil Spector, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, Barry Mann & Cynthia Weil, Carol King & Gerry Goffin, Andy Kim & Marvin Hamlisch.


The Brill Building

Among the musicians headquartered at the Brill Building were Bobby Darin, Frankie Valle and the Four Seasons,the Drifters, Connie Francis, Lesley Gore, Darlene Love, the Ronettes, Gene Pitney, the Shirelles, the Shangri-las, Dionne Warwick, Tony Orlando & even California boy Brian Wilson maintained an East Coast address at the Brill Building.

From the mid-1950s until the mid-1960s the Brill Building was headquarters of Pop Music USA. But as Robbie Robertson said, the Beatles changed all that and songwriting is nearly an extinct profession except for a small cadre professional songwriters who write exclusively for the Broadway stage and film soundtracks. Randy Newman is an example of a songwriter who has adapted to the changing circumstances and now most of his income comes from lucrative contracts to write movie scores and soundtracks.

This journal will hopefully provide some history and critical analysis of popular music songwriting the United States. My purpose is to show examples of great songcraft since the dawn of poplar music in America and explain why certain songs have a certain elusive quality that makes them great. I look forward to this journey into the history of songcraft in the United States.

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

Two Stephen Foster Songs

Camptown Races was a Stephen Foster song first published in sheet music form by F.D. Benteen of Baltimore Maryland in 1852. Foster quite specifically tailored the song for use on the minstrel stage. He composed it as a piece for solo voice with group interjections and refrain ... his dialect verses have all the wild exaggeration and rough charm of folk tale as well as some of his most vivid imagery ... Together with Oh! Susanna, Camptown Races is one of the gems of the minstrel era.

In The Americana Song Reader, William Emmett Studwell writes that the song was introduced by the Christy Minstrels, and noting that "[Foster's] nonsense lyrics are much of the charm of this bouncy and enduring bit of Americana ... [The song] was a big hit with minstrel troupes throughout the country." In this case the traditionalist South Carolina String Band plays Camptown Races in the same authentic manner as minstrel show musicians in mid 1800s.



Oh! Susanna was written in 1848 by Foster. The song was very popular with confederate soldiers during the Civil War. This rare 1925 recording of Oh! Susanna is by A.E. Fields and contains the patently offensive lyric about "killing 500 n*ggers." Believe it or not that lyric was not considered to be offensive day in the good old days.

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Trollheart

Hey Gavin! Welcome back! Sorry to hear about your Warehouse, but I hear tell Butthead was in that area playing with matches. Just sayin', y'know?

Seriously, great to have you back in the Journals section and hope you'll stay this time. Your writeups are always a great read!

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Gavin B.

Thanks for your kind comments, Trollheart. Most of my journals are limited run editions on specific topics. I will usually move on when the subject matter is exhausted or I get bored with the topic.

I'm still thinking about reviving my Golden Age of Reggae journal which lost all of it's song links when I got into a legal dispute with YouTube over the fair use provisions of copyright laws. Now that the issue has been settled in my favor, I'm free to relink all the songs that YouTube unlinked when they accused me copyright violations.

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys!


George F. Root

George Frederick Root was born at Sheffield, Massachusetts, and was named after the German-born British composer George Frideric Handel. Root left his farming community for Boston at 18, flute in hand, intending to join an orchestra. He worked for a while as a church organist in Boston, and from 1845 taught music at the New York Institute for the Blind, where he met Fanny Crosby, with whom he would compose fifty to sixty popular secular songs.

Root wrote one song that has endured for 150 years and was written during the Civil War and became a popular song among Union troops. The original name of the song was Battle Cry of Freedom but over the years it's come to be known as Rally 'Round the Flag Boys. Ry Cooder did a beautiful interpretation of Rally 'Round the Flag Boys for his soundtrack to The Long Riders, a movie about Jesse James.

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

The King of Ragtime


Scott Joplin

Scott Joplin (1867 –1917) was an African-American popular music composer and pianist. Joplin achieved fame for his ragtime compositions, and was later titled "The King of Ragtime". During his brief career, he wrote 44 original ragtime pieces, one ragtime ballet, and two operas. One of his first pieces, the "Maple Leaf Rag", became ragtime's first and most influential hit, and has been recognized as the archetypal rag.


The original sheet music for Maple Leaf Rag.

The Maple Leaf Rag (copyright registered 18 September 1899) is an early ragtime musical composition for piano composed by Scott Joplin. It was one of Joplin's early works, and became the model for ragtime compositions by subsequent composers. It is one of the most famous of all ragtime pieces. Royalties from the sheet music sales of Maple Leaf Rag gave Joplin a steady if unspectacular income for the rest of his life.

