In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a few blocks of Manhattan’s 28th Street housed sheet music publishers, composers, songwriters, and agencies. Nicknamed Tin Pan Alley, it was home to the nation’s music industry.
The playhouse being the main venue of entertainment, Broadway musicals and Union Square vaudeville acts demanded an unceasing supply of songs. A dense concentration of creative talent laid the foundation for the “Great American Songbook,” a canon of songs and jazz compositions that have stood the test of time.
Late nineteenth century New York City saw the mass arrival of East European Jews who had escaped persecution. They made their distinct presence audible in music. Tin Pan Alley consisted primarily of Jewish composers who introduced Yiddish lyrical traditions and liturgical melodies to the metropolis.
Black Americans played their part in the process too. The sheer vitality of these emerging trends created enduring new standards in popular music, launching the iconic careers of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and many others.
Tin Pan Alley’s influence went worldwide. From 1911 into the 1990s, its London equivalent was Denmark Street, Soho. There were intriguing parallels between these creative urban hubs.
Shaping Tin Pan Alley
Born in 1863 in Vilnius, Lithuania, Judah Katzenelenbogen grew up in a Jewish family of publishers. In 1887 he emigrated to America and opened a bookshop in Canal Street, Lower Manhattan.
Following current trends in sheet music publishing, he issued Ukraine-born Avrom Goldfaden’s arrangement of a traditional Yiddish lullaby titled “Rozhinkes mit Mandlen” (Raisins & Almonds). It was an immediate hit.
He then published a collection of songs named Di Yidishe Bine (The Yiddish Stage, 1897). He also edited the journal Lider Magazin (Magazine of Songs), published by the Hebrew Publishing Company, Brooklyn.
Every issue held a variety of lyrics as well as spoofs of recent hit songs. A flourishing niche “industry” surfaced of text writers adding Yiddish words to popular American tunes.
Many songs originated in Manhattan’s theater circles. Second Avenue was known as the “Yiddish Broadway.” Songwriters and composers such as Henry Russotto, Louis Friedsell, Shalom Secunda and many others, were revered figures at the time.
The “stage Jew” was a common character in vaudeville acts mocking immigrants through exaggerated accents and stereotypical attributes. In the end, Jews took over the genre themselves, happily indulging in self-mockery. In the process, they sharpened their skills as songwriters.
New copyright laws of 1909 curbed plagiarism and the theft of songs. Immigrant songwriters turned away from imitative spoofs and began creating their own work. They revolutionized the craft by expressing themes of love, loss, and pain in songs that would make up the core of America’s popular music. East European Jews and their offspring shaped Tin Pan Alley.
Aaron Gumbinsky was born in 1872 in Detroit into an immigrant family of Polish Jews. Pursuing a career in music, he adopted the stage name Harry von Tilzer by adding “von” to his mother’s maiden name (Sarah Tilzer). A prolific composer, his first hit was “My Old New Hampshire Home” (1898) which sold two million sheet music copies. In 1902, he founded a publishing company with his younger brother Albert, himself a successful songwriter.
When in 1900 journalist Monroe Rosenfeld of the New York Herald visited Von Tilzer’s office on 28th Street, he was struck by a cacophony of noise emanating from neighboring businesses. Music publishers kept upright pianos in their offices where keyboard pounders banged out the latest songs trying to attract client attention.
During the interview, Von Tilzer compared this soundscape to the clatter of tin pans in a professional kitchen. Rosenfeld was handed an instant headline for his article: “Tin Pan Alley.”
The anecdote’s accuracy cannot be checked since the report has not survived, but Grove’s Dictionary of American Music confirmed the story. The name Tim Pan Alley stuck, the industry accepting it as a badge of honor. It became a general term for the catchy and memorable tunes that came to dominate American popular music. The output of Tin Pan songwriters was phenomenal.
Song Pluggers
The “song plugger” was a person who performed in saloons, small theaters, or departments stores to introduce new compositions and drive the sale of sheet music. The qualification “hit” song depended upon the number of sheets sold. Newspapers started printing weekly lists of the best-selling sheet music. The practice was central to the success of Tin Pan Alley in its early days.
