"Alexander's Ragtime Band": song history, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video

"Alexander's Ragtime Band"

• "Alexander's Ragtime Band" at (Nearly) One Hundred (a fully developed history of the song)

1910-1911: The beginnings of "Alexander's Ragtime Band" are told in a number of varying narratives. The points of agreement include that Berlin wrote or at least began to write the melody in 1910 but the lyric was not completed until the winter of 1911. The song was published and copyrighted, March 18, 1911. Pretty much everyone agrees that the song received its first proper performance, the one that started it off on the road to immortality, from Emma Carus when she sang it (or as has been reported, "belted it out") on April 17, 1911, at the Big Easter Vaudeville Carnival at Chicago's American Music Hall.

Source: Joel Whitburn, Pop Memories, 1890-1954, Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research Inc., 1986.
For later recordings, see the Cafe Songbook Record/Video Cabinet.

Arthur Collins (baritone) and Byron Harlan (tenor), 1911 (1); Bill Murray, 1911 (2); Prince's Orchestra, 1912 (3); Victor Military Band, 1912 (4); Bessie Smith, 1927 (17); Boswell Sisters, 1935 (9); Louis Armstrong, 1937 (12); Bing Crosby and Connee Boswell, 1938 (1).

Alexander's Ragtime Band, 1938 (movie) performed by Performed by Alice Faye with Tyrone Power on violin, Don Ameche on piano,
Jack Haley on drums, and others.

There's No Business Like Show Business (1954) song performed by Ethel Merman, Dan Dailey, Donald O'Connor, et. al. Click here for complete film data at IMDB.

Frank Sinatra and Irving Berlin gab on Frank's radio show
and perform together one of the composer's earliest songs:
"Alexander's Ragtime Band," with Axel Stordahl and his orchestra, c. 1947.

Although Berlin's biographer Laurence Bergreen, and the scholarly team of Robert Kimball and Linda Emmet give different accounts of the evolution of "Alexander's Ragtime Band" from Irving Berlin's mind to the song we all know, Michael Freedland, in his 1974 biography of the composer traces the song's path through a performance at the Friars Club in New York City on the occasion of Berlin's induction into the organization at the Hotel Astor in the sprint of 1911. Freedland claims (without documentation and contrary to other accounts) that this was the first time the words to the song were heard in public. Moreover, the great George M. Cohan was there to hear it, in fact, making a speech welcoming Berlin into membership:

Irving Berlin is a Jewboy who named himself after an English actor and a German city . . . . Irvy writes a good song with a good lyric. It's music you don't have to dress up to listen to, but it is good music. He is a wonderful little fellow, wonderful in lots of ways. He has become famous and wealthy without wearing a lot of jewelry and falling for funny clothes. He is Uptown but he is there with the old Downtown hard shell. And with all his success, you will find his watch and his handkerchief in his pocket where they belong.

"With that 'Irvy' played the piano again-- 'Alexander's Ragtime Band' of course," the lyrics for which Freedland says Berlin had just written for this very event (Freedland, Irving Berlin, pp. 36-37).

Laurence Bergreen, in his biography of Berlin stops short of saying the song Berlin sang at his Friars Club induction was "Alexander's Ragtime Band." He concerns himself with "Alexander" as a song that produced a major change in the form of American popular song. Before Berlin, he says, the "English influenced compositions of Stephen Foster ["Berlin's favorite composer"], such as "Beautiful Dreamer," were based on a sixteen bar chorus. The chorus was

constructed in four sections of four bars each. It was this latter form—simple, symmetrical and inevitable— that served as the model for popular songs at the time Berlin entered the field. And it remained the standard until Berlin smashed the mold with his ground-breaking hit, 'Alexander's Ragtime Band,' with it's chorus of thirty-two effervescent bars. (pp. 39-40).