In 1907, Joplin moved from St. Louis to New York City, seeking to find a producer for a new opera. He attempted to go beyond the limitations of the musical form which made him famous, without much monetary success. His second opera, Treemonisha, was not received well at its partially staged performance in 1915.

In 1916, suffering from tertiary syphilis and by consequence rapidly deteriorating health, Joplin descended into dementia. He was admitted to a mental institution in January 1917, and died there three months later at the age of 49.

Below is a rare version of Maple Leaf Rag taken from a player piano roll that was originally played by Scott Joplin:

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

The St. Louis Blues


W.C. Handy & his Memphis Orchestra (circa 1918). Handy is in the rear with trumpet in hand.

Saint Louis Blues is a popular American song composed by W. C. Handy in the blues style. It remains a fundamental part of jazz musicians' repertoire. It was also one of the first blues songs to succeed as a pop song.

Published in September 1914 by Handy's own company, it later gained such popularity that it inspired the dance step the "Foxtrot". The version with Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong on cornet was inducted in the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1993. The 1929 version by Louis Armstrong & His Orchestra (with Henry "Red" Allen) was inducted there in 2008.


The original sheet music to St. Louis Blues

The song is a standard 12 bar blues but Handy added an unconventional 16 bar bridge with an exotic tango like rhythm. St. Louis Blues was such a popular song that Handy was still earning upwards of $25,000 a year in royalties on the song at the time of his death in 1958.

This 1914 version of St. Louis Blues by Handy & the Memphis Orchestra was the best selling 78 rpm single record since the 1906 invention of the Victrola record player.

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

Blind Willie McTell

Blind Willie McTell- 12 String Troubadour

Blind Willie McTell (1898-1958) was a Georgia based ragtime blues guitarist who was best known for composing the blues classic Statesboro Blues a song that's been covered by nearly aspiring every blues band in existence, including the Allman Brothers Band, Taj Mahal, and the David Bromberg Band.

He played with a fluid, syncopated fingerstyle guitar technique, common among many exponents of Piedmont regional blues, although, unlike his contemporaries, he came to use twelve-string guitars exclusively. His skill on the 12 string guitar exceeded Leadbelly's, who was the most famous 12 string guitarist of the pre-WWII era. McTell was also an adept slide guitarist, unusual among ragtime bluesmen.

His vocal style, a smooth and often laid-back tenor, differed greatly from many of the harsher voice types employed by Delta bluesmen, such as Charley Patton. McTell embodied a variety of musical styles, including blues, ragtime, religious music and hokum. Technically speaking, most of McTell's song's weren't blues because he used minor chords and bridge transitions in most of them. His use of chord patterns were far more complex than a simple twelve bar blues blues progression.

McTell was first and foremost a troubadour who rarely played clubs and eked out a living busking in public areas. McTell would frequently play for tips in the parking lot of the Pig N' Whistle Barbecue in Atlanta . He was also known to play behind the nearby building that later became Ray Lee's Blue Lantern Lounge.

The Dylan Connection

McTell's vocal talents and his guitar virtuosity overshadowed the fact that McTell was perhaps the finest lyricist and storyteller from the pre-Dylan era. Bob Dylan himself, has worshiped McTell's music and has covered three different McTell songs and even borrowed McTell's lyrics for his own original compositions. Dylan's 1965 song Highway 61 Revisited, the second verse begins with "Georgia Sam he had a bloody nose", referring to one of Blind Willie McTell's many recording names. Dylan's 1983 song of tribute to McTell, simply titled Blind Willie McTell, is considered to be one of Dylan's absolute masterpieces.

Dyin' Crapshooter's Blues

The original recording date of Dyin' Crapshooter's Blues is unknown, but it's probably sometime between 1925 and 1932, McTell's most prolific period of recording.To maximize his royalty revenues, McTell would sign "exclusive contracts" with several recording labels using various aliases, thus making it difficult to ascertain the original recording date of many of his songs.

I selected Dyin' Crapshooter's Blues because it's a great showcase of McTell's lyrical talents. It's the story of Little Jessie, a real life gambler & bootlegger associate of McTell's who achieved a level of notoriety before being gunned down by the Atlanta Police Department sometime in the Roaring Twenties. The song describes the funeral march for Little Jessie and the lyrics have the carnivalesque surreal quality of a Fellini film.

I've posted the lyrics the song beneath the YouTube embed. In one of the last verses McTell refers to three locations: Hampton Hotel, the South Belle, and the North Atlanta (Hotel)...all of which were houses of ill repute in Atlanta during the Roaring Twenties.



Dyin' Crapshooter's Blues
Lyrics & music by Blind Willie McTell

Little Jesse was a gambler, night and day
He used crooked cards and dice.
Sinful guy, good hearted but had no soul
Heart was hard and cold like ice

Jesse was a wild reckless gambler
Won a gang of change
Altho' a many gambler's heart he left in pain
Began to spend a-loose his money
Began to be blue, sad and all alone
His heart had even turned to stone.

