"Embraceable You." "Someone to Watch Over Me." "Alexander's Ragtime Band." "My Funny Valentine." "White Christmas." Irving Berlin once wrote a song entitled "The Song is Ended, But the Melody Lingers On," and surely the title is a perfect epitaph for an incomparable era of American songwriting that endowed us with so many of our most beloved ballads and rousing showstoppers. The Song is Ended is the story of the Golden Age of American popular music, and a celebration of the enduring melodies and colorful life stories of five of this century's most engaging songwriters: Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers, with a fond bow in the direction of Victor Herbert and George M. Cohan. Author William G. Hyland provides an expert analysis of trends in popular songwriting during the first half of this century, escorting readers on a fascinating tour of the sights and sounds of fifty-odd years of American music, from the scratchy victrolas and Old World melodies of New York's teeming Lower East Side, to the hustle and bustle of Tin Pan Alley, to the hot rhythms and smoky clubs of the Jazz Age, to the sound stages of Hollywood and the glittering Broadway triumphs of "Showboat", "Anything Goes", "Porgy and Bess", "Pal Joey", and "Oklahoma!". Nostalgic lovers of good music will delight in the stories behind some of their favorite songs: Irving Berlin, for example, originally wrote his tender and romantic classic "I'll Be Loving You, Always," for a Marx Brothers revue (he wisely cut it), and he first composed "God Bless America" as an enlisted soldier in 1918, only to put it aside for almost twenty years when the pianist helping him rehearse for an army benefit complained "Geez, another patriotic song?" From Cole Porter's light-hearted and irrepressible "You're the Top" to Rodgers and Hart's wistful "Blue Moon" or the unforgettable "Summertime" from George Gershwin's masterful "Porgy and Bess," The Song is Ended captures the charm, freshness and vitality of a truly great era in American musical history. The melodies from this golden era truly linger on, just as Berlin predicted, and reverberate on every page of this superb volume.

The Song is Ended: Songwriters and American Music, 1900-1950

Arts & Photography

Hyland, William G.

Music

Oxford University Press

Richard Rodgers, a musical genius whose Broadway career spanned six successful decades, composed more than a thousand songs for the American stage. Although he reaped wealth, success, and recognition that included two shared Pulitzer Prizes, Rodgers found happiness elusive. In this first comprehensive biography of Rodgers, William G. Hyland tells the full story of the complex man and his incomparable music. Hyland’s portrait of Rodgers (1902-79) begins with his childhood in an affluent Jewish family living in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan. During college years at Columbia University and early work on the amateur circuit and Broadway, Rodgers entered into a historic collaboration with the lyricist Lorenz Hart. The team produced a dozen popular shows and such enduring songs as "The Lady Is a Tramp." Rodgers’ next partnership, with Oscar Hammerstein II, led to the creation of the musical play, a new and distinctively American art form. Beginning with Oklahoma! in 1943, this pair dominated Broadway for almost twenty years with a string of hits that remain beloved favorites: Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music. When Hammerstein died in 1960, Rodgers began a new phase in his career, writing the lyrics to his own music, then joining lyricists Stephen Sondheim, Sheldon Harnick, and Martin Charnin. Despite periods of depression, excessive drinking, hypochondria, and devastating illness at different points in his life, Rodgers’ outpouring of music seemed little affected, and he continued to compose until his death at age seventy-seven. An icon of the musical theater, Rodgers left a legacy of timeless songs that audiences return to hear over and again.

Richard Rodgers

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Yale University Press

Prospects for East-West Relations: A Task Force Report to the Trilateral Commission (The Triangle Papers ; 31)

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

Trilateral Commission

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