SOCIETY, THE MUSIC BUSINESS, AND GEORGE WHITE’S SCANDALS (1920)
BY THE TIME WORLD WAR I ENDED in 1918, the balance of power between the Old World and the New was shifting westward. Yet even before the war, a cultural shift was under way in America that did much to transform the entertainment business in which Gershwin would flourish. During the nineteenth century, gender roles had emanated from the Victorian code, which centered men’s lives outside the home and women’s activities within it. Women were widely thought to be predisposed toward virtue and restraint, while men’s virtue was believed to depend on the moral compass of honorable women. Husbands who sought sexual gratification outside of marriage were not necessarily stigmatized; when stigmatization took place, it was more likely to target “loose” women who did the same. By the early years of the twentieth century, however, that code was eroding.
The 1910s found public entertainment gravitating away from moral affirmation and toward self-expression and personal enjoyment. One result of this development—or was it a cause?—was the so-called dance craze that hit New York around 1911, and soon thereafter swept across the country. Old World dances such as the waltz, schottische, and polka gave way to the fox trot, turkey trot, Charleston, and black bottom, to name a few. Freed from the obligation to execute prescribed steps, dancers now responded to the music through movement that could be restrained or vigorous according to individual choice. The dances were linked to indigenous musical styles: ragtime, which had begun to win popularity even before 1900, and jazz, which reached the public consciousness during the 1910s.1
As jazz music and new dancing styles entered the arena of public entertainment, Gershwin became a musician. We have so far seen George, an improviser from the start, show an affinity for new music, whether as a piano pupil whose teacher encouraged his ragging of the classics, or as would-be secretary to Irving Berlin. His expressive approach to the piano, grounded in dance rhythms, had much in common with the way people were learning the new dances. And the world of popular songs and musical comedy on which his sights were set was deeply influenced by the trend toward self-expression and the evolution of gender roles.
The state of the American music business, however, had an economic downside for composers. Piracy was so widespread that no individual author could battle it effectively: hotels, restaurants, cabarets, dance halls, and the like offered music to their customers without compensating the composers or lyricists, which as profit-making ventures they were legally required to do. As a result, early in 1914 the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) was founded partly in order to give musical creators a way to protect their intellectual property rights. The procedure was simple. Rather than retaining the performing rights conferred by copyright, members assigned them to ASCAP, which in turn collected performance royalties from users of the music, and then paid the creators according to a scheme worked out by the society and its members. The organization faced tough resistance in its early years and was often ignored by proprietors and performers. In 1917, however, the U.S. Supreme Court, overturning a lower court decision, declared that the playing and singing of copyrighted music in restaurants, dance halls, and cabarets—unlike in school glee clubs and church choirs, for example—failed the not-for-profit test, and therefore users must pay royalties when they performed copyrighted works. Thus, by the time Gershwin was hired by Harms in 1918, performance royalties were being channeled directly to composers. Gershwin himself joined ASCAP in 1920.2
Another key economic issue for musicians concerned sound recording—the “mechanical reproduction” of music. The first federal copyright law, passed in 1790, had centered chiefly on books. Because much of that era’s music was published in book form—sacred tunebooks, anthologies of secular and instrumental pieces—copyright protection of musical works was widespread from the nation’s founding. As sheet music sales boomed in the 1800s, most music was copyrighted. But by the twentieth century two questions were growing more urgent every year: Could a musical composition still be considered a copy of a work after it was transferred to a record or piano roll? And if so, did copies constitute a royalty-producing property for the individual who had copyrighted the original? In 1905, when Congress began formal consideration of new copyright practices, income from mechanical reproductions of music was being channeled chiefly to record manufacturers. Most performers were also paid, as Gershwin would be for his work on piano rolls; but the creators made nothing. John Philip Sousa and Victor Herbert were among those who took part in the 1905 hearings, in vigorous support of composers’ rights. The 1909 revision was the first law to recognize that a piano roll could enjoy copyright protection, though phonograph recordings did not.
