Magee, Jeffrey. " Everybody Step Irving Berlin, Jazz, and Broadway in The 1920s."

Everybody Step: Irving Berlin, Jazz,
and Broadway in the 1920s

JEFFREY MAGEE
n his four annual Music Box Revues that ran on Broadway between 1921
and 1924, Irving Berlin introduced a series of songs that one critic referred to as jazz creation[s].1 The critic was not alone: many of his contemporaries linked jazz to Berlin. An account of the 1922 Music Box Revue,
for example, acknowledged Berlin, revealingly, as still the single-handed master of syncopes and jazz (emphasis added).2 Prominent cultural commentators such as Carl Van Vechten and Gilbert Seldes also emphasized Berlins
leading role in jazz.3 In 1925 Berlins first biographer, Alexander Woollcott,
noted the preposterous fashion of using the word jazz and the word
Berlin as interchangeable termsand devoted most of the books final
chapter to reinforcing the association.4 Mid-1920s press reports describe
Berlin as a jazz composer and Broadways king of jazz;5 they further link
him with efforts to stage a jazz opera at the Metropolitan Opera House,6
and to develop (with Sergei Diaghilev) a new ballet to express the effect of
modern jazz music.7 Such projects never materialized, and Berlins status as
jazz king evaporated with the Jazz Age. Since then Berlin merits hardly a
1. Ibee, New Plays Presented within Week on Bway, Variety 72, no. 6 (27 September
1923): 18. The plural is added here because the review drew direct comparisons to numbers in
the two earlier shows: the first act finale . . . is nothing like the jazz creation of last year, which
had Pack Up Your Sins, nor is equal to the Step number of the first revue of the series.
2. [Jack] Lait, Music Box Revue, Variety 68, no. 10 (27 October 1922): 16.
3. Articles by Gilbert Seldes (in The Dial, 1923) and Carl Van Vechten (in Vanity Fair, 1926)
are discussed in MacDonald Smith Moore, Yankee Blues: Musical Culture and American Identity
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 94 and 98.
4. Alexander Woollcott, The Story of Irving Berlin (New York: G. P. Putnams Sons, 1925),
216.
5. Quotations from newspapers around the time of Berlins wedding to Ellin Mackay in
January 1926 appear in Laurence Bergreen, As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin (New
York: Penguin, 1990), 258.
6. Jazz Opera in View for Metropolitan, New York Times, 18 November 1924, 23; Berlin
Calls Jazz American Folk Music; Composer Predicts It Will Eventually Be Sung in the
Metropolitan Opera House, New York Times, 10 January 1925, 2.
7. Diaghileff Ballet to Appear Here Soon, New York Times, 28 November 1927, 18.
Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 59, Number 3, pp. 697732, ISSN 0003-0139, electronic ISSN
1547-3848. 2006 by the American Musicological Society. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission
to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website,
www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: jams.2006.59.3.697.
698
Journal of the American Musicological Society
mention in jazz history writing.8 Yet the question remains: Why and how did
the jazz label make sense to so many observers at a time when, as Mark
Tucker has written, jazz was a fluid, unstable construct?9 The issue, raised
by Charles Hamm almost three decades ago, still awaits full exploration.10
Ultimately, the aim is not to determine if Berlins music constitutes jazz by
some objective stylistic measure, but to understand why many people, in a particular time and place, referred to it as such.11
Coming to terms with Berlins notable and influential, brand of jazz requires immersion in four concentric elements: (1) the music of a song family
whose distinctive traits call for identification and definition, (2) recurring
themes in their lyrics, (3) the theatrical context that reinforced the songs jazz
resonance, and (4) the cultural context of 1920s New York that cast Jewish
songwriters as the chief developers of African American idioms and of the
Broadway musical. Bringing such perspectives to bear on Berlins jazz creations reveals that by juxtaposing particular musical and linguistic elements in
a specific theatrical format, Berlin won a position as a leading figure in jazz at a
time when few agreed on the musics content, meaning, or value.
Black Topics, Jazz Trope

The song Everybody Step established the paradigm. After its premiere in
the 1921 Music Box Revue, at least three prominent commentators identified
8. An exception appears in Gary Giddins, Visions of Jazz: The First Century (New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3144, which includes a full chapter on Berlin in the section dubbed Precursors. Giddins provides a brisk account of Berlins entire career, launched by
a bracing summary of Alexanders Ragtime Band as a work that embodies old forms made
new (31), but does not address how or why Berlin might have been construed as an actual jazz
musician.
9. Mark Tucker, Jazz, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed.
(2001), 14:910. Written in light of that perspective, this article avoids using scarequotation
marks around the term jazz in hopes of restoring some of the terms broad resonance in the
1920s.
10. See Charles Hamm, Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (New York: Norton, 1979),
where he writes that definitions of jazz exclude Berlin and other writers of popular songs, and indeed see such musicians as exploitative of the black American and his music. But the view from
New York, in the 1920s, was quite different (333).
11. In addition to elaborating on Hamms claim, this article reflects more recent efforts to
emphasize how definitions of jazz depend on historical contingency: jazz is the music that large
groups of people have called jazz at particular moments in history, as Krin Gabbard has put it, in
Jammin at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996), 8. This article also embraces Lawrence Gushees caution, in another context, that the effort to determine whether some kind of music is really jazz is a well-traveled and frustrating
path, with traps of logic, philosophy, racial ideology, and politics everywhere one treads (Gushee,
Pioneers of Jazz: The Story of the Creole Band [New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005], 4).
Irving Berlin, Jazz, and Broadway in the 1920s
699
it as an exemplar of jazz. These included composers John Alden Carpenter,

who cited Everybody Step as one of the ten great masterpieces in music
history,12 and George Gershwin, who more modestly pointed to Everybody
Step as the single best exercise for singers trying to learn jazz. Unfortunately,
even Gershwin was vague in defining his terms and applying them to the song,
beyond his reference to what he called its rhythmical variation.13 The language supports Jeffrey Melnicks view that uses of the term jazz in this period
tended to rely, and even thrive, on musicological imprecision, an imprecision that his book to some extent reinforces and that lingers in the continued
use of vague modifiers such as jazzy, raggy, and bluesy to describe a
wide swath of the eras music.14 In fact, we can now do a great deal to bring
precision to the issue.
In Everybody Step, Berlin constructs a playful collage of then-familiar
figures in a way that suggests he wanted the seams to show. The crucial passage
12. A World Court of Eminent Musicians Discuss the Ten Great Masterpieces, Etude
(March 1924): 15052, 154. On page 150, Carpenter, identified as Eminent American Composer, lists ten works which seem to me close to indispensable. He further notes that the list
would have been different ten years earlier and ten years hence would be very different again.
The lists concludes with three more points: (1) The order of the list is alphabetical. (2) In the
case of Berlin, the choice of this particular composition is arbitrary. Any one of a half a dozen masterpieces of the same type by this composer would serve as well. (3) Ditto in reference to the
Chopin selection. Carpenters list, which includes more recent music than any other member of
the court, also names Bachs B-Minor Mass, Beethovens Seventh Symphony, Chopins C-sharpMinor Polonaise, Stravinskys Petrouchka, and several theater works: Carmen, Pellas et Melisande,
Boris Godounoff [sic], H. M. S. Pinafore, and Die Meistersinger (150). In the August 1924 issue of
Etude, which focused on The Jazz Problem, Carpenter was again consulted, and his comment
linked Berlins musicimplicitly, his ragtime and jazz idiomsto the beginnings of a distinctive
American music: I am strongly inclined to believe that the musical historian of the year two
thousand will find the birthday of American music and that of Irving Berlin to have been the
same (Where is Jazz Leading America? 518). Statements by Carpenter and others in the
August Etude issue are reprinted in Robert Walser, ed., Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 4154. While Carpenters claim may
seem to be historiographically marginal today, it may be borne out in future work that tracks variants of the jazz trope through the work of such distinctively American composers as Gershwin,
Copland, and Bernstein.
13. See Gershwins published statements from 1926, in Gershwin, The George Gershwin
Reader, ed. Robert Wyatt and John Andrew Johnson (New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004), 100. In an article called Does Jazz Belong to Art? (originally in Singing [July
1926]). Gershwin at first identifies Jerome Kerns They Didnt Believe Me as the jazz song in
question (97), but later, replying to a published letter to the editor (originally in Singing [October
1926]), corrects himself in print by naming Everybody Step, claiming that his initial reference
to the Kern song was an error in a transcription of hastily prepared comments (100). The third
commentator to publish a statement about Everybody Step was Isaac Goldberg, Tin Pan Alley:
A Chronicle of American Popular Music (1930; repr., New York: Frederick Ungar, 1961); he cites
Paul Whitemans 1921 recording of Everybody Step as excellent for a number of jazz illustrations, particularly cross rhythms, tone color and spirit (281).
14. Jeffrey Melnick, A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American
Popular Song (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 25.
700
is the principal phrase of the refrain (see Ex. 1). Here Berlin combines disparate features associated with ragtime and blues with a concision unprecedented in American popular song: secondary-rag rhythm (mm. 24),15
marked by patterns of three eighth notes against an explicit duple-meter beat;
a related figure that has been dubbed 2-note secondary rag (mm. 56 and
78);16 blue notes, especially the melodically and harmonically prominent flat
seventh (mm. 14); a pattern that I call blues bass, with its pounding four-beat
chords in contrast to the bass-chord alternation of ragtime and rag-inflected
song (mm. 27),17 and a truncated blues chord progression (through the first
half of m. 7)all packed into an eight-bar phrase comprising the A section of
an AABA song form.
To an ear attuned to Tin Pan Alley, blues, and ragtime in the first two
decades of the twentieth century, the passage comprises a collage of features
that had currency and strong African American resonancewhile also holding
its African American sources at some distance, as if placing them in quotation
marks. Such figures may be recognized as black topicsthat is, in Robert S.
Hattens definition of topics, patches of music that trigger clear associations
15. The first printed reference to secondary rag appears in Don Knowlton, Anatomy of
Jazz, Harpers 154 (April 1926): 581, where he claims to have gotten the phrase from a negro
guitarist. The rhythmic pattern, however, already had a history dating back at least two decades,
appearing in such pieces as Charles L. Johnsons Dill Pickles (1906) and Euday Bowmans
12th Street Rag (1914), a popular song of its era that would become a jazz standard in years to
come.
16. Two-note secondary rag may be seen as a fusion of the familiar three-note version and another figure known as the cakewalk rhythma short-long-short-long-long pattern that became
perhaps the single most frequently used device in early ragtime. (The refrain melodies of turn-ofthe-century hits such as Hello Ma Baby [1899] and Under the Bamboo Tree [1902] are
based entirely on that figure.) Edward A. Berlin quotes R. Nathaniel Dett as identifying the cakewalk rhythm as of most frequent occurrence in antebellum black folk-dances, but that it has
been much misused for purposes of caricature (Ragtime: A Musical and Cultural History
[Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980], 107). Two-note secondary rag
goes back to the early twentieth century as well: the pattern forms the rhythmic basis of the second strain of Scott Joplins 1908 Pineapple Rag (ibid., 13034 and 137).
17. The blues bass pattern, of more recent vintage than the rag-based devices, seems to
date from the late 1910s or even 1920. Berlin used it in his earlier Home Again Blues (1920),
and it recurs in prominent blues or blues-based songs of the 1920s. The ultimate source of the
pattern remains unclear. It may have roots in sheet music of the 1910s, such as the four-beat lefthand pattern in the last strain of W. C. Handys St. Louis Blues (1914), or in publications of
Clarence Williams, as Wayne Shirley has suggested (personal communication, March 2006). It
may also derive from Harlem piano playing, perhaps especially the recordings and piano rolls of
James P. Johnson. When Fletcher Henderson began making records with Ethel Waters in 1921,
Waters recalledin a description that matches the blues bass pattern identified hereFletcher
wouldnt give me what I call the damn-it-to-hell bass, that chump-chump stuff that real jazz
needs, so she demanded that he study Johnsons piano rolls (Waters, with Charles Samuels, His
Eye Is On the Sparrow: An Autobiography [1950; repr., Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978],
14647).
701
Example 1 Everybody Step, refrain, mm. 18

Ev - ry - bod - y

step
to
the

syn - co - pa - ted
go - in with em when they be - gin.
l l
l
l
l
6

band
is
grand.

l l

l l
Youll be say- in yes-sir,
the

l
l l l
l l
Hes the best pro - fes - sor
rhy - thm. Lets be

in
all
the land.
l l l
l
with styles, genres, and expressive meanings.18 In this view, what struck listeners as musically new in these Berlin songs was the topical play of specific
ragtime and blues elements, some of which had rarely if ever coexisted in the
same song.
18. Robert S. Hatten, Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven,
Schubert (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 2. Topic theory, which lies beyond the
scope of this article, has a rich and nuanced history in its own right, beginning with Leonard
Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York: Schirmer Books, 1980), and continuing in the work of V. Kofi Agawu, Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic
702
The way had been paved in the decade before Everybody Step. Edward A.
Berlin has noted that blues elements, rare in ragtimes first decade and a half,
began appearing more frequently in rags after 1912 and contributed to the
erosion of a distinctive [ragtime] style.19 Before that, ragtime had developed
a stable and, in Edward Berlins terms, cohesive style. In this process,
Edward Berlin finds blue notes to be the most common blues element found
in rags,20 he finds the twelve-bar form to be virtually nonexistent among
rags, and he makes no mention of the blues bass pattern. The blues bass became a trademark of Tin Pan Alley and Broadway blues songs in the 1920s, as
in George Gershwins Ill Build a Stairway to Paradise (from George Whites
Scandals of 1922) and Kickin the Clouds Away (Tell Me More, 1925), both
clearly inspired by Berlins model; Jerome Kerns Cant Help Lovin Dat
Man (Show Boat, 1927); and many others. W. C. Handys early songsthat
is, the earliest published blues songsprovide examples of blues-ragtime hybrids, but do not mix such a variety of disparate figures. Memphis Blues
(1912) combines twelve-bar blues and sixteen-bar ragtime strains, and St.
Louis Blues (1914) features three twelve-bar blues strains and one sixteenbar tango section forming a large-scale, Tin Pan Alleylike AABA structure. In
the erosion of a stable ragtime style, Edward Berlin also finds other elements mingling with the stable ragtime vocabulary: dotted rhythms (which,
he finds, [m]ore than any other single factor . . . changed the character of
ragtime21), triplets, and varied left-hand patterns that depart from ragtimes
standard octave-chord alternation.22 In Everybody Step, Irving Berlin uses
them all.
By packing such references into a single song, Berlin created what contemporary listeners could recognize as a jazz trope, in the sense that Robert S.
Hatten defines a musical trope as a synthesis of . . . otherwise contradictory
Music (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Robert S. Hatten, Musical Meaning
in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1994); and Raymond Monelle, The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2000), 80, which notes the potential for expanding topic analysis beyond the
classic style that has provided its chief repertoire. For an illuminating application of topic (and
trope, to be considered below) in American music studies, see Michael V. Pisani, Imagining
Native American Music (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2005). James
Buhler, among others, has also heeded that call in the realm of American studies in his work on
early twentieth-century silent film music, and students in my seminars, most notably Jason
Hooper and Katherine Baber, have explored topical applications to American repertories with
promising results.
19. See Berlin, Ragtime, chap. 8, esp. 15460. Blues influence in published ragtime was
slight until the second decade of the twentieth century, Berlin writes. With the unveiling of
blues in published form in 1912, that influence increased substantially, and blues became another
important factor in the disintegration of ragtime as a distinctive genre (154).
20. Ibid., 159.
21. Ibid., 152.
22. Ibid., 14754.
703
topics . . . juxtaposed in a single functional location or rhetorical moment.23

Heard in this way, the passage does conform to later notions that jazz represented a fusion of ragtime and blues. But such recognition does not otherwise
bring the example closer to jazz as it has been construed by later jazz musicians and historians. It still privileges notated composition, omitting most of
the very features that would later come to define the idiom. Yet Berlins juxtaposition of distinctive blues and ragtime features within the refrains principal
phrase may help to explain why so many 1920s commentators pointed to
Everybody Step as a paradigm for the new style.
For this repertory, the approach opens up a way to confront, musically, the
cultural problem that has plagued writings about this music: the notion of
white appropriation, in particular Jewish-American appropriation, of black
musica subject to be more fully explored below.24 For the moment, however, hearing the songwriters products as fields of topical play that shaped an
emergent trope helps bring musical precision to a phenomenon that has been
noted but not well defined. This effort also draws a more neutral distinction
between seemingly contradictory types of jazz in the 1920s. One was the
writing-centered jazz whose leading figures were seen as bandleaders such
as Paul Whiteman; songwriters such as Berlin, Gershwin, Jerome Kern; and
novelty piano composer Zez Confrey (among the musicians who most influenced Aaron Coplands conception of the idiom). The other was the partly
improvised, partly memorized music of instrumentalists such as King Oliver,
Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, and Sidney Bechet, whose status among
the eras most significant jazz musicians became secure only after the 1920s.25
By developing more neutral distinctions between the kinds of music identified as jazz in the 1920s, we can recognize Everybody Step not as the product of an imperfect understanding, or opportunistic dilution, or inauthentic
adaptation of African American idiomsalthough those perspectives still
adhere to this musicbut rather as a knowing bent toward efficiency. How
23. In Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes, Hattens full definition of trope reads:
the interpretive synthesis of, for example, otherwise contradictory topics that are juxtaposed in a
single functional location or rhetorical moment (3).
24. On important distinctions between white and Jewish in the United States from the
nineteenth century onward, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European
Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), esp.
chap. 5, Looking Jewish, Seeing Jews.
25. This bifurcated view of jazz emerges more from contemporaneous writingssome of
which will be discussed belowthan from musicians, whose work frequently combined improvisation and reading. On the intricate blend of improvised and written elements in the work of
Fletcher Henderson and Don Redman, leading figures in 1920s jazz whom black and white writers alike singled out as rare black musicians working to elevate the idiom, see Jeffrey Magee,
The Uncrowned King of Swing: Fletcher Henderson and Big Band Jazz (New York and Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005), esp. chap. 3. It was Bechet, incidentally, who claimed as late as
1960 that jazz was simply a term that white people have given to the musicthe music
being ragtime. See Sidney Bechet, Treat It Gentle: An Autobiography (1960; repr., New York: Da
Capo, 1978), 3.
704
Example 2a Everybody Step, refrain, mm. 916

9

Lis - ten

to
the
pep
that
e - merg - es
from the
mid - dle
jaz-zy d-dle un-der his chin.
15

