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The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty | 
 enlarge | Author: Wilfrid Sheed
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  40 reviews
Sales Rank: 98030
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.8
ISBN: 0812970187
Dewey Decimal Number: 780
EAN: 9780812970180
ASIN: 0812970187
Publication Date: May 13, 2008
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Product Description
From Irving Berlin to Cy Coleman, from “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” to “Big Spender,” from Tin Pan Alley to the MGM soundstages, the Golden Age of the American song embodied all that was cool, sexy, and sophisticated in popular culture. For four glittering decades, geniuses like Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Harold Arlen ran their fingers over piano keys, enticing unforgettable melodies out of thin air. Critically acclaimed writer Wilfrid Sheed uncovered the legends, mingled with the greats, and gossiped with the insiders. Now he’s crafted a dazzling, authoritative history of the era that “tripled the world’s total supply of singable tunes.”
It began when immigrants in New York’s Lower East Side heard black jazz and blues–and it surged into an artistic torrent nothing short of miraculous. Broke but eager, Izzy Baline transformed himself into Irving Berlin, married an heiress, and embarked on a string of hits from “Always” to “Cheek to Cheek.” Berlin’s spiritual godson George Gershwin, in his brief but incandescent career, straddled Tin Pan Alley and Carnegie Hall, charming everyone in his orbit. Possessed of a world-class ego, Gershwin was also generous, exciting, and utterly original. Half a century later, Gershwin love songs like “Someone to Watch Over Me,” “The Man I Love,” and “Love Is Here to Stay” are as tender and moving as ever.
Sheed also illuminates the unique gifts of the great jazz songsters Hoagy Carmichael and Duke Ellington, conjuring up the circumstances of their creativity and bringing back the thrill of what it was like to hear “Georgia on My Mind” or “Mood Indigo” for the first time. The Golden Age of song sparked creative breakthroughs in both Broadway musicals and splashy Hollywood extravaganzas. Sheed vividly recounts how Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern, and Johnny Mercer spread the melodic wealth to stage and screen.
Popular music was, writes Sheed, “far and away our greatest contribution to the world’s art supply in the so-called American Century.” Sheed hung out with some of the great artists while they were still writing–and better than anyone, he knows great music, its shimmer, bite, and exuberance. Sparkling with wit, insight, and the grace notes of wonderful songs, The House That George Built is a heartfelt, intensely personal portrait of an unforgettable era.
A delightfully charming, funny, and most illuminating portrait of songwriters and the Golden Age of American Popular Song. Mr. Sheed’s carefully chosen depictions and anecdotes recapture that amazingly creative period, a moment in time in which I was so fortunate to be surrounded by all that magic.”
–Margaret Whiting
From the Hardcover edition.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 35 more reviews...
 The House that George Built September 3, 2008
It is amazing to think that there were people walking about the streets of Hollywood and Broadway with those fabulous songs ringing in their heads yearning to be written down for the first time. and Wilfred Sheed writes like a happy man expounding on a theme at a slightly tipsy dinner table late at night. I read the whole thing in two evenings.
 I couldn't put it down (even under the worst of circumstances) August 5, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Lots of good insights in the reviews of this book. The writing style is circuitous, occas. redundant, but I think Mr. Sheed was just awash in so much information, so many memories & emotions, such affection for the music and the people who blessed the world with it, that I can forgive him.
Kathryn Atwood's 11/25/07 review is almost precisely what I'd have written if she hadn't already. I love her sentence, "Sheed's insights....will deliver many 'aha!' moments"--and they certainly did for me.
The book kept my interest enough to finish it in 5-to-20 minute increments over 3 miserable days/nights of the worst stomach virus of my life when every shred of my being just wanted to roll over and die, and that's quite a feat.
I'm probably prejudiced in Mr. Sheed's favor because he obviously shares my special affection for some of the comparatively less-well-known songs: Gershwin's "Soon", and Kern's "I'm Old-Fashioned", among others. He refers to them lovingly several times.
On the other hand, If he'd mentioned what just might be my absolute favorite song of the era, the 1936 Link/Marvell/Strachey masterpiece, "These Foolish Things", I'd probably have given him 5 stars. (Just kidding. The writers were all Brits and I guess he figured he had enough to deal with on this side of the Atlantic.)
(Have any of you, BTW, ever heard the Ella/Louis 7+ minute performance with all the exquisite verses?
First daffodils and long excited cables,
And candlelight on little corner tables..."
The sigh of midnight trains in empty stations
Silk stockings thrown aside, dance invitations...
The smile of Garbo and the scent of roses,
The waiters whistling as the last bar closes....
And still my heart has wings....)
What an era that was: what energy/synergy/symbiosis/serendipity! I can understand why anyone trying to chronicle the embarrassment of riches that gushed forth from so many sources in such a short time might have a hard time keeping their words from kinda tumbling over each other now and then.
 Not quite the popular song primer it could have been August 3, 2008
"The House That George Built" by Wilfred Sheed seems at first glance to be the perfect primer to the story of our greatest American songwriters. Not since composer Alec Wilder's groundbreaking reference guide "American Popular Song" has there been a comparable effort to tie together the compositional timelines of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern & Cole Porter, plus all of the lesser known songwriters they influenced. The main four were somewhat engaged in a friendly competition for top bragging rights as they wrote their greatest hits all about the same time- and for audiences as diverse as Broadway, Hollywood, and the fellow at the parlor piano just looking to learn the latest Tin Pan Alley hit.
From the introductory chapter, Sheed speaks to the reader as if he's across from you at the dinner table with a brandy, ready to regale you with wonderful tales and little known tidbits. And for the most part throughout the book, a compendium of newly written material plus essays that first appeared in Esquire, the New York Times, Time magazine and other print media sources, Sheed delivers: for instance, we learn that the famous "Street Of Dreams" was the focal avenue of the jazz world, Manhattan's 52nd Street; "Laura", the gorgeous movie theme by David Raksin with lyrics by Johnny Mercer was the one song that Cole Porter had wished he had written himself; Burton Lane was discovered playing piano as a lad by Gershwin's mother and soon became a protege of the master; and so on. But in order for us to understand our famous subjects, Sheed must get inside their private lives, and in most cases, inside their heads. He gets a lot of this interesting information thanks to help from friends and fellow musical aficionados like Wilder, Michael Feinstein, Ann Ronnell (composer of "Willow Weep For Me" and Gershwin's friend), Cy Coleman, Lane and many wives and offspring of his subjects. So we also learn that both Harold Arlen and Larry Hart (Richard Rodgers' first lyricist) were manic depressives; Jerome Kern had a penchant for risky gambling; Irving Berlin had low self-esteem; Rodgers became an uncontrollable alcoholic; and Cole Porter had a surprising religious side in his later years despite his long time penchant for a gay party lifestyle. Admittedly, some of this dishy stuff reads a bit like tabloid fodder, but Sheed offers it as matter-of-factly as possible, presenting to us the human side of these very creative but often tortured geniuses.
Sheed shows us how our four main protagonists (Berlin/Gershwin/Kern/Porter) fit into the transition from classical music into jazz, America's own music, through the intermingling of African, European and Jewish music traditions. The needs and demands of the public also dictated how and what each of these men would write, for Broadway songs would have different expectations next to songs written for Hollywood films. Sheed is right on target, but the slight drawback is that his chapters tend to make for slow reading. Yes, the psychological ramifications are interesting, but we do not really need to hear every detail about Kern's family or Porter's school life, and it often takes a bit of time to get to the stories we really want to hear about- the writing of these popular song masterpieces. After all, we expected this to be a book about music and its history.
The reader happens across an occasional lovely nugget of wisdom, such as Kern's analogy of songwriting being akin to fishing: "...you may feel twenty tugs on your line and only one of them will be a fish worth keeping, and it might sometimes take a while to know which one." But you'll often come across a tedious bit, like this run-on sentence about Rodgers: "From then on, his parents would magically cease to matter until they later showed up in the orchestra seats, warmly applauding their son- nice people, after all, in that context, who, rare among artists' parents, thoroughly approved of his chosen life: a life that he, perhaps in return, proceeded to keep as outwardly square as he possibly could, dressing and comporting himself like a banker, hiding any private sins in the best private manner, and eventually courting a full length a most suitable and ladylike young woman named Dorothy Feiner, to whom he tried vociferously to be faithful, for a while." Eek. This rambling type of prose gets difficult to sift through after a while, and is really more suited towards story `spinning' than delivering facts. Actually, with Garrison Keillor's warm praise for Sheed's book (front and center on the cover), it's easy to see a similarity between Keillor's Wobegon stories and Sheed's type of storytelling.
Sheed also has an annoying habit of overusing a literary device- a composer's own song titles as a reference to his own life situation. "By the end of it, Kern had learned, if nothing else, how to `let himself go'..." "Linda (Porter's wife) was still `nice to come home to' occasionally and `love' in one's fashion." I guess one could chalk this up to the material coming from different sources. The use of such a device wouldn't normally appear so often in a book, and it reads a bit too punny.
The book does have a well researched Appendix that cites numerous little known songs from the `two hit wonder' composers and songwriting teams of the period. Sheed sets a condition of two bonafide hits in order for these lesser known composers to be included in the listing. I found myself humming the tunes as I read the titles, forgotten gems like Isham Jones's "It Had To Be You", "Fools Rush In" by Rube Bloom, and Gene DePaul's "I'll Remember April".
To sum it all up: this book appears to be geared toward the intellectual set (most likely the type who get most of Porter's lyric double-entendres), and not the casual reader. For those who are musicians or interested in this particular genre, I do recommend giving the book a try. At the beginning I thought I would really love this book; by the end I realized I only liked and respected it. Despite the book's shortcomings, Sheed obviously has great love for these songs and the period from which they came. There is a lot of worthwhile material here- just be prepared that you'll have to dig for it.
But what about the songs? June 26, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I have to agree with many of the other reviewers that refer to the author's "cute" and "self-absorbed" writing style. I could forgive that, however--the man did actually meet and/or know many of the figures he writes about, so his pedestal-perching is somewhat deserved. What I can't overlook is how he glosses over what I thought this book would be all about--the songs themselves. He drops titles here and there, but rarely goes into any depth regarding their creation or impact. More space is devoted to Cole Porter's wardrobe than his entire score for "High Society." If you're looking for a song-by-song breakdown of the impact these men had on popular music, this ain't it. If you're looking for a more gossipy "dish" on what composer did what and where with whom and what they were wearing, you will not be disappointed.
Sausage Better than the Sizzle June 8, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
There are some wonderful stories and insights in this book, but the reader has to battle through Sheed's annoyingly 'cute' prose to get to them. If you can ignore his style, you will learn new things about each of the great American songwriters. The chapters on some of the less heralded composers - such as Lane and Whiting - are major contributions to our understanding of an art form that had a glorious but all too brief flowering.
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