The contract drawn up on February 21, 1918, between Gershwin and Harms reveals the relationship between composer and publisher. Its first provision made Gershwin an employee of Harms for one year, hired “to conceive, create, compose, and write music for musical compositions and Numbers.” Harms held the exclusive right to “publish, copyright, re-copyright, print, reprint, copy,” and sell Gershwin’s music and all its lyrics, as well as everything he wrote for “production purposes” (meaning the musical comedy stage). Gershwin assigned copyright to the company in advance for all music created during the contract period, promising not to write music for another publisher, to collaborate on any music to be published by another company, or to allow his name to be linked to any music whose rights Harms did not own. Gershwin, however, still owned the “performing, stage and producing rights” of his “musical plays, musical comedies and operas.” For each copy of a published piece sold, Harms paid the composer a royalty of three cents. And the firm agreed to pay him a salary of $35 per week, plus an additional $15, the latter drawn against future royalties. After the contract expired, Harms still held the rights to publish and sell all music written under its provisions, and the composer still collected royalties on the same basis, provided he had complied with the terms of the contract.3
BY EARLY 1920, Gershwin was gaining public attention. On March 13, Billboard magazine published the first of many interviews that Gershwin would give throughout his life.4 “What do you think the chances are of getting a better type of music in musical comedy?” the interviewer asked. Gershwin thought them excellent, as long as something basic was understood: “A composer doesn’t have to be afraid of writing a musicianly score nowadays, if he will only provide melody.” Later in the interview, Gershwin steered the conversation back to what seemed to be his idée fixe. “Remember,” he insisted, “melody is dominant. Without melody everything will go for nothing. There is a lot of money waiting for the fellow who can write original scores, but once again and always—melody must be dominant.” Which prompted the reporter to comment: “From which [I] gathered the impression that, in writing musical comedy, melody is the thing”—and that became the article’s headline.
In Gershwin’s musical universe, melody was indeed “the thing” around which all else revolved. As a young concertgoer, he devised a technique of “intensive listening” that led him to the piano to revisit and absorb the motifs of the music he had just heard. As a piano student known to “rag the classics,” he honed skills as an embellisher of melody that would serve him well as a rehearsal accompanist and an entertaining party guest. As a Tin Pan Alley song plugger, he worked as a salesman with growing expertise on what made a melody sing. As a maker of piano rolls, he engaged with popular songs as an arranger—a framer of melodies that were already or soon to be published. Gershwin’s standard improvisational ploy at the piano was to present his own songs with constantly changing embellishments on a still-recognizable melody. When writing classically oriented music, he adorned it with songlike structures and tuneful passagework. For Gershwin, determined to reach listeners, his consciousness of their positive response to what they were hearing helped to direct his creative process.
At the time of his interview, Gershwin was studying harmony with Edward Kilenyi and finding ways to bring technical elements from his classical training into popular songs. “I have used whole tone harmonies a la Debussy in one piece and it was very effective,” Gershwin told his interlocutor, adding: “One can write dissonances where a few years ago they would have been torn out of the score instanter.” Finally, the interviewer asked whether the young composer had “tried to develop any particular style,” to which Gershwin responded,
Well, I don’t know that I have tried, but I think it has naturally come about. I believe that every composer has someone in mind that he makes his idol. Mine was Jerome Kern. I didn’t try to imitate him, but I admired his music so much that my early efforts were subconsciously similar to his work. Then I think that after one works along he injects more of himself into his work and his style really becomes a remodeling of himself in terms of his idol. . . . I believe that if you are natural you will be different and you will develop your style by just being yourself.
Five years would pass before the first of several articles that Gershwin would write appeared in print. But the Billboard interview is a landmark: early proof that as the master of his training, Gershwin relished intellectual engagement with the craft he was practicing. Finding himself in a musical world split into separate spheres, popular and classical, he maintained a staunch commitment to both.