Oh,

what
mu
sic,
the clar - i - net - er
the
11
of

Could not
be bet - ter

705
Example 2b Everybody Step, refrain, mm. 2532

25
Ev - ry - bod - y

step,
if
27
you
want
to
comes to strut-tin o - ver the ground
30

sweet-ie
and
me,
glut - ton, when it
Wait-ll you see
step,
step,
step-ping a
see
my lit - tle
round.
little, Berlin seems to ask, does it take to suggest these idioms? The principal
phrase provides one answer, as we have seen, and its subsequent variants provide another. In both later variants of the A phrase Berlin swerves from the
blues-based progression to the subdominant and instead moves to a major
submediant chord (see Exx. 2a, m. 12, and 2b, m. 28). Having already suggested the blues in the first phrase, Berlin avoids further blues implications.
Put another way, he finds no reason to develop the association any further.
Apparently, it worked. A review published in Variety eight days after the opening singled out Everybody Step as a particularly wicked blues.26
26. Jack Lait, Americas Greatest Show, Variety 64, no. 6 (30 September 1921): 15.
706
Beyond its principal phrase, Berlin reinforces the songs rich resonance with
unmistakable allusions toand, in one phrase, a near quotation ofthree of
his own songs that had accrued strong ragtime associations since their appearance in sheet music, stage performances, and sound recordings in the early
1910s: Alexanders Ragtime Band (1911), Everybodys Doing It Now
(1911),27 and The Syncopated Walk (1914). Freely deploying elements derived from these songs, Berlin creates, in effect, a lineage for jazz that leads
back to his own earlier songs. The opening phrase of Everybody Step, for
example, clearly derives from that of The Syncopated Walk (Exx. 3a and
3b). Both feature a repeated one-bar idea marked by a strong downbeat
chord, a chromatic fill, and a dotted-rhythm pickup to the next bar. The roots
of both phrases extend back to Alexanders Ragtime Band, whose famous
refrain introduces the rhythmic pattern (Ex. 3c).
In Everybody Step Berlin draws an unmistakable connection to The
Syncopated Walk, as he later nearly quotes a phrase of both music and lyrics
from its refrain: Look at em doin itwhich, like the opening bars of
Everybody Step, features an ascending chromatic triplet (Exx. 4a and 4b).
A year earlier, moreover, Berlin had already reused that phrase from Syncopated Walk in a song that evokes jazz, a song for the Ziegfeld Follies of 1920
called The Syncopated Vamp (Ex. 5).28 That song celebrates a jazzy
Cleopatra from whose stylish clothes a little bit of her ankle shows, and
whose vigorous dancing and bold flirtations make her, like jazz itself, both
dangerous and irresistible.29 The song abetted the widespread linkage of jazz
and promiscuous femininityhere, exoticized in the familiar but safely distant
image of Cleopatrasupporting a gender-charged rhetoric that quickly developed into discussions of whether anyone could make a lady or honest
woman out of jazz.30
27. Often printed as Everybodys Doin It Now, the songs title appears differently on the
first page of sheet music and the title page, which appears to have been the source of the discrepancy ever since. See Irving Berlin, The Complete Lyrics of Irving Berlin, ed. Robert Kimball and
Linda Emmet (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 40.
28. The two-bar excerpt in Example 5 actually features quotations from two earlier Berlin
songs. The first bar of the example quotes from music set to the line full of originality in The
International Rag (1913).
29. Berlin had also used the look at em doin it phrase as a choral interjection at a risqu
romantic moment in the song Teach Me to Love from the 1915 show Stop! Look! Listen!
30. See, for example, Henry O. Osgood, So This Is Jazz (Boston: Little, Brown, 1926), 131,
on claims that Paul Whiteman would make an honest woman out of jazz. The imagery linking
jazz and womanhood sometimes went to absurd extremes. Lawrence Gilman, reviewing the premiere of Gershwins Concerto in F, cited conductor Walter Damroschs extended metaphor
about Lady Jazz needing a knight who could lift her to a level that would enable her to be received as a respectable member in musical circles. Gilman goes on to amend Mr. Damroschs
engaging metaphor with reference to Jazzerella, a not quite Cinderella-like figure whom
Gershwin has joined in marriage (New York Herald Tribune, 4 December 1925, 18, reprinted
in Gershwin Reader, 8586). Melnick, in A Right to Sing the Blues, has explored the notion of jazz
as embodying a ripe but unauthorized femininity (21).
707
Example 3a Everybody Step, verse, beginning

Soon
youll hear
tune,
thats gon - na
lift
Example 3b The Syncopated Walk, verse, beginning

but theres a
in how the
Strange
change
peo -
Example 3c Alexanders Ragtime Band, refrain, beginning

Come on
and
hear,
Come on

\ [

n
and
hear
Al - ex -

Everybody Step also deploys a figure that could be called the Alexander
break, which includes a melodic rest on a downbeat articulated by a bass
accent, followed by a dotted-rhythm figure, which is then repeated or sequenced. The model, again, appears in Alexanders Ragtime Band (Exx. 6a,
b, c). Such breaks recur in songs throughout Berlins post-Alexander ragtime vein.
708
Example 4a Everybody Step, refrain, mm. 2122

21

They sim - ply
7777777

ru
in
it.
Look at em do
in
it.
Example 4b The Syncopated Walk, refrain, beginning

3
Look at em do - in it,
Look at em do - in it,
That syn-co - pat-ed

n
n
walk.

Example 5 The Syncopated Vamp, refrain, mm. 67

-mer - i - can shoul - der shak - ers shes

3
the
champ
Berlin implicates Everybody Step even more deeply with his brand of
ragtime through links to yet another song for everybody: Everybodys
Doing It Now, the song that planted the phrase doin it [sic] in popularsong vernacular by repeating it no fewer than thirteen times in its refrain. The
exhortation to Come, come dont hesitate, in Everybody Step, also re-
709
Example 6a Alexanders Ragtime Band, verse, mm. 78

7
To

the lead - er
man,
rag - ged me
ter man?
Example 6b Everybody Step, verse, mm. 56

5

It could

be sweet - er
but then

the me - ter
was

Example 6c Everybody Step, refrain, mm. 1516

15

the clar - i - net - er

Could not
be bet - ter

calls the earlier songs Come, come, come, come let us start. At the same
time, the word hesitate recalls a similar phrase in The Syncopated Walk:
Comedont you hesitate, with a pun on hesitate referring both to its
denotative meaning (to hold back) and to its connotative allusion to the
hesitation waltza dance implicitly rendered pass by the more vigorous
duple-meter ragtime- and jazz-related dances that became popular in the
710
1910s. Once again, however, these passages derive from the famous exhortations to come on and hear and come on along that Berlin had introduced
in Alexanders Ragtime Band. Berlins effort to press controversial idioms
such as ragtime and jazz into the musical mainstream seems to require the
hortatory tone, calling on everybody to come on and hear the new style.
All of these musical and linguistic features from Berlins earlier songs become
additional referents that fuel the musical associations conjured in Everybody
Step. Having established a network of connections through music, Berlin
could leave it to others to interpret them as signs of jazz. At least one composer had already taken the cue. As Judith Tick has shown, a short piano piece
called Jazzy, written in summer 1921 by the young Aaron Copland, uses
Berlins come on and hear motif in its principal theme.31
If Everybody Step drew heavily on earlier Berlin songs, it, in turn, became a wellspring of ideas for Berlins subsequent jazz numbers. In Pack Up
Your Sins and Go to the Devil (1922), Berlin develops and extends the twonote secondary-rag figure that had appeared in Everybody Step (Ex. 7; cf.
Ex. 1, mm. 56 on yes sir, the band is grand and mm. 78 on [pro-]fessor
in all the land). The song, however, places the figure in a new stylistic world
by setting it to the gutty blues bass pattern. Here, too, Berlin once again invokes blues harmony but recontextualizes it, for the refrain begins not on the
tonic (F) but on the dominant of the dominant (G), which then moves to the
dominant (C).
In the bridge, Berlin takes the songs rhythmic language a step further by
reiterating its principal rhythm against an accompaniment marked by an augmented (three-note) secondary-rag pattern (mm. 1719), which leads to an
Alexander-like break (Ex. 8). He ultimately crowns the number with a patter
based on a new secondary-rag melody, first sung alone then presented in
counterpoint to the principal tune (Ex. 9). By 1922, this kind of double, or
counterpoint song had become a show-stopping trademark of Berlins stage
scores, ever since the popular Simple Melody appeared in his first musical
comedy, Watch Your Step (1914). The patter melody itselfwith its rising
four-eighths-and-a-quarter figure covering three beatsbears a striking resemblance to the second strain of Zez Confreys piano novelty Stumbling
(1922), which Henry O. Osgood and Aaron Copland later singled out as an
exemplary jazz melody.32
31. See Judith Tick, The Origins and Style of Coplands Mood for Piano, no. 3, Jazzy,
American Music 20 (2002): 28284. As Howard Pollack has shown (John Alden Carpenter: A
Chicago Composer [1995; repr., Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001],
11415), John Alden Carpenter preceded Copland in quoting Alexanders Ragtime Band in a
concert work, in his Adventures in a Perambulator (1914), yet it seems to have been Copland
who first made its jazzy associations explicit.
32. Osgood, So This Is Jazz, 43; Copland, Jazz Structure and Influence, Modern Music 4,
no. 2 (January 1927): 11.
711
Example 7 Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil, refrain, mm. 14

Pack up your sins and go

\

to the dev - il
in
Ha - des.
Youll meet the

Example 8 Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil, refrain, mm. 1623

Youll hear a

n n n
20

jazz
bands
then put a trick in it,
the
a jazz-y kick in it,

They start-ed pick-in it
n n

777777

heav-en - ly tune that went
to the dev-il
Be - cause
n

n
n
n

777777
7777777
16
Still other songs combine black topics in a fresh way. When You Walked
Out Someone Else Walked Right In (1923) features a melody based on the
cakewalk rhythm played over a blues bass (Ex. 10). When the principal phrase
returns, Berlin gives it a stronger blues inflection, adding the flat seventh to
the harmony, and moving not to the V of V, but to the subdominant, as if he
is writing a blues progression (Ex. 11). The refrain of Learn to Do the Strut
(1923) sustains a blues progression for almost eight bars, supported by flat
sevenths and thirds, before swerving to the major submediant, as Berlin had
712
Example 9 Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil, patter, mm. 14

If you care to dwell where the weath-er is hot,

l
\

l
n

l l l l
nn

H-E-doub-le-L is a

l l l
n

won-der-ful spot

l l
n
Example 10 When You Walked Out Someone Else Walked Right In, refrain, mm. 14
(Words and Music by Irving Berlin. Copyright 1923 by Irving Berlin. Copyright Renewed.
International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of Hal Leonard
Corporation)
When

you walked out

some-one
else

walked right
in

\
done in Everybody Step (Ex. 12). Bring On the Pepper (1924) combines
blues bass, blue notes, secondary rag, and cakewalk rhythms, making it an obvious a sequel to Everybody Step.
Beyond all of their musical resemblances, the songs also draw from a common well of themes linked by implications or descriptions of risqu or illicit
behavior: vigorous dancing, drinking (this, during Prohibition), sexual freedom, and a carefree attitude about eternal damnationall things that jazz was
thought to inspire in the 1920s. Everybody Step, Bring On the Pepper,
and Learn to Do the Strut all celebrate fast dancing whose accompaniment
is variously described as a jazzy fiddle (Everybody Step), a peppy jingle
/ That the jazz bands love to play (Bring On the Pepper), and a jazzy
tune (Learn to Do the Strut). In Pack Up Your Sins, the singer reports a
message from a deceased friend who enjoys an afterlife in Hades with the
finest of gentlemen / And the finest of ladies, all of whom would rather be
713
Example 11 When You Walked Out Someone Else Walked Right In, refrain, mm. 1724
(Words and Music by Irving Berlin. Copyright 1923 by Irving Berlin. Copyright Renewed.
International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of Hal Leonard
Corporation)
17

you
cold
so
what
love,

could I
do?