Police walked up and shot my friend Jesse down
Boys i got to die today

He had a gang of crapshooters and gamblers at his bedside
Here are the words he had to say:

Guess I ought to know
Exactly how I wants to go

Eight crapshooters to be my pallbearers
Let 'em be veiled down in black
I want nine men going to the graveyard, bubba
And eight men comin back

I want a gang of gamblers gathered 'round my coffin-side
Crooked card printed on my hearse
Don't say the crapshooters'll never grieve over me
My life been a doggone curse

Send poker players to the graveyard
Dig my grave with the ace of spades
I want twelve polices in my funeral march
High sheriff playin' blackjack, lead the parade

I want the judge and solic'ter who jailed me 14 times
Put a pair of dice in my shoes
Let a deck of cards be my tombstone
I got the dyin' crapshooter's blues

Sixteen real good crapshooters
Sixteen bootleggers to sing a song
Sixteen racket men gamblin'
Couple tend bar while i'm rollin' along

He wanted 22 womens outta the Hampton Hotel
26 off-a South Bell
29 women outta North Atlanta

Well his head was achin'
His heart was thumpin
Jesse went down bouncin' and jumpin' said,
"folks don't be standin' around moanin' and cryin"

He wants everybody to do the charleston whilst he dies
One foot up and a toenail draggin'
Throw my buddy Jesse
In the hoodoo wagon

Come here mama
With your can of booze
Dyin' crapshooter's blues
The dyin' crapshooter's blues
Goin' down with the dyin' crapshooter's blues

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

Mack the Knife


Bertold Brecht & Kurt Weill

Mack the Knife is a song composed by Kurt Weill with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht for their music drama Die Dreigroschenoper, or, as it is known in English, The Threepenny Opera. It premiered in Berlin in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. The song has become a popular standard.

Both Weill & Brecht fled from Nazi Berlin to New York City as Jewish refugees from the Holocaust. In the early Fifties, they were targeted by right-wing Senator Joseph McCarthy as subversives during his witch hunt for communists.

The song was first introduced to American audiences in 1933 in the first English-language production of The Threepenny Opera. That production, however, was not successful, closing after a run of only ten days.

It took 26 years for Mack the Knife to become a popular music standard in the United States. In 1956 Louis Armstrong recorded a swing version of Mack the Knife that gained attention for the song. Kurt Weill's widow, Lotte Lenya, the star of both the original 1928 German production and the 1954 Broadway version, was present in the studio during Armstrong's recording. He spontaneously added her name to the lyrics, which already named several of gangster/serial killer Macheath's (aka Mack the Knife) female victims.

Two years later, in 1958, Bobby Darin recorded a version of Mack the Knife that became a million selling #1 recording. The song remained Darin's signature song throughout his long and successful career as a performer.

Both versions of Mack the Knife are worth hearing. Armstong gets credit for his innovative swing arrangement which producer Tom Dowd imitated on the Darin recording... But Darin delivers the goods with his energetic, elegantly phrased vocal interpretation of the song.



Kurt Weill's deliciously dark lyrics are stunning. Music industry icon, Dick Clark originally advised Darin not record the song because of the savagery of Kurt Weill's lyrics.

Mack the Knife
Lyrics by Kurt Weill, Music by Bertold Brecht

Oh, the shark, babe, has such teeth, dear
And it shows them pearly white
Just a jackknife has old MacHeath, babe
And he keeps it out of sight

You know when that shark bites with his teeth, babe
Scarlet billows start to spread
Fancy gloves, though wears old MacHeath, babe
So there's never, never a trace of red, oh, let it swing, yeah

On a sidewalk, blue Sunday mornin'
Lies a body oozin' life
Some, someone's sneakin' 'round a corner
Tell me, could that someone be Old Mack the Knife?

There's a tugboat down by the river, don't you know?
Where a cement bag, just a'drooppin' on down
Yes, that cement is there strictly for the weight, dear
Five'll got to gift you ten Old Macky's back in town

D'ja hear 'bout Louie Miller? He got disappeared
After drawin' out all his hard earned cash
And now MacHeath will spend just like a sailor
Could it be our boy done somethin' rash?

Jenny Diver, yeah, yeah, Sukey Tawdry
Hello Miss Lotte Lenya, good evening Lucy Brown
You know that line forms, way on the right, babe
Now, that Macky's back in old biggest town

I said, "Jenny Diver, look out too", Sukey Tawdry
Sit back Miss Lotte Lenya and wait Old Lucy Brown
I mean, I tell you that line forms way on the right, babe
Now, that Macky's back in town
Look out, Old Macky is back

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt