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The Complete Lyrics of Irving Berlin | 
 enlarge | Author: Robert Kimball
Category: Book
List Price: $65.00
Buy New: $15.19
You Save: $49.81 (77%)
New (7) Used (10) from $14.23
Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 1369987
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 560
Shipping Weight (lbs): 5.3
Dimensions (in): 11.4 x 10.8 x 1.5
ASIN: B000FTCH5M
Publication Date: October 9, 2001
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Gathered together in one volume for the first time: all of the incomparable song lyrics of Irving Berlin, whose career and work are the most important and all-encompassing in the history of American popular music.
Berlin came from a poor immigrant family and began his career as a singing waiter, but by the time he was nineteen he was publishing his songs and quickly found fame with "Alexander's Ragtime Band" in 1911. In the extraordinary six decades that followed, Berlin wrote one popular hit after another: "Blue Skies," "Always," "Cheek to Cheek," "White Christmas," "God Bless America," "There's No Business Like Show Business," and many, many more. He also wrote a number of the classics of musical theater's Golden Age, climaxing with Annie Get Your Gun. He penned three Astaire and Rogers films--Top Hat, Carefree, and Follow the Fleet--as well as the scores of Holiday Inn, Easter Parade, and other movies. The breadth of his accomplishments is staggering.
Berlin's entire oeuvre is here--the lyrics of more than 1,200 songs (400 of which have never before appeared in print), along with anecdotal, historical, and musicological commentary and dozens of photographs.
This beautiful volume is an invaluable contribution to the understanding and enjoyment of popular music in our time.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Only one side of a great songwriter February 21, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The problem with pop-tune anthologies is that song lyrics have to be heard, not read, and only with their music. Especially so with an Irving Berlin, who did nearly all his work for the theater and films, and for whom the presentation was as important as the song. (Picture "A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody" without Ziegfeld's beauties -- impossible.) And the fact is Berlin's lines could be flat-out flat-footedly corny. "A melody mellow/Played on a cello" can only provoke giggles in those unfamiliar with the songs, which I fear is the norm these days; at his worst he's downright clueless. (As in his proposed jingle for an unproduced NBC spectacular: "Everybody step,/Have a drink of Coca-Cola -- /It's the finest pepperola...." Pepsi-Cola?) But this is the problem with comprehensiveness. There are too many "rag" songs and "coon" songs and "step-step-step" songs, too many singing musical notes and dancing edibles, too much high-flown love treacle, too little of the poetry and wit that marked golden-age pop songwriting at its finest. Even the most interesting ones like "Sadie Salome (Go Home)", fresh with their impudent suggestiveness, can only hint at their marvels. And the chronological layout inevitably sets up the drab finish of the decades of verbal noodling, reclusion and despair. Yes he wrote catchy tunes in the early days, but Berlin didn't really come into his own until late, with his thirties revues, and the Fred-and-Ginger scores, and "Holiday Inn", and "This is the Army", and "Easter Parade", and his one true masterpiece, "Annie Get Your Gun." These are works to be savored, not anthologized. And it took a special talent to bring out Berlin's real measure: listen to Blue Eyes and TD and their larger-than-life rendition of "Be Careful, It's My Heart" to know it. Moreover Red Norvo's "Remember" and Les Brown's "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm" and the sumptuous instrumental "New Amsterdam Roof" from "Easter Parade" (on the Rhino soundtrack album) make the strong case that Berlin is at his best without words.
That said, there can be no doubting the completeness, the care, the diligence that went into this collection (even if the phrase "No music is known to survive" gets a little tiresome), the obvious love and respect for this show-biz titan. Alas, perhaps the only way to appreciate his greatness is to go back in time to experience it, a further frustration of books like this.
 A Revelation May 19, 2002
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
I was already a Berlin fan before I got this book. Some of his lyrics are known to almost everyone; he "is" American music. I love to read, hear, and sing his words. But the overwelming bonus of this book is to find out that he wrote so many bad lyrics along with his successes; and I mean downright lousey. I treasure knowing this because I am now aware that A) Writing fabulous lyrics is difficult for ANYONE! - and - B) Writing bad lyrics did not stop Irving Berlin; he just kept churning out material and some of it is immortal. This book is wonderful, particularly for those of us who write songs.
A massive monument in Americal musical history February 23, 2002
10 out of 11 found this review helpful
Jerome Kern was not one to compliment other composers. However, when he was asked to assess Irving Berlin's place in American music, Kern replied that Berlin WAS American music. Not too long ago, the A&E channel did two "Classroom" broadcasts about Berlin's life; and by a coincidence, several items concerning this prolific composer have recently come my way. I want to share one of them with you.It is a wonderful book from publisher Alfred A. Knopf titled "The Complete Lyrics of Irving Berlin," edited by Robert Kimball and Linda Emmet (one of the composer's three daughters). Now, considering that this man wrote well over a thousand songs, that is quite a bit of material for a single volume. But this one measures roughly 11" by 12" and holds 530 pages, which hold three columns of text. In this way, we get the lyrics to 1,200 songs for which he wrote both words and the music (only a few early songs were set to words by others). The organization is chronological and intelligently packaged. Unlike Rodgers, Kern and Gershwin, Berlin wrote for Tin Pan Alley as well as for the stage. Therefore the editors have grouped the lyrics by "Songs" that were not intended for a specific show or film and by songs that were. So for 1914, for example, you will get all the independent songs composed that year in one chapter and those written for "Watch Your Step" the same year in a separate chapter. Even more welcome are the lyrics to many songs that were never published! It makes fascinating reading to surmise why these had to wait until this book came along to see the light of day. To make this book even more valuable, each song is given a little preface concerning copyright dates and other items of interest to the American musical historian. And you will love the full-page photographs that stand at the start of each chapter. There is also an introductory essay and a very useful chronology at the start of the book, while the index at the end can help you locate in the body of the book any song by title with no trouble. So while Berlin's lyrics might not be as clever as those of Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart or Ira Gershwin, many of them will bring back memories of how Americans felt almost from the start to the finish of the last century. (Take note. Knopf also has available similar tomes for the lyrics of Porter, Hart, and I. Gershwin. Each one is a definite Grabbit.
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