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The House That George Built:
Wilfrid Sheed
With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty
Random House
July 2007
On Sale: July 3, 2007
368 pages ISBN: 1400061059 EAN: 9781400061051 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
From Irving Berlin to Cy Coleman, from “Alexander’s Ragtime
Band” to “Big Spender,” from Tin Pan Alley to the MGM
soundstages, the Golden Age of the American song embodied
all that was cool, sexy, and sophisticated in popular
culture. For four glittering decades, geniuses like Jerome
Kern, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Harold Arlen ran
their fingers over piano keys, enticing unforgettable
melodies out of thin air. Critically acclaimed writer
Wilfrid Sheed uncovered the legends, mingled with the
greats, and gossiped with the insiders. Now he’s crafted a
dazzling, authoritative history of the era that “tripled the
world’s total supply of singable tunes.” It began when immigrants in New York’s Lower East Side heard
black jazz and blues–and it surged into an artistic torrent
nothing short of miraculous. Broke but eager, Izzy Baline
transformed himself into Irving Berlin, married an heiress,
and embarked on a string of hits from “Always” to “Cheek to
Cheek.” Berlin’s spiritual godson George Gershwin, in his
brief but incandescent career, straddled Tin Pan Alley and
Carnegie Hall, charming everyone in his orbit. Possessed of
a world-class ego, Gershwin was also generous, exciting, and
utterly original. Half a century later, Gershwin love songs
like “Someone to Watch Over Me,” “The Man I Love,” and “Love
Is Here to Stay” are as tender and moving as ever.
Sheed also illuminates the unique gifts of the great jazz
songsters Hoagy Carmichael and Duke Ellington, conjuring up
the circumstances of their creativity and bringing back the
thrill of what it was like to hear “Georgia on My Mind” or
“Mood Indigo” for the first time. The Golden Age of song
sparked creative breakthroughs in both Broadway musicals and
splashy Hollywood extravaganzas. Sheed vividly recounts how
Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern, and Johnny Mercer
spread the melodic wealth to stage and screen. Popular music was, writes Sheed, “far and away our greatest
contribution to the world’s art supply in the so-called
American Century.” Sheed hung out with some of the great
artists while they were still writing–and better than
anyone, he knows great music, its shimmer, bite, and
exuberance. Sparkling with wit, insight, and the grace notes
of wonderful songs, The House That George Built is a
heartfelt, intensely personal portrait of an unforgettable era.
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