21
Off
grew so
with the
old
love
and
on
with the

new!

down below than up above, because there Youll hear a heavenly tune /
That went to the Devil / Because the jazz bands, / They started pickin it, /
Then put a trick in it / A jazzy kick in it. In the song When You Walked
Out Someone Else Walked Right In, the singer does not pine for her departed lover, but instead blithely celebrates a quick change in her romantic
fortunes in the suggestive line Off with the old love and on with the new!
Whether or not the prominent and repeated use of the word walked also
conjures the sexual resonance that Charles Hamm found in a few of Berlins
songs dating from a decade earlier, When You Walked Out nevertheless
suggests that sexual freedom has become a domain of gender equality.33
Although those lyrics do not mention jazz, the music abets the message with
33. See Charles Hamm, Irving Berlin: Songs from the Melting Pot: The Formative Years,
19071914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 5859. By 1914, when Berlin uses
walk in songs for the legitimate stage such as The Syncopated Walk, the sexual overtonesso
resonant in the vaudeville numbers from 191112 that Hamm citesseem to be muted if not
entirely silent.
714
Example 12 Learn to Do the Strut, refrain, mm. 19 (Words and Music by Irving Berlin.
Copyright 1923 by Irving Berlin. Copyright Renewed. International Copyright Secured. All
Rights Reserved. Used by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation)

But
you ought-a
leave your house

or

!

7
hut
and
to
do
you
will
the
strut,
youd bet - ter

danc - ing
go
right
off
your

be - fore the

learn
halls

are
shut,
nut
its ragtime and blues references. The lyrics of Tokio Blues (1924) add an
orientalizing element to the range of references in Berlins jazz vein and
relocate the exoticized femininity evoked in The Syncopated Vamp. In a
musical setting stocked with now-familiar devices such as secondary rag, blue
notes, and blues bass, the lyrics evoke a girls plaintive desire to return to her
Japanese home. In early Tin Pan Alley and vaudeville song, homesickness
has its most common expression in the back-to-Dixie number, in which the
songs persona longs for the simple, idyllic world of the old South. In Tokio
Blues Berlin uses his by now well-established jazz markers to fuse the
back-to-Dixie number and japonisme in a kind of orientalized minstrelsy
715
that reached a peak of popularity in the years just before the Music Box
Revues.34
Beyond the Graphocentric Frame

Although musical and linguistic elements in the sheet music may go a long
way to reveal features that contemporaries heard as jazz, no analysis of the
phenomenon can stop there. Until recently, analyses of 1920s jazz tended to
(1) emphasize sound recordings to the virtual exclusion of all other primary
documents, (2) emphasize cultural context to the virtual exclusion of music altogether, or (3) treat the music as a chiefly notated phenomenon. This third
approach, with roots in the 1920s, operates within what may be called the
graphocentric frame, a writing-centered frame in which music is assumed to
gain value and legitimacy through notation.
The graphocentric frame received its most explicit articulation in the first
book purporting to explain jazz: So This Is Jazz, written by Henry O. Osgood
and published in 1926. In the beginning of a work containing full chapters on
the music of George Gershwin and Irving Berlin, Osgood explains that he had
become a happy convert to the music only when he heard a band of eight
gentlemen playing from written parts. He disdained the improvisation and
irresponsibility of musicians jolting up and down and writhing in simulated
ecstasy, in the manner of Negroes at a Southern camp-meeting.35 Here the
graphocentric frame has overtones of regional, social, racial, and ethnic bias
that continue to resonate in writings about supposed fusions of jazz and classical music. Aaron Coplands 1927 article Jazz Structure and Influence works
entirely within the graphocentric frame, going so far as to present renotated
passages from jazz workssuch as Zez Confreys Stumbling and Gershwins songs Fascinating Rhythm and Clap Yo Handsto demonstrate
how their irregular accents (usually some variant of secondary rag) might be
rebarred to show modernistic polymeter and meter shifts.36 Although Berlin
34. W. Anthony Sheppard, Strains of Japonisme in Tin Pan Alley, 19001930, paper presented as part of a Society for American Music session at the Musical Intersections conference,
Toronto, November 2000. Sheppard noted a marked peak in Japanese-themed songs in 1917,
which gradually declined through the 1920s. For a wide-ranging exploration of the intersections
between American popular music and orientalism through a single song, see Charles Hiroshi
Garrett, Chinatown, Whose Chinatown? Defining Americas Borders with Musical Orientalism, this Journal 57 (2004): 11973. See also Judy Tsou, Gendering Race: Stereotypes of
Chinese Americans in Popular Sheet Music, Representations 6, no. 2 (1997): 2562. For a related discussion of the theme of Salome in songs and dances, see the preceding article in this issue,
Larry Hamberlin, Visions of Salome: The Femme Fatale in American Popular Songs before
1920, this Journal 59 (2006): 63196.
35. Osgood, So This Is Jazz, 58.
36. Copland, Jazz Structure and Influence, 1113. Stanley V. Kleppinger claims that
Coplands treatment of secondary-rag rhythms as metrical rather than rhythmic phenomena
716
strove to have his compositions notated and published, he harbored no

