Irving Berlin (born Israel Isidore Beilin; May 11, 1888 – September 22, 1989) was a Russian-born American songwriter. His music forms a large part of the Great American Songbook. Berlin received numerous honors including an Academy Award, a Grammy Award, and a Tony Award. He also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Gerald R. Ford in 1977. The broadcast journalist Walter Cronkite stated he "helped write the story of this country, capturing the best of who we are and the dreams that shape our lives".
Born in Russia, Berlin arrived in the United States at the age of five. His family left Russia to escape pogroms against the Jewish village of Tolochin. He published his first song, "Marie from Sunny Italy", in 1907, receiving 33 cents for the publishing rights, and became known as the composer of numerous international hits, starting with 1911's "Alexander's Ragtime Band". He also was an owner of the Music Box Theatre on Broadway. For much of his career, Berlin could not read sheet music, and was such a limited piano player that he could only play in the key of F-sharp; he used his custom piano equipped with a transposing lever when he needed to play in keys other than F-sharp. He was known for writing music and lyrics in the American vernacular: uncomplicated, simple and direct, with his stated aim being to "reach the heart of the average American", whom he saw as the "real soul of the country".
Berlin's songs have reached the top of the US charts 25 times and have been extensively re-recorded by numerous singers. Berlin died in 1989 at the age of 101. Composer Douglas Moore sets Berlin apart from all other contemporary songwriters, and includes him instead with Stephen Foster, Walt Whitman, and Carl Sandburg, as a "great American minstrel"—someone who has "caught and immortalized in his songs what we say, what we think about, and what we believe." in the Russian Empire to a Jewish family. Although his family came from the shtetl of Tolochin (in present-day Belarus), Berlin later learned that he was probably born in Tyumen, Siberia, where his father, an itinerant cantor, had taken his family. On September 14, 1893, the family arrived at Ellis Island in New York City. When they arrived, Israel was put in a pen with his brother and five sisters until immigration officials declared them fit to be allowed into the city. After the family's naturalization, the name "Beilin" was changed to "Baline".
According to biographer Laurence Bergreen, as an adult Berlin admitted to no memories of his first five years in Russia except for one: "he was lying on a blanket by the side of a road, watching his house burn to the ground. By daylight the house was in ashes." As an adult, Berlin said he was unaware of being raised in abject poverty since he had known no other life.
The Berlins were one of hundreds of thousands of Jewish families who emigrated to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century, escaping discrimination, poverty and brutal pogroms. Other such families included those of George and Ira Gershwin, Al Jolson, Sophie Tucker, L. Wolfe Gilbert, Jack Yellen, Louis B. Mayer (of MGM), and the Warner brothers. He became a newspaper boy, hawking The Evening Journal. One day while delivering newspapers, according to Berlin's biographer and friend, Alexander Woollcott, he stopped to look at a ship departing for China and became so entranced that he did not see a swinging crane, which knocked him into the river. When he was fished out after going down for the third time, he was still holding in his clenched fist the five pennies he earned that day.
His mother took a job as a midwife, and three of his sisters worked wrapping cigars, common for immigrant girls. His older brother worked in a sweatshop assembling shirts. Each evening, when the family came home from their day's work, Bergreen writes, "they would deposit the coins they had earned that day into Lena's outspread apron." From this he stepped up to work as a song plugger and singing waiter in cafes and restaurants in the downtown areas of New York City. His first lyric, written with a café pianist, earned him a royalty of thirty-seven cents.
However, before Berlin was fourteen his meager income was still adding less than his sisters' to the family's budget, which made him feel worthless.
Berlin learned what kind of songs appealed to audiences, writes Bergreen: "well-known tunes expressing simple sentiments were the most reliable." Never having had lessons, after the bar closed for the night, young Berlin would sit at a piano in the back and begin improvising tunes.
thumb|Berlin photographed in 1907 in Pach Brothers Studio
Berlin continued writing and playing music at Pelham Cafe and developing an early style. He liked the words to other people's songs but sometimes the rhythms were "kind of boggy", and he might change them. One night he delivered some hits composed by his friend George M. Cohan, another kid who was getting known on Broadway with his own songs. When Berlin ended with Cohan's "Yankee Doodle Boy", notes Whitcomb, "everybody in the joint applauded the feisty little fellow."
Recognition as songwriter
Max Winslow (c. 1883–1942), a staff member at music publisher Harry Von Tilzer Company, noticed Berlin's singing on many occasions and became so taken with his talent that he tried to get him a job with his firm. Von Tilzer said that Max claimed to have "discovered a great kid", and raved about him so much that Von Tilzer hired Berlin.