Bergreen quotes Berlin as attributing the success of "Alexander" to its melody having "started the heels and shoulders of all America and a good section of Europe to rocking," and the lyric with its repetition of "Come on and hear" issued "an invitation . . . to join in. . . . an idea pounded in again and again throughout the song in various ways." This, for Berlin, "was the secret of the song's tremendous success" (Laurence Bergreen, As Thousands Cheer, pp. 68-69).

Robert Kimball and Linda Emmet state, "Alexander's Ragtime Band" is simply "one of the greatest successes in the annals of American popular music and the song that made Berlin famous all over the world."

Kimball and Emmet quote a 1914 interview with Berlin in which the composer recalls how the song was born: "The melody came to me right out of the air. I wrote the whole thing in eighteen minutes surrounded on all sides by roaring pianos and roaring vaudeville actors." Apparently Berlin "was not impressed by it when the melody first came to him. In fact after playing it over a few times on the piano, he did not take the trouble to note the melody on paper" only writing it down later when he had to kill some time before catching a train for a winter get-away to Palm Beach in 1911. (Kimball and Emmet, The Complete Lyrics of Irving Berlin pp. 30-31--paperback edition.)

"Irving Berlin famously worked at night as he found it hard to sleep during what were usual hours for most people. So, it was overnight in March that he wrote "Alexander's Ragtime Band," submitting it for copyright on March 18, 1911 (presumably the day the composition was finished). Or did he? The song's original form and creation remain topics of debate. One version of the story, which Berlin himself supported, was that he wrote it as a piano solo first, perhaps as early as 1910. It does seem that in the summer or fall of 1910 he transcribed at least the basic tune, if nothing else. The March 18, 1911 copyright card states "words and music by Irving Berlin," so however long it took to create both those words and music, they were done by that date. A later version was submitted for copyright on September 6, 1911 as a piano solo."

Alec Wilder differentiates Irving Berlin from Jerome Kern in terms of how Berlin's music got to be less European and more American sooner because of how the two of them grew up.

One sees how Kern's contemporary, Irving Berlin, a product of Lower East Side poverty, should have arrived at an American sound much sooner then Kern, simply because he was directly exposed to it in its rawness. There was no sophisticated musical home life, no money for study, no time for anything but work. But no matter how arduous that must have been, Berlin was at least out in the street where it was all happening. "Alexander's Ragtime Band' was no accident. He'd hear what was in ferment around him and use what came naturally" (Alec Wilder, American Popular Song , p. 87--paperback edition).

Strictly speaking, "Alexander's Ragtime Band" wasn't a ragtime number, like the many ragtime tunes that Berlin actually did write when he was starting out—songs with a 'ragged' or syncopated beat, which influenced the young George Gershwin. But the song did have a high-octane American energy, especially in its opening theme ('Come on and hear . . .') and its radical jump into a higher key after four bars. Berlin had an immigrant's ear, tuned to every scrap of music and rhythm in the air of his adopted country" (William Zinsser. Easy to Remember , pp. 104, 106).

Philip Furia confirms Wilder's and Zinsser's points but specifically in relation to the American vernacular of Berlin's lyric: "What ragtime did for song lyrics generally during the early years of Tin Pan Alley it did for Berlin as well. It licensed the vernacular as a lyrical idiom and forced the lyricist to construct a lyric out of short, juxtaposed phrases marked by internal rhymes and jagged syntactical breaks.

Ain't you goin', Ain't you goin', to the leader man, ragged meter man? Grand stand, brass hand, ain't you comin' along?" (Furia, The Poets of Tin Pan Alley , p. 49).

"Alexander's Ragtime Band" was created at the beginning of Berlin's career. It was also of significance at the mid-point of his life when, as his daughter puts it, her father "had given himself, or been given by Darryl Zannuck, in Alexander's Ragtime Band [a Hollywood movie salute to Berlin's songs], as fine a fiftieth birthday present as a songwriter could ask for." And, finally, the song was in his awareness at the end of his life, because one of the last things the composer heard before he died (at 101) was his daughter telling him "that his two-year-old great-grandson Peter liked to dance to 'Alexander's Ragtime Band'" (Barrett, Irving Berlin A Daughter's Memoir,pp. 159, 299—hard cover edition).