condescension himself toward oral transmission, since he conceived his songs
by playing them at the piano and by a kind of singing dictation captured in
notation by his musical secretary.37 And he knew that the reception of his
songs depended on their delivery. Woollcott notes that Berlin did not begin
developing numbers for the Music Box shows until he and his collaborators
had hired the performers.38
With Berlins work as his case in point, Charles Hamm has argued that the
meaning of a piece of popular music is shaped most importantly at the moment of performance, and his analysis of contemporary recordings of Berlins
early songs has convincingly demonstrated the flexibility of genre in this domain.39 In the case of Berlins jazz, several elements of performance style and
context framed and defined the idiom in ways that are hidden from view in the
sheet music. Early performances amplify the generic implications of what
Berlin wrote. Indeed, to Berlins audiences of the early 1920s, a rich network
of theatrical contexts reinforced the familial relationship of the songs and their
jazz associations.40
In the late 1910s and 1920s, theater had been a common venue for jazz
performance. Jazz bands regularly performed as stage acts in vaudeville shows,
as pit orchestras for revues, and as accompanists for nightclub floor shows.
Such bands, however, tended to shift styles from number to number, and jazz,
so-called, especially in the early 1920s, formed just one part of a versatile
repertory.41 The constantly shifting scenes and styles of Berlins revue format,
constitutes his radical, if not revolutionary view of jazz (On the Influence of Jazz Rhythm in
the Music of Aaron Copland, American Music 21 [2003]: 81). Coplands treatment reinforces a
graphocentric view of jazz as a strictly notated music, for his article focuses chiefly on rhythms in
published sheet music and even expresses disdain for the notion that the jazz band created jazz
because that is confusing color with substance (9). Copland deliberately avoids considering jazz
as heard music, indeed an idiom that grew from aurally transmitted performance.
37. Through the 1920s the secretary was Arthur Johnston. See Edward Jablonski, Irving
Berlin: American Troubadour (New York: Henry Holt, 1999), 87.
38. Woollcott, Story of Irving Berlin, 18889.
39. See Charles Hamm, Genre, Performance, and Ideology in the Early Songs of Irving
Berlin, chap. 19 in Putting Popular Music in Its Place (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995), 370.
40. For a discussion of how Berlins Blue Skies, whichdespite lacking the musical and
verbal markers of jazz described herewas nevertheless construed as a jazz song in the late
1920s, thanks to its performance by Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer, see Jeffrey Magee, Irving
Berlins Blue Skies: Ethnic Affiliations and Musical Transformations, Musical Quarterly 84
(2000): 55759.
41. Tucker, Jazz, 14:909. The connections between early jazz and theater have only recently come to the fore after many years in which historians and critics took pains to extricate jazz
from the commercial taint of theatrical performance. Lawrence Gushees work has emphasized
this point. See, for example, his A Preliminary Chronology of the Early Career of Ferd Jelly
Roll Morton, American Music 3 (1985): 389412. The cradle of his art was New Orleans,
717
then, would not have been an unlikely context for jazz performance. What
must have struck contemporary observers, however, was that jazz could be
presented in a venue considered classy by Broadway standardsfar from
the lower rungs of vaudeville where both black and white jazz bands regularly
played. Indeed, class is the single word with which Berlins Music Box Revues
were most often identified during their runs and by which they are still remembered by theater historians.42 The venue was the Music Box Theater,
which Berlin and his business partner Sam H. Harris had just constructed in
1921 for the express purpose of presenting a new series of annual revues
featuring Berlins songs. The newness of the theater and the novelty of the
musical style thus complemented each other.
The theatrical dimension of Berlins jazz creations had at least three
other specific components: (1) a performance by a peppy sister act, (2) a climactic program position, and (3) placement among nostalgic and sentimental
songs whose style and performance expressly avoided even a hint of jazz flavor.
First, Berlin wrote most of his Music Box jazz songs for a sister act, most
often the Brox Sisters, a close-harmony trio who embodied the suggestive image of the newly faddish flapperthe petite, short-haired, boyishly shaped
girl-woman, who wore makeup and no corset, and whose dresses tended to
show some ankle and maybe more (Fig. 1).43 Berlin, jazz, and sister acts had
writes Gushee, but its nursery was the world of black vaudeville and cabaret entertainment . . .
between 1907 and 1923 (407). See also idem, Pioneers of Jazz, which traces the Creole Bands
theatrical work; Magee, The Uncrowned King of Swing, 12022 and 167, on Fletcher
Hendersons regular but often hapless experiences in the theater; Howard Spring, Changes in
Jazz Performance and Arranging in New York, 19291932 (PhD diss., University of Illinois,
1993), 7583, on the variety of venues in which jazz musicians played; and John Louis Howland,
Between the Muses and the Masses: Symphonic Jazz, Glorified Entertainment, and the Rise of
the American Musical Middlebrow, 19201944 (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2002), 85 and
122, which describes the revue-derived variety entertainment format in which Paul Whiteman
presented jazz.
42. The big punch of the Music Box had been classand class . . . was the slogan for 1922
(Lait, Music Box Revue, 16). Using the concept language with which Stephen Sondheim and
Harold Prince regularly summarized what their shows were about, Ethan Mordden went so far
as to say that the Music Box Revues were about class (Make Believe: The Broadway Musical in the
1920s [New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997], 91). Comedian Sam Bernard,
who had performed in the Music Box Revues, claimed that the theater itself stinks from class
(quoted in Bergreen, As Thousands Cheer, 178). Robert Baral described the Music Box shows
distinctive style in similar terms as high polish and taste in Revue: The Great Broadway Period
(New York and London: Fleet Press, 1962), 152.
43. The term flapper and its various associations, including jazz, were in wide circulation in
the United States by the time Berlin staged the first Music Box Revue in 1921. F. Scott Fitzgeralds
short-story collection, Flappers and Philosophers, was published in 1920 and borrowed its title
from an advertising sloganA book about flappers, written for philosophers!promoting
Fitzgeralds novel This Side of Paradise, published in early 1920. (See the preface to F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Flappers and Philosophers, ed. James L. W. West III [Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000], xv.) For example, in the story Head and Shoulders, set in 1918,
718
Figure 1 The Brox Sisters (Photo courtesy of David Merrick)
Fitzgeralds female protagonist, Marcia Meadow, fits the flapper mold: she is an outgoing entertainer who enjoys smoking, dances the shimmy, sings a song about a Jazz-bound Blundering
Blimp, and takes an assertive role in her courtship with the straitlaced college boy Horace
Tarbox. Jazz and flappers (and much else) are likewise linked in Fitzgeralds The Beautiful and
719
formed a bond in Berlins first song using the word jazz: Mr. Jazz Himself
(1917), whose cover featured a cameo photograph of two women and the
caption as introduced by the Watson Sisters.44 It was the Broxes, however,
who became most closely identified with Berlins brand of jazz on stage and
on sound recordings (Table 1). For them, Berlin wrote Everybody Step
and The Schoolhouse Blues for the 1921 show, When You Walked Out
and Learn to Do the Strut for the 1923 revue, and Tokio Blues and
Who for the 1924 showall part of the song family related to Everybody
Step. (Although the Broxes did not appear in the 1922 edition of the series,
Berlin had written in the same vein for a comparable sister act, the McCarthy
Sisters, who premiered Pack Up Your Sins and Bring On the Pepper.) In
his review of the Music Box Revue of 1924, Alexander Woollcott described the
Broxes as the sidling [sic] trio who seem to have been expressly created to
sing Irving Berlins songs.45
The Brox Sisters recorded five songs from the Music Box Revues around the
time that the songs had their premieres in the show (see Table 1). The recordings reveal a standardized approach to the material that helped to stabilize the
sound of Berlins jazz and homogenize a style whose notated versions, as we
have seen, evoke stylistic heterogeneity.46 It should be noted that although the
recordings are valuable documents of contemporary performance practice,
they do not necessarily replicate the sounds that audiences heard from the
Music Box stage. As shown in Table 1, three songs that the Brox Sisters
recordedBring On the Pepper, Learn to Do the Strut, and Tokio
Blueswere staged with a larger ensemble of performers who do not appear
on the recordings. Moreover, it is revealing that of the act-1 finales, only
Learn to Do the Strut was recorded by the Broxes, and that recording likely
represents a truncated version of the stage performance because Berlins
Damned (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1922), where he creates a fantasy conversation between The Voice and Beauty, in which The Voice says: You will be known during your fifteen years as a ragtime kid, a flapper, a jazz-baby, and a baby vamp (29). For an extensive survey
of changes in womens fashion and behavior in the 1920sand the strenuous outcry against
themsee Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1931), esp. chap. 5, The Revolution in Manners and Morals.
A more recent study also illuminates the flapper phenomenon: Paula S. Fass, The Damned and the
Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
44. Mr. Jazz Himself sheet music cover viewed at the website of Indiana Universitys Lilly
Library sheet music collections, accessed 14 April 2006: http://www.letrs.indiana.edu/s/
sheetmusic.
45. Unidentified 1924 clipping in the Library of Congress, Music Division, Irving Berlin
Collection, Scrapbook #4 (General Clippings, 192249), on music microfilm 92-20-013.
46. These recordings are available on The Ultimate Irving Berlin, vol. 2, (compact, disc Pearl
Gem 0117, 2002).
720
Table 1 Jazz Numbers in Irving Berlins Music Box Revues

1921
1922
1923
1924
Everybody Step (Brox Sisters and ensemble)

The Schoolhouse Blues* (Brox Sisters)
Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil (Margaret and Dorothy McCarthy and
ensemble)
Bring On the Pepper* (Margaret and Dorothy McCarthy, with Sylvia Jocelyn and
the Eight Music Box Dancers)
When You Walked Out Someone Else Walked Right In (Brox Sisters)
Learn to Do the Strut* (Brox Sisters and ensemble)
Tokio Blues* (Brox Sisters and ensemble)
Who* (Brox Sisters)
Call of the South / Old Folks at Home and Bandanna Ball (ensemble)
Bold indicates act-1 finale

*Recorded by the Brox Sisters (available on The Ultimate Irving Berlin, vol. 2, compact disc [Pearl Gem
0117], 2002)
finales lasted longer than the approximately three-minute limit of a 78 rpm

record.47
Yet the records do provide a vivid glimpse of the Broxes singing, and thus
a useful document of Berlins jazz in performance. On record, the Broxes sang
as one in tight, lockstep harmonynever once venturing even a short phrase
of solo or duet.48 The sisters singing style featured a high range and a coy
nasality that anticipated Helen Kane and the animated character she inspired,
Betty Boop. That style also had a deliberate rhythmic rigidity in a period before the ability to swing became the test of jazz performance, a quality especially apparent when they deliver the streams of eighth notes in secondary-rag
passages, as in their 1923 recording of Bring On the Pepper. The Broxes
approach conveyed an affect that might be characterized as innocent naughti47. The manuscript of the piano-vocal score of the first Music Box Revue (which is not in
Berlins hand but has the distinction of being the only one in the series for which a complete score
exists) includes Everybody Step as an extended number in fourteen pages, in the following
form that would have been extremely difficult to fit onto a 78 rpm record: Introduction (7 mm.),
Verse (16), Chorus (32), Patter (20), Chorus (32), Patter (20), Chorus (32), for a total of 159
measures (Library of Congress, Music Division, Irving Berlin Collection, box 172, folder 2). A
recent recording of a public concert performance of the song features a piano-vocal arrangement
with solo and ensemble singers performing the original format in more than four minutes, far exceeding the maximum length allowed by a 78 rpm record (up to ca. 3:30). Thanks to Benjamin
Sears and Bradford Connor for providing a copy of this performance.
48. The homogeneous trio sound suggests a previously unrecognized impetus for pioneering
jazz arranger Don Redmans trademark clarinet trio passages for Fletcher Hendersons orchestra
beginning in 1923. Redmans clarinet trios have been widely noted in the jazz literature, and
another plausible model lies in Wilbur Sweatmans vaudevillian feat of performing on three
clarinets at once. See Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (New York
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 262; and more recently Magee, The Uncrowned
King of Swing, 7982.
721
ness, teasing the border between wholesome and risqu. In Schoolhouse