Berlin rose as a songwriter in Tin Pan Alley and on Broadway. In 1911, Emma Carus introduced his first world-famous hit, "Alexander's Ragtime Band", followed by a performance from Berlin himself at the Friars' Frolic of 1911 with Clifford Hess as his accompanist.
Initially the song was not recognized as a hit, however; Broadway producer Jesse Lasky was uncertain about using it, although he did include it in his "Follies" show. It was performed as an instrumental but did not impress audiences, and was soon dropped from the show's score. Berlin regarded it as a failure. He then wrote lyrics to the score, played it again in another Broadway review, and this time Variety news weekly called it "the musical sensation of the decade".
Variety called Watch Your Step the "first syncopated musical", where the "sets and the girls were gorgeous". Berlin was then 26, and the success of the show was riding on his name alone. Variety said the show was a "terrific hit" from its opening night. It compared Berlin's newfound status as a composer with that of the Times building: "That youthful marvel of syncopated melody is proving things in Watch Your Step, firstly that he is not alone a rag composer, and that he is one of the greatest lyric writers America has ever produced."
By 1918 he had written hundreds of songs, mostly topical, which enjoyed brief popularity. Many of the songs were for the new dances then appearing, such as the grizzly bear, chicken walk, or foxtrot. After a Hawaiian dance craze began, he wrote "That Hula-Hula", and then did a string of Southern songs, such as "When the Midnight Choo-Choo Leaves for Alabam". During this period, he was creating a few new songs every week, including songs aimed at the various immigrant cultures arriving from Europe. On one occasion, Berlin, whose face was still not known, was on a train trip and decided to entertain the fellow passengers with some music. They asked him how he knew so many hit songs, and Berlin modestly replied, "I wrote them." Wilder puts it on the same level as Jerome Kern's "pure melodies", and in comparison with Berlin's earlier music, says it is "extraordinary that such a development in style and sophistication should have taken place in a single year".
In 1917, Berlin was drafted into the United States Army, and his induction became headline news, with one paper headline reading, "Army Takes Berlin!" But the Army wanted Berlin, now aged 30, to do what he knew best: write songs. While stationed with the 152nd Depot Brigade at Camp Upton, he then composed an all-soldier musical revue titled Yip Yip Yaphank, written as a patriotic tribute to the United States Army. The show was taken to Broadway where it also included a number of hits, including "Mandy" and "Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning", which Berlin performed himself.
According to Berlin biographer David Leopold, the theater, located at 239 West 45th St., was the only Broadway house built to accommodate the works of a songwriter. It was the home of Berlin's Music Box Revue from 1921 to 1925 and As Thousands Cheer in 1933 and today includes an exhibition devoted to Berlin in the lobby.
Various hit songs by Berlin
By 1926, Berlin had written the scores to two editions of the Ziegfeld Follies and four annual editions of his Music Box Revue. These shows spanned the years of 1921–1926, premiering songs such as "Say It With Music", "Everybody Step", and "Pack Up Your Things and Go to the Devil". The song was introduced by Belle Baker in Betsy, a Ziegfeld production. In 2012 it was used for a flash mob wedding event in Moscow.
;"Marie" (1929)
This waltz-time song was a hit for Rudy Vallée in 1929, and in 1937, updated to a four-quarter-time swing arrangement, was a top hit for Tommy Dorsey. It was on the charts at no. 13 in 1953 for The Four Tunes and at no. 15 for the Bachelors in 1965, 36 years after its first appearance.
The song was written by Berlin twenty years earlier, but he filed it away until 1938 when Kate Smith needed a patriotic song to mark the 20th anniversary of Armistice Day, celebrating the end of World War I. "To me," said Berlin, "'God Bless America' was not just a song but an expression of my feeling toward the country to which I owe what I have and what I am." The Economist magazine writes that "Berlin was producing a deep-felt paean to the country that had given him what he would have said was everything."
thumb|Singing "[[God Bless America" at the Pentagon memorial dedication, September 11, 2008]]
It quickly became a second national anthem In 1954, Berlin received a special Congressional Gold Medal from President Dwight D. Eisenhower for contributing the song.
The song was heard after September 11, 2001, as U.S. senators and congressmen stood on the Capitol steps and sang it after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. It is often played by sports teams such as major league baseball. The Philadelphia Flyers hockey team started playing it before crucial contests. When the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team pulled off the "greatest upset in sports history", referred to as the "Miracle on Ice", the players spontaneously sang it as Americans were overcome by patriotism.