The Pelham Café at 12 Pell Street, close to the poverty-stricken Five Points neighborhood, was the headquarters of Mike Salter, a Russian-born Jewish gangster. A former tenement building, the saloon was known as the “House of a Hundred Entrances.” Multiple passageways, trapdoors, and points of entry/exit were in use to dodge police raids.
Labeled the uncrowned “Prince of Chinatown,” Salter controlled local prize-fights, dice games, and opium dens. He also acted as a “ward heeler” for Tammany Hall, mobilizing immigrant voters by whatever means, including practices such as false registration, ballot box stuffing, or repeat voting.
Nicknamed “The Professor,” Mike (Nick) Nicholson played a tin pan piano, accompanied by the saloon’s seventeen-year-old Russian-born waiter Israel (Izzy) Baline belting out raunchy versions of current hit songs. The café’s music blended Jewish melodies with ragtime rhythms, attracting a diverse local audience.
As word spread of Izzy’s musical talent, the bar began hosting a more upmarket crowd. Chuck Connors, Chinatown’s self-appointed tour guide, led celebrity “slummers” through its doors. John Jacob Astor (New York’s richest entrepreneur), Thomas Lipton (Scottish tea magnate), and August Belmont (financier and diplomat) came to sample the atmosphere. When Rear Admiral Prince Louis of Battenberg (British Navy) entered the bar, a horde of reporters followed in his steps.
In 1907, Salter challenged “The Professor” and Izzy to compose a ditty celebrating his saloon. They responded by producing “Marie from Sunny Italy.” Sold cheaply to Tin Pan Alley publisher Joseph W. Stern, the sheet music listed the misspelled name I. Berlin as its lyricist. The song launched the career of Izzy Baline, better known as Irving Berlin.
That same year, police arrested Salter on charges of false voter registration and shut down his saloon. Salter skipped bail and fled to Canada (he later ran ventures in Coney Island).
In 1911, Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” sold over two million copies of sheet music, earning him the accolade “King of Tin Pan Alley.” The former song plugger would become one of America’s greatest performing artists.
Popularity of vinyl records in the 1930s threatened to suffocate Tin Pan Alley. Instead, it evolved into the legendary eleven story Art Deco Brill Building at 1619 Broadway (named after its owner Maurice Brill, a Jewish haberdasher of Russian descent). It was there that the greatest pop music of the 1950s and 1960s would be created.
The teams working in and around the building crafted an “assembly-line” of chart-toppers recorded by artists such as Aretha Franklin, The Drifters, Dionne Warwick, The Ronettes, and Elvis Presley.
Mick Jagger’s Rag Trade
The influence of Tin Pan Alley spread worldwide. Running from Charing Cross to St. Giles High Street, Denmark Street became known as London’s Tin Pan Alley. With the West End theaters nearby, it was a hub of music publishers and recording studios. Located close to the “rookery” of St Giles, the street was a crime-ridden slum during the nineteenth century.
Change came in 1911 when music publisher Lawrence Wright hired a basement there and set up offices in 1911. He was the founder of Melody Maker magazine in January 1926.
Those who followed this pioneer included Irving Mills, the publisher of Hoagy Carmichael and Duke Ellington. Over the decades, the soundscape evolved from jazz and blues to R&B. In 1952, promoter Maurice Kinn (born in Poplar, East London, the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe) founded the New Musical Express which began compiling Britain’s first singles chart, replacing the sale of sheet music as a measurement of popularity.
Former dance-band singer Richard Leon (Dick) James was born Isaac Vapnick in East London in December 1920 into a Polish family (his father was a kosher butcher). He worked as a music publisher out of 132 Charing Cross Road at the corner of Denmark Street.
There, in 1963, he and Brian Epstein (his Jewish grandparents were of Russian and Lithuanian descent) formed the Northern Songs firm, publishers of The Beatles. He later founded Dick James Music (DJM) and launched the career of Elton John.