Blues that becomes especially clear when they sing the lines Now if we
dont pass our exam / ooh-ooh-ooh were going to be in a jam / Mothers
going to spank us but we dont give a replacing Berlins rhyming oath
with a conspicuous silence, as if saying damn would be worse than academic
failure and corporal punishment.
In visual presentation and musical style, the singers act seems to have been
calculated to go against not just earlier models of white femininity, as most
portrayals and discussions of flappers note, but also against current models of
black jazz and blues performance. Indeed, they formed a stark contrast to the
dark-skinned, matriarchal, and lower-voiced African American vaudeville blues
singers such as Mamie Smith and Ma Rainey, who had come to New York
around 1920 to perform and record on the newly popular race records.
(Bessie Smith, who would soon be dubbed Empress of the Blues, made her
first records in 1923.) Berlins jazz, then, appears to be intricately bound up
with public images of skin color, body shape, and voice type, and the Brox
Sisters embodied it.49 Berlins songs and the Broxes performances of them
form a blatant early example of how the sounds and images of jazz developed
within a framework that intersects gender and race.50
The staging of Everybody Step also became a model for Berlins later
jazz efforts. In each of the first three revues, a jazz number highlighted the
act-1 finale. It began with the Brox Sisters in onethat is, in front of the
traveler curtain, which concealed all but the front of the stage during scene
changesand then the traveler opened to reveal the full company. Under the
headline Americas Greatest Show, the Variety reviewer Jack Lait identified
Everybody Step as the best number and noted: When the girls get it
swinging the curtains part and the whole stage is in Alice blue and the whole
company enters, dressed alike for a stunning effect and a work-up of hysterical
enthusiasm in front.51 Subsequent productions strove for equally stunning
effects and further linked jazz to feminine power and allure as dangerous
forces. The 1922 production staged Pack Up Your Sins as a comic vision of
49. On popular images of black women in the 1920s, and Ma Raineys appearance in particular, see Sandra Lieb, Mother of the Blues: A Study of Ma Rainey (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), 8, 10. On later associations between jazz and black masculinity, especially
in the bebop era, see Ingrid Monson, The Problem with White Hipness: Race, Gender, and
Cultural Conceptions in Jazz Historical Discourse, this Journal, 48 (1995): esp. 4026. The associations of jazz and the femme fatale/honest lady dichotomy seem to have died out by the end
of the 1920s.
50. On the importance of recognizing how assumptions about gender, sexuality, and race inform jazz narratives, see Sherrie Tucker, Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies,
Current Musicology, nos. 7173 (Spring 2001Spring 2002): 375408. The narrative itself,
Tucker asserts, is shaped by [problematic] notions of gender and sexuality and race (378). She
goes on to claim that jazz sounds, spaces, images, scholarship, and historiography are gendered
whether women are in them or not (398).
51. Lait, Americas Greatest Show, 15.
722
hell, with the Devil and her jazz band accepting a parade of historic and contemporary sinners into the underworld, including Cleopatra, Don Juan,
Salome, the jazz clarinetist Ted Lewis, and the dancer Gilda Gray. The presence of Cleopatra and Salome, in particular, further dramatizes the eras associations of jazz and exoticized and eroticized femininity, here embodied by
historical figures. Gilda Gray represents their contemporary heir. She had
committed her most recent sin just three months earlier, during the summer of 1922, when she had danced the risqu shimmy in the Ziegfeld Follies
while singing the topical racially charged song Its Getting Dark on Old
Broadway.52 The staging of When You Walked Out Someone Else Walked
Right In, though not a finale, added a racial implication to the songs message of sexual freedom. Variety noted that the Brox Sisters performed it in
high yallowin other words, in a light shade of blackface makeup.53
Berlins revues further defined jazz through difference, that is, with numbers whose musical qualities, lyric sensibility, and performance style stood in
stark contrast to the jazz songs. Say It With Music became the theme song
for the entire Music Box series, with its smooth ballad style and its reference to
the strains of Chopin or Liszt as models of beautiful music. Its placement
in the show also enhanced its difference from jazz: it appeared in the scene just
before Everybody Step. In other songs, Berlin even creates a dialogue with
the jazz songs by denying the attraction of jazz altogether. In The Waltz of
Long Ago the verse claims that Jazz dancing nowadays does not appeal to
me; / I never cared about the jazzy melody. / Id love to dance around a
while, / But my kind of dance is out of style. By idealizing the waltz, the
song directly contradicted Learn to Do the Strut from earlier in the same
show, which had urged dancers to move beyond the waltz and the lancers
and learn this brand-new step.54 This kind of dialogic song construction
and placement had roots in Berlins earlier ragtime efforts, most strikingly in
counterpoint songs such as the one he wrote for his show Watch Your Step,
where he sets a smooth nostalgic ballad associated with mother (Simple
Melody) against a lively syncopated rag with diabolic resonance (Musical
Demon). The impulse remained with him for the rest of his career, as in the
counterpoint song Old Fashioned Wedding, written for the 1966 revival of
Annie Get Your Gun. A smooth ballad supports the character Franks vision of
an old fashioned wedding, while Annies rapidfire, syncopated tune offers a
contrasting vision of a liberated woman who will love and honor, yes, but not
52. Baral, Revue, 15. Sheet music accessed at http://digital.library.ucla.edu/apam/,

22 September 2005. On the shimmy, its racial associations, its sexual provocativeness, and Gilda
Grays role in popularizing it, see Rebecca A. Bryant, Shaking Things Up: Popularizing the
Shimmy in America, American Music 20 (2002): 16887.
53. Ibee, New Plays Presented within Week on Bway, 18.
54. The Lancers referred to popular nineteenth-century dance comprising a set of five
quadrilles, each in a different meter.
723
obey. In the Music Box shows, Berlin achieved a similar counterpoint effect
in successive, rather than simultaneous, presentation.
In the Music Box Revues, the nostalgic and sentimental songs, like many
others that conjured the past or a genteel way of life, tended to be performed
by classically trained singers, such as John Steel, the archetypal emcee of the
Ziegfeldian parade-of-beauties number (who had introduced Berlins A
Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody in the Follies of 1919), and Grace Moore, an operatic soprano whom Berlin had discovered and hired in Paris. Steel sang the
stage premiere of a number called Diamond Horseshoe, which merged
nostalgia, visions of Metropolitan operatic grandeur, and feminine pulchritude. Moore, who had introduced The Waltz of Long Ago, also presented
Tell Her in Springtime, whose musical allusions to Mendelssohns Spring
Song (and textual allusions to Shakespeare) support the songs advice to
young men that courtship should begin in the spring, because She wont
answer no / If you play Romeo / In the spring.
Berlin and his collaborators embedded the jazz/non-jazz opposition into
the structure of the show. Accenting the vast gulf between contemporary and
historic New York, the 1924 Music Box Revue opened and closed with a scene
featuring Rip Van Winkle, who is awakened by a mountain climber in the
Catskills and led to the big city, where he watches a parade of girls, including a
Broadway stepper who is jazzing her life away. Rip Van Winkle then sings
Where is the little old New York, / The one that I used to know, / long,
long ago? Proceeding to the Music Box Theater to see a new revue, he purportedly observes the entire show until returning to the stage for the finale as
the guest of honor at a banquet hosted by the entire company.55
A symbolic frame for the show, Rip Van Winkle appears as a quaint vision of
a stable, idealized pasta fictionalized and white nineteenth-century past, a
past that must be honored even as it now appears obliterated by Jazz-Age
cultural miscegenation. No matter that nineteenth-century New York, and
other parts of the country, had been riven by ethnic and class tensions.56 The
shows version of the citys past downplayed conflict in order to evoke a
picture framed by racial homogeneity and social stability. The Music Box
Revue had conjured that past before, and not just in its theme songs allusion
to the beautiful music of Chopin and Liszt. The 1921 revue created a
strong association between middle-class domestic comforts and reassuringly
familiar nineteenth-century cultural icons. In the midst of the Dining Out
Scene, the couple identified as boy and girl diners sings a duet about a
cozy kitchenette apartment for two where they can enjoy a home-cooked
55. See Berlin, Complete Lyrics, 21213.
56. Irish-black relations were particularly tense in New York during the mid-nineteenth century (George Brown Tindall and David E. Shi, America: A Narrative History, 4th ed. [New York:
Norton, 1996], 500). The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 stopped Chinese immigration for a
decade and was renewed indefinitely in 1902 (ibid., 89495).
724
meal and listen to the tuneful Humoresque on the phonograph.57 In the

next scene a young man concedes that, unlike the cabaret crowd, he would
rather stay at home and read his little book of poetry featuring works of
Kipling, Poe, and Longfellow.58 In the 1922 revue, Berlins song Crinoline
Days harkened Back to the olden / Days that were golden and, particularly, to eighteen seventy-four [when] Rosy complexions werent bought in a
storea lyric that, despite its rosy imagery, implicitly conjures a white face.
In a review highlighting Grace Moores performance of The Waltz of Long
Ago, a critic of the 1923 revue noted that the setting and costumes for the
number recalled the 70s.59
Jewish Jazz and the Ethnographic Frame

Conjuring the 70s suggests a strategic choice to invoke not just a prejazz New York, but also a New York that existed before new waves of southand east-European immigrationespecially Russian-Jewish immigration
accelerated in the half-century since. Between 1881 (when anti-Semitic violence began to escalate in Russia, ultimately driving out the Berlin family) and
1921 (when Congress acted to restrict European immigration), New York
City witnessed a population influx unprecedented in the nations history. The
same period saw a wave of African American migration from the rural South
to the urban North that transformed Harlem from a genteel community of
established white upper-class citizens to the capital of black America.60 The
period 192124precisely the years of Berlins Music Box Revuesmarked a
peak of nativist reaction across the country. Harbingers of decline, books such
as Madison Grants The Passing of the Great Race (1916), Lothrop Stoddards
The Rising Tide of Color (1920), and articles in the Saturday Evening Post by
Kenneth Roberts, reflected and articulated a widely felt sense of threat to
Anglo-Saxon stock and a feeling that something needed to be done about it.61
In 1921, when the countrys principal immigration gateway, Ellis Island, began to overflow, ships carrying newcomers detoured to Boston. In response,
Congress reinforced its Emergency Immigration Act of 1921 with the
National Origins Act of 1924, further limiting immigration. These years also
saw a peak in the membership and national profile of the Ku Klux Klan, culminating in its 1925 parade of 40,000 members down Pennsylvania Avenue in
57. Berlin, Complete Lyrics, 19697.