Other songs
Though most of his works for the Broadway stage took the form of revues—collections of songs with no unifying plot—he did write a number of book shows. The Cocoanuts (1929) was a light comedy with a cast featuring, among others, the Marx Brothers. Face the Music (1932) was a political satire with a book by Moss Hart, and Louisiana Purchase (1940) was a satire of a Southern politician obviously based on the exploits of Huey Long. As Thousands Cheer (1933) was a revue, also with book by Moss Hart, with a theme: each number was presented as an item in a newspaper, some of them touching on issues of the day. The show yielded a succession of hit songs, including "Easter Parade" sung by Marilyn Miller and Clifton Webb, "Heat Wave" (presented as the weather forecast), "Harlem on My Mind", and "Supper Time", a song about racial violence inspired by a newspaper headline about a lynching, sung by Ethel Waters. She once said about the song, "If one song can tell the whole tragic history of a race, 'Supper Time' was that song. In singing it I was telling my comfortable, well-fed, well-dressed listeners about my people...those who had been slaves and those who were now downtrodden and oppressed."
1941 to 1962
World War II patriotism—"This is the Army" (1943)
thumb|Irving Berlin singing and conducting aboard [[USS Arkansas (BB-33)|USS Arkansas, 1944]]
Berlin loved his country, and wrote many songs reflecting his patriotism. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau requested a song to inspire Americans to buy war bonds, for which he wrote "Any Bonds Today?" again to Treasury.
Annie Get Your Gun (1946)
The grueling tours Berlin did performing "This Is The Army" left him exhausted, but when his longtime close friend Jerome Kern, who was the composer for Annie Get Your Gun, died suddenly, producers Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II persuaded Berlin to take over composing the score.
Loosely based on the life of sharpshooter Annie Oakley, the music and lyrics were written by Berlin, with a book by Herbert Fields and his sister Dorothy Fields, and directed by Joshua Logan. At first Berlin refused to take on the job, claiming that he knew nothing about "hillbilly music", but the show ran for 1,147 performances and became his most successful score and biggest box office success.
One reviewer commented about the play's score, that "its tough wisecracking lyrics are as tersely all-knowing as its melody, which is nailed down in brassy syncopated lines that have been copied—but never equaled in sheer melodic memorability—by hundreds of theater composers ever since." Historian and composer Alec Wilder says that the perfection of the score, when compared to his earlier works, was "a profound shock".), it stayed no. 1 on the pop and R&B charts for 10 weeks, and went on to over 50 million records. Crosby's version is the best-selling single of all time. Music critic Stephen Holden credits this partly to the fact that "the song also evokes a primal nostalgia—a pure childlike longing for roots, home and childhood—that goes way beyond the greeting imagery."
Songwriting methods
According to Saul Bornstein (a.k.a. Sol Bourne, Saul Bourne), Berlin's publishing company manager, "It was a ritual for Berlin to write a complete song, words and music, every day." Berlin said that he "did not believe in inspiration," and felt that although he might be gifted in certain areas, his most successful compositions were a "result of work". He said that he did most of his work under pressure. He would typically begin writing after dinner and continue until 4 or 5 in the morning. "Each day I would attend rehearsals", he said, "and at night write another song and bring it down the next day." Though Berlin eventually learned how to produce written music, he never changed his method of dictating songs to a "musical secretary".
As a result, Wilder says that many admirers of the music of Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers and Cole Porter were unlikely to consider Berlin's work in the same category because they forgot or never realized that Berlin wrote many popular tunes, such as "Soft Lights and Sweet Music", "Supper Time", and "Cheek to Cheek". Some are even more confused because he also wrote more romantic melodies, such as "What'll I Do?" and "Always".
Composer Jerome Kern recognized that the essence of Irving Berlin's lyrics was his "faith in the American vernacular", an influence so profound that his best-known songs "seem indivisible from the country's history and self-image". Kern, along with George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II and Cole Porter, brought together Afro-American, Latin American, rural pop, and European operetta. It led composer George Gershwin to claim that he learned from Berlin that ragtime, which later became jazz, "was the only musical idiom in existence that could aptly express America". Because Berlin was Jewish and she was a Catholic of Irish descent, their life was followed by the press, which found the romance of an immigrant from the Lower East Side and a young heiress a good story. Biographer Philip Furia writes that newspapers rumored they were engaged before she returned from Europe, and some Broadway shows even performed skits of the "lovelorn songwriter". After her return, she and Berlin were besieged by the press, which followed them everywhere. Variety reported that her father vowed that their marriage "would only happen 'over my dead body.'"
thumb|upright=1.1|The [[Lower East Side in 1909. Berlin said he never forgot his childhood years when he slept under tenement steps, ate scraps, wore secondhand clothes and sold newspapers. "Every man should have a Lower East Side in his life," he said.]]