By the 1960s, the street captured the energy of Rock & Roll. David Bowie, The Kinks, Black Sabbath, and many other groups and performers rehearsed in its studios. The Rolling Stones recorded their first album in 1964 at Regent Sound Studios (4 Denmark Street) founded in 1961 by Ralph (Raphael) Elman.
Born in Mile End, East London, the latter’s father hailed from Kyiv, Ukraine, from where he had escaped the Russian pogroms. Andrew Loog Oldham took on the management of The Stones, shaping their image and musical direction. His father was a non-Jewish U.S. Air Forces lieutenant who died in action during the war. His mother Celia (née Löwenstein) was of Lithuanian Jewish heritage. She raised him as a single parent in London.
Oldham hired eighteen-year-old photographer Gered Mankowitz, a descendant of Russian Jewish immigrants, who handled the band’s early album covers and joined them on their first tour of America. In 1966, Oldham turned over management of the Rolling Stones to New York accountant Allen Klein who secured the band’s record deal with Decca. Klein was the son of Jewish immigrants from Budapest.
The band’s song “Shattered” was an ode to New York City. Included in the 1978 album Some Girls, its lyrics recall the era of Abraham Beame (the city’s first Jewish mayor) which was darkened by recession, austerity, and crime.
Economic downturn caused the demise of the Jewish garment and rag industry, to which Jagger refers with the line: “Shmatta shmatta shmatta, I can’t give it away on Seventh Avenue.” The Yiddish word “shmatta” means rag.
By the 1990s, Tin Pan Alley’s prominence had waned. The digital revolution in music in addition to rising rents in Central London, drove independent labels and small publishers to cheaper suburban premises.
Creative Milieus
The Tin Pan Alley phenomenon in Manhattan and London share striking parallels. Both were small streets in dense immigrant districts where rents were affordable, packing small publishing houses, song pluggers, and instrument shops into just a few buildings. West 28th Street earned the then derogatory name “Tin Pan Alley” in the late nineteenth century.
When during the 1910s and 1920s, British publishers and musicians congregated in Denmark Street, they borrowed the American nickname as an honorary moniker. In both cities, Jewish immigrant composers, songwriters, and entrepreneurs dominated every aspect of the industry.
Both streets offered a diversity of styles, serving as cultural melting pots for Jewish musicians who had fled persecution in Eastern Europe. In Manhattan, immigrant Jews blended European and Yiddish folksongs with syncopated ragtime rhythms to define American popular music. Denmark Street saw the evolution from traditional sheet music publishers to twentieth-century rock and pop producers.
New York’s Tin Pan Alley sat just blocks from the vaudeville and Broadway circuits; Denmark Street was a short walk from London’s West End. Songwriting, publishing, and theatrical performance fed off one another in the development of popular music as we know it today.
A creative milieu is a physical and social setting where talent clusters to generate innovative ideas, art, and music. Within an urban context, such nurturing surroundings were often associated with immigration. Driven by a will to succeed and borne out of the necessity to overcome socio-economic disparities or racial stereotyping, migrants introduced new aesthetic standards as well as alternative ethnoinguistic traditions. Diverse perspectives sparked artistic breakthroughs.
Vanguard contributions by newcomers pushed the rise of Tin Pan Alley in both Manhattan and London. The streets eventually lost their monopoly as stakeholders expanded to other areas. Manhattan’s music industry moved up towards Broadway, while musical activity in London gradually dispersed in various directions – but the magic and memory of the name Tin Pan Alley live on.
Illustrations, from above: Tin Pan Alley in 1910; Judah Katzenelenbogen’s Lider Magazin, No 7, 1892 (Hebrew Publishing Company, Brooklyn); Harry von Tilzer and Andrew B. Sterling’s “My Old New Hampshire Home,” 1898; Irving Berlin and Mike Nicholson’s “Marie from Sunny Italy” (New York, Joseph W Stern, 1909); and “Not fade Away” advertisement from Regent Sound Studios at 4 Denmark Street where The Rolling Stones recorded their first album (courtesy Tony Bacon).
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