58. Ibid., 197.
59. Ibee, New Plays Presented within Week on Bway, 18.
60. Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper and Row,
1971), 17.
61. For summaries of these works, see William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity,
191432, 2nd ed. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 205.
725
Washington, DC.62 Just as the rapid demographic shift fueled American modernist composers interest in jazz as a symbol of release and revolt, as Carol J.
Oja has shown,63 Berlins references to the 1870s in distinctly non-jazz songs
stood as poignant symbols of an era when the citys demographic profile had
been comparatively stable and homogeneous.64
The notion that Berlins shows purposefully idealized an era that preceded
the waves of immigration in which Berlin and his family had participated may
sound like a contradiction. Yet at a time when the term jazz and its musical
signs were increasingly coded Jewish in contemporary discoursea theme
to be explored further belowit made sense for Berlin and his collaborators
to evoke alternative, and distinctly non-Jewish, sounds and images of New
York. The effort corresponds to entertainment forms in which Henry Bial has
identified the impulse of active vanishinga deliberate effort to strip away
connotations of Jewishness in order to attract the widest possible audience.65
In this context, Rip Van Winkle, nineteenth-century music and poetry, and
images of 1870s New York thus formed perfect foils for Berlins jazz creations, which may be heard as the aural analog to the cultural miscegenation
driven by European immigration, black migration, and urbanization. As in the
Broxes use of high yallow makeup, the racial mixture sometimes also had
visual reinforcement. The act-1 finale of the 1924 show made that as explicit
as possible. Here, Berlin conflated jazz and minstrelsy in a particularly dramatic way. A small group began in one singing a song called Call of the
South, which grew into a double number with Stephen Fosters Old Folks
at Home as its counterpoint. The traveler then parted to reveal the whole
company, led by Fanny Brice, singing a song called Bandanna Ball. Few critics mentioned the music this time, but many remarked on the seemingly
miraculous lighting and makeup effect in which the entire ensemble was transformed from whiteface to blackface. An opening-night critic marveled that the
actors are at one moment white and at the next negro. Every one last night
grew feverish over that chemical accomplishment; and it alone is enough to establish the revue as a popular destination.66 The New York Times critic called
it the outstanding moment.67 And yet another critic saw such artistry in the
number that he found it worthy of inclusion in a popular opera. Yet, the
62. Tindall and Shi, America, 109296.
63. Carol J. Oja, Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s (New York and Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001), 314.
64. Moore, in Yankee Blues, also emphasizes the link between demography and jazz, which
illuminated white nervousness over the rapid ethnic transformation of Northern cities (82) and
represented the brassy symbol of Negro migration (85).
65. Henry Bial, Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 155.
66. Unidentified clipping with Percy Hammond byline, Library of Congress, Music Division,
Irving Berlin Collection, Scrapbook #4 (General Clippings, 192249), on music microfilm 9220-013.
67. Music Box Filled with Beauty, New York Times, 2 December 1924, 23.
726
same critic invoked revealing terms when straining to describe the shows
overall musical style: Here is jazz, he wrote, but it is classical jazz.68
The scene, in effect, parts the curtain that had obscured what Berlin had
been striving for in the preceding years. Despite having stripped away the
trappings of traditional minstrelsy he had brought the minstrel spirit into the
jazz age. Jeffrey Melnick has described Berlins talent in the 1910s and
1920s as the ability to reconfigure the minstrel stance and defuse its most
offensive elements . . . to distill the sights and sounds of minstrelsy into a usable modern musical grammar.69 We can now hear that grammar develop
or, from another perspective, retreatfrom Everybody Step through
Bandanna Ball. The final Music Box Revues nineteenth-century, Rip Van
Winkle theme allowed Berlin to restore minstrelsys nineteenth-century roots
in this climactic number, which, by appearing as the act-1 finale, draws an
unmistakable link to the more overtly jazz-oriented interior finales of the
previous three years.
Only a few months before the 1924 show, Paul Whiteman had introduced
Gershwins Rhapsody in Blue as the ultimate refinement of jazz, and Otto
Kahn had just announced his view that the Met should produce a jazz
opera, so the notion of jazz as a potentially new vein of classical music was
in the air. With Gershwin and Berlin in the forefront, such views also developed within an intellectual context in which racial mixing had begun to loom
large as a theme in discussions of jazz. Several scholars have recently highlighted the ways in which the periods public discourse constructed a close relationship between jazz and Jewish Americans, especially Russian and East
European immigrants.70 Samson Raphaelson explained why his 1925 play The
Jazz Singer featured a Jewish protagonist by claiming that Jazz is Irving
Berlin, Al Jolson, George Gershwin, Sophie Tucker. . . . Jews are determining
the nature and scope of jazz more than any other racemore than the negroes, from whom they have stolen jazz and given it a new color and meaning.71 By 1927, the writer Isaac Goldberg, who would go on to write the
68. Undated clipping labeled Mirror [Daily Mirror?] in Library of Congress, Music
Division, Irving Berlin Collection, Scrapbook #4 (General Clippings, 192249), on music microfilm 92-20-013.
69. Melnick, A Right to Sing the Blues, 45.
70. See Moore, Yankee Blues, 13060, for a thorough exploration of the cultural issues involved, in particular, the ways in which what he terms the Jewish nexus challenged the redemptive culture advanced by white gentile composers and critics. On how the issues came into
focus after the premiere of Rhapsody in Blue, see David Schiff, Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 8799. For a vivid and nuanced exploration of
how Aaron Copland was implicated in this discussionin which the terms American, eclectic, jazz, and Jewish overlappedsee Beth E. Levy, From Orient to Occident: Aaron Copland and the Sagas of the Prairie, in Aaron Copland and His World, ed. Carol J. Oja and Judith
Tick (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), esp. 30717.
71. Samson Raphaelson, preface to The Jazz Singer (New York: Brentanos, 1925), 10. Also
quoted in Melnick, A Right to Sing the Blues, 103.
727
first Gershwin biography and many other books, had constructed a historical
narrative that conflates a black-to-Jewish ethnic transference with a South-toNorth geographical move. In an article entitled Aaron Copland and His
Jazz, Goldberg wrote: In the course of its filtration from the South to a
small but noisy point called Manhattan Island, it [jazz] has undergone something decidedly more than a sea change. It reaches from the black South to
the black North, but in between it has been touched by the commercial wand
of the Jew. He then identifies Gershwin, Berlin, and Kern as the key figures
in the process.72
This problematic narrative of Jewish immigrants as cultural mediators, a
view advanced by Jews and Gentiles alike, with both philo-Semitic and antiSemitic implications, received wide circulation in the 1920s. Contemporary
observers worked within what amounts to an ethnographic frame, taking for
granted the notion that Jewish composers had developed the most compelling
jazz of the era. But few agreed on whether it was a good thing or a bad thing.
Most observers, as MacDonald Smith Moore has written, were simply
puzzled, unable to resolve into a common focus their images of Jews, jazz,
modernism, and America. Attitudes were seldom unmixed.73 Understandably, the issue lost favor for several decades in writings on music, but in
the past two decades it has been revived for critical analysis.74 While confronting the political and economic asymmetries in what Melnick calls blackJewish relations, these scholars find in Jewish blackface, Jewish jazz, and
Jewish theatrical performance the channeling of elements and perceptions
of black culture that few other ethnic groupscertainly not the increasingly
nativist white Anglo-Saxon mainstreamwere willing to acknowledge or confront. Berlin stood at the forefront of the movement, and, indeed, his theatricalization of jazz in the Music Box Revues appears now to have incited, or at
least accelerated, the linkage of jazz and Jewsa linkage that would both benefit and complicate the careers of Gershwin, Copland, and Leonard Bernstein,
among others. If Berlins brand of jazz now seems naive or inappropriate in a
historical narrative that places African American improvisers at its center, it is
because it has been heard within a limited historical perspective. Berlins jazz
72. Isaac Goldberg, Aaron Copland and His Jazz, American Mercury 12 (September
1927): 63, quoted in Mary Herron Dupree, Jazz, the Critics, and American Art Music in the
1920s, in Gershwin Reader, 124.
73. Moore, Yankee Blues, 13435.
74. Ibid., 13060; Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996); Melnick, A
Right to Sing the Blues; and Andrea Most, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Pamela M. Potter traces the development of
ideas about music and raceespecially Germanness and Jewishnessin Nazi-era musicology, in
Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitlers
Reich (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1998); see especially 17691 for an
overview of music and the Jewish Question.
728
was conspicuously heterogeneous and synthetic, mixing black and white signs
themselves multilayered and complexwith a distinctively assimilative
Jewish sensibility in a period when racial boundaries in the public sphere were
being policed more intensively, and sometimes more violently, than ever.
The ethnographic frame in which Berlin stood out as a leading jazz composer goes hand in hand with the graphocentric frame. Later jazz writers
would identify jazzs defining qualities in precisely the things that get distorted
by or left out of the graphocentric frame: improvisation; subtle pitch inflections such as scoops, slides, and blue notes that lie between the flat and natural
third; a variety of timbral and textural devices including growls, grunts, and
wah-wah effects, which in the case of brass instruments could be enhanced
through the artful use of plunger mutes; and the rhythmic flexibility that
would later come to be recognized as swing. If Irving Berlin had not yet fathomed such qualities or found a way to capture them in print and on stage, he
nevertheless played a crucial role in defining jazzwhile invoking its critics
through a kind of staged musical debateas a powerful cultural symbol, an
exciting, modern, and democratic common ground on which, ideally, everybody could step.
Works Cited
Archives:
Irving Berlin Collection, Library of Congress, Music Division, Washington, DC.
Articles in Contemporary Newspapers and Periodicals:

Berlin Calls Jazz American Folk Music; Composer Predicts It Will Eventually Be
Sung in the Metropolitan Opera House. New York Times, 10 January 1925, 2.
Diaghileff Ballet to Appear Here Soon. New York Times, 28 November 1927, 18.
Gershwin, George. Does Jazz Belong to Art? Singing (July 1926): 1314. Reprinted
in George Gershwin, The Gershwin Reader, edited by Robert Wyatt and John
Andrew Johnson. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
. Letter to the Editor. Singing (October 1926): 1718. Reprinted in George
Gershwin, The Gershwin Reader, edited by Robert Wyatt and John Andrew
Johnson. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Gilman, Lawrence. Review in the New York Herald Tribune, 4 December 1925, 18.
Reprinted in Gershwin, The George Gershwin Reader, edited by Robert Wyatt and
John Andrew Johnson, 8586. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004.
Goldberg, Isaac. Aaron Copland and His Jazz. American Mercury 12 (September
1927): 63.
Ibee. New Plays Presented within Week on Bway. Variety 72, no. 6 (27 September
1923): 18.
Jazz Opera in View for Metropolitan. New York Times, 18 November 1924, 23.
729
Knowlton, Don. Anatomy of Jazz. Harpers 154 (April 1926): 581.