Furia says that throughout Berlin's life he often returned on foot to his old neighborhoods in Union Square, Chinatown, and the Bowery. He never forgot those childhood years when he "slept under tenement steps, ate scraps, and wore secondhand clothes," and described those years as hard but good. "Every man should have a Lower East Side in his life," he said. He used to visit The Music Box Theater, which he founded and which still stands at 239 West 45th St. From 1947 to 1989, Berlin's home in New York City was 17 Beekman Place.
George Frazier of Life magazine found Berlin to be "intensely nervous", with a habit of tapping his listener with his index finger to emphasize a point, and continually pressing his hair down in back and "picking up any stray crumbs left on a table after a meal". While listening, "he leans forward tensely, with his hands clasped below his knees like a prizefighter waiting in his corner for the bell.... For a man who has known so much glory", wrote Frazier, "Berlin has somehow managed to retain the enthusiasm of a novice." Her parents liked to celebrate every single holiday with their children, and "[t]hey seemed to understand the importance, particularly in childhood, of the special day, the same every year, the special stories, foods, and decorations and that special sense of well-being that accompanies a holiday."
Berlin was a member of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks.
Berlin was a staunch advocate of civil rights. He was honored in 1944 by the National Conference of Christians and Jews for "advancing the aims of the conference to eliminate religious and racial conflict". His 1943 production This Is The Army featured the first integrated division army unit in the United States. In 1949, the Young Men's Hebrew Association (YMHA) honored him as one of the twelve "most outstanding Americans of Jewish faith".
Death
thumb|The grave of Irving Berlin in [[Woodlawn Cemetery (Bronx)|Woodlawn Cemetery, the Bronx, New York]]
Berlin died in his sleep at his 17 Beekman Place town house in Manhattan on September 22, 1989, at the age of 101, of a heart attack and other natural causes. He was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York.
Legacy and influence
The New York Times, after his death in 1989, wrote, "Irving Berlin set the tone and the tempo for the tunes America played and sang and danced to for much of the 20th century." His life as an immigrant from Russia became the "classic rags-to-riches story that he never forgot could have happened only in America".
During his six-decade career, from 1907 to 1966, he produced sheet music, Broadway shows, recordings, and scores played on radio, in films and on television, and his tunes continue to evoke powerful emotions for millions around the world. He wrote songs like "Alexander's Ragtime Band", "Cheek to Cheek", "There's No Business Like Show Business", "Blue Skies" and "Puttin' On the Ritz". Some of his songs have become holiday anthems, such as "Easter Parade", "White Christmas" and "Happy Holiday". "White Christmas" alone sold over 50 million records, the top-selling song in recording history. It won an ASCAP and an Academy Award, and is one of the most frequently played songs ever written.</blockquote>
In 1934, Time put him on its cover and inside hailed "this itinerant son of a Russian cantor" as "an American institution". And again, in 1943, the same magazine described his songs as follows:
<blockquote>They possess a permanence not generally associated with Tin Pan Alley products and it is more than remotely possible that in days to come Berlin will be looked upon as the Stephen Foster of the 20th century.</blockquote>
At various times, his songs were also rallying cries for different causes: He produced musical editorials supporting Al Smith and Dwight Eisenhower as presidential candidates, he wrote songs opposing Prohibition, defending the gold standard, calming the wounds of the Great Depression, and helping the war against Hitler, and in 1950 he wrote an anthem for the state of Israel. The publishers again appealed, but the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal, allowing the decision to stand. The precedent-setting 1964 ruling established the rights of parodists and satirists to mimic the meter of popular songs.
At his 100th-birthday celebration in May 1988, violinist Isaac Stern said, "The career of Irving Berlin and American music were intertwined forever ... American music was born at his piano",
- US Army Medal of Merit from General George Marshall at the direction of President Harry S. Truman.
- Congressional Gold Medal in 1954 from President Dwight D. Eisenhower for contributing many patriotic songs, including "God Bless America".
- Special Tony Award in 1963.
- Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1968.
- Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970, which "celebrated its First annual Induction and Awards Ceremony in New York City".
- Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 by President Gerald Ford. The citation reads, in part: "Musician, Composer, Humanitarian, And Patriot, Irving Berlin Has Captured The Fondest Dreams And Deepest Emotions Of The American People In The Form Of Popular Music."
- Lawrence Langner Memorial Award for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in the American Theatre at the 1978 Tony Awards.
- 100th-birthday celebration concert was for the benefit of Carnegie Hall and ASCAP on May 11, 1988.
- Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on February 1, 1994.
- American Theater Hall of Fame.
Musical scores
The following list includes scores mostly produced by Berlin. Although some of the plays using his songs were later adapted to films, the list will not include the film unless he was the primary composer.