"All Alone": song history, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video

"All Alone"

Irving Berlin's Music Box Revues, with words and music by Berlin, were staged at his own Music Box Theater, New York City, beginning in 1921, and concluding with the fourth in the series, which opened in December, 1924.

"All Alone" is featured in the movie Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938), a film tribute to Berlin, where it is sung by Alice Faye.

"No one talked about it [the movie] as 'Alice Faye's picture' or 'the new Tyrone Power film.' It was Irving Berlin's—every inch of the way." from Michael Freedland, Irving Berlin , New York: Stein and Day, 1974, p. 134.

Al Jolson, 1925 (1); John McCormack, 1925 (1); Paul Whiteman, 1925 (1); Cliff Edwards, 1925 (6); Abe Lyman, 1925 (10); Ben Selvin, 1925 (11); Lewis James, 1925 (12).

Pop music critic Alec Wilder with his usual elegant insight uses "All Alone" as an example of Berlin's uncanny ability to be unique in every song he wrote, adjusting to "the demands or needs of the moment, the singer, or the shift in popular mood."

One searches for stylistic characteristics and is baffled. For the sea of his talent is always in motion. It's mercurial and elusive. You decide to concentrate, on, let's say, pop songs such as "All Alone." You decide it is in the same stylistic category as "Always," so you search for parallels. There aren't any (Alec Wilder, American Popular Song , p. 99)

Apparently seeing his songs as less unique than Wilder did, Berlin himself, when asked by a London reporter in the late forties what the formula was for a successful song, replied, "Songs do well if they are based on one of these ideas: first, home; second, love; third, self-pity—you know like 'What'll I Do?' or 'All Alone'—and fourth, happiness" (Freedland, Irving Berlin, p. 179).

Philip Furia and Michael Lasser,
America's Songs: The Stories Behind the Songs of Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley, New York: Routledge, 2006.

Philip Furia and Michael Lasser regard the impetus behind Berlin's writing a group of songs about loneliness, including "All Alone," during the early Twenties as a business decision.

Beginning in 1910, phonograph recordings vied with the piano as the source of home entertainment, and by the 1920s, a new medium radio, was presenting songs aimed at the solitary listener. . . . Berlin first sensed this change when his 1921 song " All by Myself ," sold more copies of phonograph records than it did of sheet music. He decided that what the public wanted were what he called "sob-ballads," intimate romantic songs of sadness and yearning.

They continue to emphasize the role technology played in the success of "All Alone," pointing out that it was introduced over the radio as opposed to on the stage. One result was that "instead of hampering sales of sheet music and recordings . . . , the broadcast prompted the sale of a quarter of a million records of 'All Alone' within a month." Berlin capitalized on the phenomenon by promptly getting it onto the stage by interpolating the song into [the touring company—Ed. note] of The Music Box Revue of 1924, where the two leads sang it to one another by telephone from one side of the stage to the other.

[Editor's note: A scene such as this must have reinforced the notion that technology could encourage intimacy by overcoming physical separation. The radio played a role here too, having the capacity to inject music into the confines of a lonely room, thus speaking directly to the emotions of the person who inhabited it—a person who might then go out and buy more new technology, e.g. the phonograph and record, so that the solitary individual could feel better or worse, as the case might be, whenever the need arose.]

The newspapers , , , interpreted such hits as "All Alone" (1924) and "Remember" (1925) in the light of Berlin's courtship of socialite Ellin Mackay [who would later become his second wife over strong objections of her family]. Berlin insisted, however, that the only song he ever wrote out of personal experience was "When I Lost You" [after his first wife died].

from Philip Furia, The Poets of Tin Pan Alley: A History of America's Great Lyricists, New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 55.

Laurence Bergreen suggests the motive for writing "All Alone" went deeper than Berlin's business sense or even the frustrations of his new romance with Ellin Mackay. He notes that the death of Berlin's mother in 1922, his only remaining link to childhood, as well as a series of unfulfilling, short-lived relationships before he met Mackay, had left a profound mark on him and evoked the feelings of "loneliness and melancholy" revealed in "sob-ballads" like "What'll I Do?," "All by Myself," and "All Alone," all songs that emerged during this period. An Ironic result of the success of "All Alone" was that Berlin's "poignant and self-pitying lyrics" had managed to broadcast to the nation "the loneliness of this private man."

All alone I'm so all alone; There's no one else but you.

Bergreen also recounts for us, in the words of Berlin's fellow Algonquin round-table companion, Alexander Woolcott, the first "performance" of the completed "All Alone." Berlin had traveled from New York City to an Atlantic City hotel in search of the quiet he needed to work on some new songs. Woolcott, who was there also, writes in his biography of Berlin,

At daybreak that day he had just completed the chorus of "All Alone" and the final version of its lyric, scribbled on the back of a menu card, was propped against a siphon which served for the moment as a music-rack. The old busker was uppermost in him and he was possessed to sing it forthwith. If I had not passed by at that moment, the nearest bellhop or chambermaid would [have] been thrown into a flutter by being pressed into service as audience. His accompanist had come down from New York to work with him on the new Music Box numbers and was already drowsing at the piano over a rough penciled lead sheet of "All Alone"

Laurence Bergreen, As Thousands Cheer The Life of Irving Berlin, New York: Viking, 1990, p. 201, 217. (Bergreen's Woolcott quotation from, Alexander Woolcott, The Story of Irving Berlin, New York: G. B. Putnam's Sons, 1925.)

For Wilfred Sheed, All Alone" although "written in his mother's last years" has persisted as Berlin's "last word on old age and loneliness and perhaps on his own fears as well." (Wilfred Sheed, The House That George Built, p. 82 hardcover edition)

Click here to read a version of the lyrics for "All Alone," as sung by Frank Sinatra.
(Both Judy Garland (listen in Record/Video Cabinet) and Sinatra omit Berlin's two verses.
(Typically songs in The Great American Songbook have only one verse, and that comes
at the beginning of the song.) To hear versions that include the verses, listen to the Keillor/Streep duet on the Main Stage or the John McCormack version
in the Cafe Songbook Record/Video Cabinet.

• Fiona Apple: Matt Albertsen
• Garrison Keillor/Meryl Streep: arthethis

Notes

• "All Alone" was written for The Fourth Music Box Revue (1924-25).
• Early Versions That Made the Charts (with year and chart #)
• For later recordings, see our Record Cabinet .
• from Philip Furia and Michael Lasser, America's Songs , New York: Routledge, 2006, pp. 37-38.
• In another place, Furia reinforces his notion about Berlin's motive for writing his "sob-ballads":
• The complete, authoritative lyrics for "All Alone" can be found in

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