Lait, Jack. Americas Greatest Show. Variety 64, no. 6 (30 September 1921): 15.
Lait [Jack]. Music Box Revue. Variety 68, no. 10 (27 October 1922): 16.
Music Box Revue Filled with Beauty. New York Times, 2 December 1924, 23.
Where is Jazz Leading America? Etude (August 1924): 51718, 520.
A World Court of Eminent Musicians Discuss the Ten Great Masterpieces. Etude
(March 1924): 15052, 154.
Other Printed Materials:

Agawu, Kofi. Playing with Signs: Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Allen, Frederick Lewis. Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties.
New York: Harper & Brothers, 1931.
Baral, Robert. Revue: The Great Broadway Period. Revised ed. New York and London:
Fleet Press, 1970.
Bechet, Sidney. Treat It Gentle: An Autobiography. 1960. Reprint, New York: Da
Capo, 1978.
Bergreen, Laurence. As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin. New York: Viking,
1990.
Berlin, Edward A. Ragtime: A Musical and Cultural History. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1980.
Berlin, Irving. The Complete Lyrics of Irving Berlin. Edited by Robert Kimball and
Linda Emmet. New York: Knopf, 2000.
Bial, Henry. Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.
Bryant, Rebecca A. Shaking Things Up: Popularizing the Shimmy in America.
American Music 20 (2002): 16887.
Copland, Aaron. Jazz Structure and Influence. Modern Music 4, no. 2 (January
1927): 914.
Dupree, Mary Herron, Jazz, the Critics, and American Art Music in the 1920s. In
George Gershwin, The Gershwin Reader, edited by Robert Wyatt and John Andrew
Johnson, 12330. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Fass, Paula S. The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s. New York
and London: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Beautiful and Damned. New York: Charles Scribners Sons,
1922.
. Flappers and Philosophers. Edited by James L. W. West III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Gabbard, Krin. Jammin at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Garrett, Charles Hiroshi. Chinatown, Whose Chinatown? Defining Americas
Borders with Musical Orientalism. This Journal 57 (2004): 11973.
Gershwin, George. The George Gershwin Reader. Edited by Robert Wyatt and John
Andrew Johnson. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Giddins, Gary. Visions of Jazz: The First Century. New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998.
730
Goldberg, Isaac. Tin Pan Alley: A Chronicle of American Popular Music. 1930.
Reprint, New York: Frederick Ungar, 1961.
Gushee, Lawrence. Pioneers of Jazz: The Story of the Creole Band. New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
. A Preliminary Chronology of the Early Career of Ferd Jelly Roll Morton.
Hamberlin, Larry. Visions of Salome: The Femme Fatale in American Popular Songs
before 1920. This Journal 59 (2006): 63196.
Hamm, Charles. Irving Berlin: Songs from the Melting Pot; The Formative Years,
19071914. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
. Putting Popular Music in Its Place. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995.
. Yesterdays: Popular Song in America. New York: Norton, 1979.
Hatten, Robert S. Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven,
Schubert. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.
. Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
Howland, John Louis. Between the Muses and the Masses: Symphonic Jazz, Glorified Entertainment, and the Rise of the American Musical Middlebrow, 1920
1944. PhD diss., Stanford University, 2002.
Jablonski, Edward. Irving Berlin: American Troubadour. New York: Henry Holt,
1999.
Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the
Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Kleppinger, Stanley V. On the Influence of Jazz Rhythm in the Music of Aaron
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Levy, Beth E. From Orient to Occident: Aaron Copland and the Sagas of the Prairie.
In Aaron Copland and His World, edited by Carol J. Oja and Judith Tick, 30749.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Lieb, Sandra. Mother of the Blues: A Study of Ma Rainey. Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1981.
Magee, Jeffrey. Irving Berlins Blue Skies: Ethnic Affiliations and Musical Transformations. Musical Quarterly 84 (2000): 53780.
. The Uncrowned King of Swing: Fletcher Henderson and Big Band Jazz. New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Melnick, Jeffrey. A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American
Popular Song. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Monson, Ingrid. The Problem with White Hipness: Race, Gender, and Cultural Conceptions in Jazz Historical Discourse. This Journal 48 (1995): 396422.
Moore, MacDonald Smith. Yankee Blues: Musical Culture and American Identity.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.
Mordden, Ethan. Make Believe: The Broadway Musical in the 1920s. New York and
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Most, Andrea. Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2004.
Oja, Carol J. Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s. New York and Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000.
Oja, Carol J., and Judith Tick, eds. Aaron Copland and His World. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2005.
731
Osgood, Henry O. So This Is Jazz. Boston: Little, Brown, 1926.

Osofsky, Gilbert. Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto. 2nd ed. New York: Harper and
Row, 1971.
Pisani, Michael V. Imagining Native America in Music. New Haven, CT, and
London: Yale University Press, 2005.
Pollack, Howard. John Alden Carpenter: A Chicago Composer. 1995. Reprint, Urbana
and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001.
Potter, Pamela M. Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar
Republic to the End of Hitlers Reich. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University
Press, 1998.
Raphaelson, Samson. The Jazz Singer. New York: Brentanos, 1925.
Ratner, Leonard. Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style. New York: Schirmer
Books, 1980.
Rogin, Michael. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting
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Schiff, David. Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
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Sheppard, W. Anthony. Strains of Japonisme in Tin Pan Alley, 19001930. Paper
presented as part of a Society for American Music session at the Musical Intersections conference, Toronto, November 2000.
Spring, Howard. Changes in Jazz Performance and Arranging in New York,
19291932. PhD diss., University of Illinois, 1993.
Tick, Judith. The Origins and Style of Coplands Mood for Piano, no. 3, Jazzy.
Tindall, George Brown, and David E. Shi. America: A Narrative History. 4th ed. New
York: Norton, 1996.
Tsou, Judy. Gendering Race: Stereotypes of Chinese Americans in Popular Sheet
Music. Representations 6, no. 2 (1997): 2562.
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edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell, 14:90326. London: Macmillan, 2001.
Tucker, Sherrie. Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies. Current Musicology,
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Waters, Ethel, with Charles Samuels. His Eye Is On the Sparrow: An Autobiography.
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Woollcott, Alexander. The Story of Irving Berlin. New York: G. P. Putnams Sons,
1925.
Sheet Music by Irving Berlin:

Alexanders Ragtime Band. New York: Ted Snyder Co., 1911.
Bring On the Pepper. New York: Irving Berlin, Inc., 1922.
Crinoline Days. New York: Irving Berlin, Inc., 1922.
Everybody Step. New York: Irving Berlin, Inc., 1921.
Everybodys Doing It Now. New York: Ted Snyder Co., 1911.
Learn to Do the Strut. New York: Irving Berlin, Inc., 1923.
732
Mr. Jazz Himself. New York: Waterson, Berlin, & Snyder Co., 1917.
Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil. New York: Irving Berlin, Inc., 1922.
Say It With Music. New York: Irving Berlin, Inc., 1921.
The Schoolhouse Blues. New York: Irving Berlin, Inc., 1921.
The Syncopated Vamp. New York: Irving Berlin, Inc., 1920.
The Syncopated Walk. New York: Irving Berlin, Inc., 1914.
Tokio Blues. New York: Irving Berlin, Inc., 1924.
The Waltz of Long Ago. New York: Irving Berlin, Inc., 1923.
When You Walked Out Someone Else Walked Right In. New York: Irving Berlin,
Inc., 1923
Recordings:
The Ultimate Irving Berlin, vol. 2. Compact disc, Pearl Gem 0117, 2002.
Abstract
In his four Music Box Revues (192124), Irving Berlin introduced a series of
songs that many construed as jazz. That view has not prevailed, but the jazz
label becomes more intelligible through efforts to restore its original milieu,
including the songs distinctive musical and linguistic elements, their theatrical
context, and the cultural commentary surrounding Berlin and his work in that
period. At a time when the term jazz had only recently entered public discourse, and when its meaning, content, and value remained in flux, Berlin deployed a variety of ragtime and blues figures that may be described as black
topics, and combined them in such a way as to produce a jazz trope, a musical
construct created by juxtaposing disparate or even contradictory topics. When
repeatedly set to lyrics that celebrate illicit behavior, the music gains further associations with things that jazz was thought to abet. Theatrical setting further
reinforced the songs links to jazz. Berlin wrote many of the numbers for a
flapper-style sister act, often placed them in a climactic program position, and
juxtaposed them with sentimental and nostalgic songs that lacked jazz flavor
and whose lyrics, in some cases, pointedly denied jazzs attractions. Beyond
the stage, the songs and their theatrical presentation flourished within an
emerging perspective that identified Jewish Americans, such as Berlin and
George Gershwin, as the key figures in jazz and musical theater. Berlins
Broadway jazz stands as an influential and revealing intersection of musical,
linguistic, theatrical, and social elements in the early 1920s.

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Everybody Step: Irving Berlin, Jazz,

and Broadway in the 1920s

Journal of the American Musicological Society

Black Topics, Jazz Trope

Irving Berlin, Jazz, and Broadway in the 1920s

it as an exemplar of jazz. These included composers John Alden Carpenter,

Journal of the American Musicological Society

Irving Berlin, Jazz, and Broadway in the 1920s

Example 1 Everybody Step, refrain, mm. 18

go - in with em when they be - gin.

Youll be say- in yes-sir,

Hes the best pro - fes - sor

rhy - thm. Lets be

Journal of the American Musicological Society

Irving Berlin, Jazz, and Broadway in the 1920s

topics . . . juxtaposed in a single functional location or rhetorical moment.23

Journal of the American Musicological Society

Example 2a Everybody Step, refrain, mm. 916

jaz-zy d-dle un-der his chin.

the clar - i - net - er

Irving Berlin, Jazz, and Broadway in the 1920s

Example 2b Everybody Step, refrain, mm. 2532

comes to strut-tin o - ver the ground

glut - ton, when it

Wait-ll you see

Journal of the American Musicological Society

Irving Berlin, Jazz, and Broadway in the 1920s

Example 3a Everybody Step, verse, beginning

Example 3b The Syncopated Walk, verse, beginning

Example 3c Alexanders Ragtime Band, refrain, beginning

Journal of the American Musicological Society

Example 4a Everybody Step, refrain, mm. 2122

They sim - ply

Example 4b The Syncopated Walk, refrain, beginning

That syn-co - pat-ed

Example 5 The Syncopated Vamp, refrain, mm. 67

-mer - i - can shoul - der shak - ers shes

Irving Berlin, Jazz, and Broadway in the 1920s

Example 6a Alexanders Ragtime Band, verse, mm. 78

Example 6b Everybody Step, verse, mm. 56

Example 6c Everybody Step, refrain, mm. 1516

the clar - i - net - er

Journal of the American Musicological Society

Irving Berlin, Jazz, and Broadway in the 1920s

Example 7 Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil, refrain, mm. 14

Youll meet the

then put a trick in it,

a jazz-y kick in it,

They start-ed pick-in it

Journal of the American Musicological Society

Example 9 Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil, patter, mm. 14

Irving Berlin, Jazz, and Broadway in the 1920s

Journal of the American Musicological Society

leave your house

youd bet - ter

Irving Berlin, Jazz, and Broadway in the 1920s

Beyond the Graphocentric Frame

Journal of the American Musicological Society

strove to have his compositions notated and published, he harbored no

Irving Berlin, Jazz, and Broadway in the 1920s

Journal of the American Musicological Society

Figure 1 The Brox Sisters (Photo courtesy of David Merrick)

Irving Berlin, Jazz, and Broadway in the 1920s