Lorenz Hart would come to be a songwriting peer of Irving Berlin from the mid-twenties through his premature death at the age of forty-eight in 1943. But before Berlin had ever heard of his younger colleague, Hart, as budding lyricist, was paying tribute to the older songwriter.

On the occasion of his parents' silver wedding anniversary, November 6, 1911 (the year "Alexander" was published), sixteen year old Larry Hart helped his father and mother celebrate by composing and performing his own words to Berlin's already enormously popular song "Alexander's Ragtime Band." According to Hart biographer Gary Marmorstein, Hart's "version probably qualifies as his earliest surviving lyric."

So clink your glass, Each Lad and Lass, For Max and Frieda's wedding day. Put on a Smile, Make life worthwhile-- Let each wrinkle shout hooray!

Marmorstein also notes that "in this anniversary song, Larry is already employing the tools he would use for the next thirty years: warmth . . . ; gallantry . . . ; repetition when it's called for; a reference or two to booze; [and] colloquial English and German that landed easily on the ear." (Marmorstein, p. 31).

George Gershwin biographer Howard Pollack sees Alexander's Ragtime Band, despite its title, being more of a jazz song than an example of ragtime. He uses this distinction to more or less dismiss those commentators who claim the song exploits the popularity of ragtime while not being a rag. They, Pollack writes, "largely miss the point; the song's significance resides precisely in its distance from ragtime songs of the turn of the twentieth century."

Berlin's intention, in using the term "ragtime," Pollack explains, was to signify a much wider class of music that was about to be called jazz. He goes on to point out that numerous discussions of this new music, including Gershwin's own, took "Alexander's Ragtime Band" as their starting point. Their common intent was to show that Berlin's song was crucial in helping to "inaugurate what might be called, more simply, the new popular music" (p. 48; Pollack cites Charles Hamm on this in his book, Irving Berlin: Songs from the Melting Pot: The Formative Years, 1907-1914).

Click here to read a version of the lyrics for
"Alexander's Ragtime Band," as sung by Ella Fitzgerald (without the verse) on the album
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Irving Berlin Songbook, Vol. 1.

The verse: Oh ma honey, oh, ma honey, Better hurry and let's meander, Ain't you goin', ain't you goin', To the leader man, ragged meter man? Oh, ma honey, oh, ma honey, Let me take you to Alexander's Grand stand, brass band, Ain' you comin' along?

The complete, authoritative lyrics for "Alexander's Ragtime Band" can be found in
Robert Kimball and Linda Emmet.
The Complete Lyrics of Irving Berlin New York: Alfred A. Knoph 2001
(Applause Theater and Cinema Books, 2005 paperback edition).

• Topsy Chapn and Virgil Bagneris: bcelaya
• Sammy Davis Jr.: JoeWllington

Notes

• Early Recordings that made the charts (year and chart #)
• Movies in which "Alexander's Ragtime Band" has been featured.
• Titanic (2002) song played in background by Salonistii. Click here for complete film data at IMDB.
• Frank Sinatra A Voice on Air 1935-1955 (4 CD / 100+ track set of Sinatra on the radio and in rehearsal)
• "Alexander's Ragtime Band," a rare duet
• (from " Alexander's Ragtime Band" at (Nearly) One Hundred " by Benjamin Sears & Bradford Conner)
• William Zinsser makes Wilder's point about Berlin's Americanness a little differently:
• Mary Ellin Barrett, Irving Berlin A Daughter's Memoir , New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.
• Gary Marmorstein A Ship Without A Sail: The Life of Lorenz Hart , New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012
• George Gershwin: His Life and Work Berkeley: Univ. of California Press 2006
• To hear the verse sung, listen to, among others, the Bessie Smith or Michael Feinstein version.

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