By the time the interview was published in March, Gershwin had missed a chance for another stage credit when Dere Mable, a musical comedy based on a book of war letters, flunked an out-of-town tryout in early February. Gershwin and Irving Caesar had interpolated one published song into this theatrical endeavor, a novelty number called “We’re Pals,” sung by a World War I soldier to his dog. In April, another Gershwin-Caesar interpolation appeared in Ed Wynn’s Carnival, a successful Broadway show starring the eponymous comedian, author, composer, lyricist, and, in this case, producer. Previously cut from La-La-Lucille!, “(Oo, How) I Love to Be Loved by You” featured words by Lou Paley; but it was again replaced by another song soon after the tryout performances.
Interpolations, though, were only a backdrop to a more important event in Gershwin’s professional life: being hired as composer for George White’s Scandals, an annual series of Broadway revues. White, born George Weitz on New York’s East Side, was a dancer by trade who, after starting out in vaudeville, worked his way up the Broadway ladder. He filled a secondary role in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1911, then won the status of principal player in the 1915 edition, where he danced with Ann Pennington, already a star. The Broadway revue, well established as a genre by the mid-1910s, flourished during the postwar years, and White, along with George Rock and Will Morrissey, all vaudeville performers turned producers, were movers and shakers in its success.
White’s first Scandals, for which he cowrote the book and lyrics with Arthur Jackson, staged the dances, and performed as a dancer himself, opened on June 2, 1919, a week after La-La-Lucille! The composer was Richard Whiting, a midwesterner who had earned his start in the Detroit office of Remick’s professional department. Cast members included Ann Pennington, whom White had lured away from the Ziegfeld Follies, his chief competitor in the revue business. The story goes that Ziegfeld, stung by his former employee’s decision to mount a revue of his own and steal one of his stars, offered White a handsome salary if he and Pennington rejoined the cast of the Follies. White supposedly countered with an even more lavish offer to Ziegfeld if he and his wife, actress Billie Burke, left the Follies to appear in his Scandals.
The first edition of the Scandals paid off handsomely for White, thanks to a successful post-Broadway tour. Nevertheless, when he began to consider the 1920 sequel, he decided to change composers, replacing Richard Whiting with Gershwin, an arrangement finalized in late February 1920 when White notified the young composer that he had worked out a deal with Harms to pay Gershwin a weekly stipend of $75, starting with rehearsals and continuing through the duration of the Broadway run.5 White continued as the cowriter—now with Andy Rice instead of Arthur Jackson, who became the show’s lyricist—and took over as stage director, too. He appeared onstage only near the show’s end, when he delighted the crowd with his imitations of other famous dance stars. After a brief tryout run in Washington, D.C., George White’s Scandals of 1920 opened in New York on June 7 and ran for 134 performances, matching the Broadway success of its predecessor.
Critical consensus judged the new Scandals better than the first, and in some quarters the music was cited as a factor. “The score which George Gershwin has composed for the show,” according to the New York Clipper, “is not only superior to last year’s music in the same show, but it is easily one of the most tuneful now being played on Broadway. Its colorful melodies and piquant jazz strains will not fail of popular rendition in the various cafes and places where orchestras hold forth.”6 The New York Times, though leaving the composer nameless, judged the revue “at least twice as good” as the 1919 edition.7
One scene in particular, “A Presidential Convention,” demonstrated how Gershwin’s music supported the timeliness of White’s revue. It opened with comedian George Bickel as William Jennings Bryan, three-time Democratic candidate for president and chairman of the convention, welcoming “The Common People,” collectively represented by dancing comedian Lester Allen, into the hall. A procession of candidates followed, each rudely dismissed with the help of a down-the-chute contraption of some kind. The convention then turned to a jazz band, the Yerkes Happy Six, for inspiration. With the stage patriotically arrayed in red, white, and blue, Ann Pennington “wafted” onto the scene, and “everybody jazzed it to the curtain,” reported Ibee, who reviewed the show for Variety.8 Another song in this scene, “Scandal Walk,” introduced a new dance in praise of gossip—celebrating it in a “jazz” idiom that feels up to date. The song made something of a stir in the marketplace, even though its melodic half steps can hardly be called tuneful.
Other songs signal that music in a jazz vein could be ruminative, as well. “On My Mind the Whole Night Long” was Gershwin’s first blues song.
We have said “Goodbye.”
Too late now to sigh,
Till I feel so blue,
Wearyin’ for you, ’cause you are
On my mind the whole night long. . . .
In 1920, the blues as a genre was still in the process of extending its reach beyond southern black communities. A key agent in that process was Alabama-born W. C. Handy, an African American trumpet player, bandleader, composer, arranger, and publisher. As a literate musician who happened upon the local folk practice known as “blues” music, Handy began, early in the 1900s, to write down and arrange melodies from oral tradition as commercial songs, and in the 1910s numbers like “Memphis Blues” (1912) and “St. Louis Blues” (1914) helped to spread the notion of melancholy as a “blue” mood. A very young Gershwin had recorded several rolls reflecting that trend, including “Chinese Blues” by Oscar Gardner and “Honolulu Blues” by James V. Monaco in 1916, and “Hesitation Blues” by Middleton and Smythe in 1917.
Blues numbers came to be marked by a particular set of musical traits: a four-to-the-bar beat, often kicked off by an introduction based on repeated quarter notes; a pitch vocabulary with varying third and seventh scale degrees—“blue notes,” sometimes raised, sometimes lowered, sometimes bent; and a phrase structure based on call-and-response, a sung melodic statement followed by an instrumental answer. Sometimes too, blues songs followed a more or less standard twelve-bar harmonic framework: three four-bar phrases, the first centered on a I (tonic) chord, the second split between two bars of IV and a return to I, and the third beginning with a V harmony that resolves to the tonic. The appearance of Kern’s “Left All Alone Again Blues” in The Night Boat, a musical comedy that opened early in 1920, showed that blues was entering the commercial marketplace and the world of the Broadway stage. “Each time he says ‘Good-bye,’ ” sings the wife of a riverboat captain, “I get those doggone / Left-all-alone-again blues.” Blues was gaining acceptance as a way of registering troubles through song, though its rural black roots remained unknown to most.
Although the sheet music for Gershwin’s “On My Mind the Whole Night Long” says nothing about blues, nor did the critics, a piano-roll version released in August 1920 labeled it “Blues—Fox Trot.” The song does not follow the twelve-bar formal pattern, yet it refers to that pattern while abounding in other blues traits, such as the four-bar intro with repeated quarter notes in the left hand. Gershwin drew upon the richness of this musical idiom to underlie the text’s direct, heartfelt sentiment.
At the same time, a song with roots in operetta drew notice for its place in what some critics considered the Scandals’ outstanding scene. The headline of the Times review began “Stunning Chinese Number,” referring to the Act II song “Idle Dreams” sung by Lloyd Garrett, Ann Pennington, and a chorus of twenty-two women. Its main verse describes a “China boy” sitting alone beside a stone idol, smoking his pipe. Enchanted by the idol, he calls out to her as if she were a beautiful young woman dancing: “Come my China maid, / I call you from your throne of jade.” As the smoker’s pipe burns low, the opium-induced image fades. Roused from his reverie, he realizes that the entire scene has taken place in his mind. A piano motive intended to sound Chinese is heard in the introduction, and again as punctuation between phrases of the verse. Based on parallel fifths, it clashes just enough with the underlying harmony to evoke an atmosphere of aural mystery. Gershwin devotes the first two bars of each section of the refrain to a simple melody that, thanks to chromatic voice-leading, is harmonized extravagantly; the effect is one of constantly changing colors.
None of the songs in George White’s Scandals of 1920 have found a place among Gershwin favorites. Yet the three described here—a production-style number, a blues-tinged number, and an exotic fantasy—suggest both the uncommon talent and the practicality of their inventor. The piano accompaniments offer a case in point. Usually made by arrangers, accompaniments were meant for pianists of modest skills; but Gershwin’s suggest that he made them himself—or at least had a hand in the process. While still demanding only modest technical skill from the player, their voice-leading—active middle voices between the melody and a decisive line in the bass—gives the pianist a worthy musical role. Buyers of this show’s sheet music found themselves in a position to re-create for themselves at least some of the songs’ expressive richness.