Wilder — American Popular Song

Author: Alec Wilder
Title: American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950
Year: 1972
Type: Book (Oxford University Press; edited and with an introduction by James T. Maher)

American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950 is a study by the composer Alec Wilder, edited and introduced by James T. Maher, published by Oxford University Press in 1972. It judges the American popular song of the first half of the twentieth century as composition, by its melodies, harmonies and rhythms as written, and it is built on the premise that a few innovators made the song what it was. Wilder finds the most sophisticated innovations in theater songs. He gives chapters to Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter and Harold Arlen, shared chapters to other theater composers, a chapter to the craftsmen who wrote songs outside the theater and a last chapter to outstanding individual songs. Its evidence is the published sheet music of some eight hundred songs, read in technical detail. Its publisher presents it as a book praised from the start and still the standard on its subject; it was a finalist for the National Book Award and the basis of a Peabody Award-winning radio series on NPR. A third edition, revised by Robert Rawlins in 2022, updates its notation and adds a chapter of more than fifty songs, chosen in part to represent women and African American composers better, with several of Wilder’s own.

Oxford University Press published the book in New York in 1972, with a paperback in 1975.¹ Wilder, born in 1907, was a composer whose work ran from popular songs to classical pieces.¹ Maher’s introduction states the book’s position: “the author takes American popular song and its creators seriously.” It sets out two premises. The first is that by about 1900 American popular song had become distinctly American in its words and music. The second is that its “unique qualities” derive “continuously from the innovations of a few outstanding song composers,” and, Maher writes, “It is from this assumption that the book takes its structure.”²

After an opening chapter on the transition era from 1885 to the First World War, Wilder gives chapters to Kern, Berlin, Gershwin, Rodgers, Porter and Arlen, then shared chapters to Vincent Youmans and Arthur Schwartz and to Burton Lane, Hugh Martin and Vernon Duke.² His tenth chapter, “The Great Craftsmen,” turns to songs written outside the theater. It opens by repeating that “the most sophisticated innovations in popular song writing have come in theater music,” but adds that the writers who “closed the gap between the pop marketplace and the theater” worked “at almost the same level of innovation as the best of the musical comedy composers.” A last chapter, “Outstanding Individual Songs: 1920 to 1950,” takes up single songs from those decades.² The book covers some eight hundred songs.³ Wilder worked from the printed sheet music and analyzed the songs’ melody, harmony and rhythm in technical terms, with little to say about lyrics or recordings, as the jazz musician Jacob Zimmerman has described it.⁴

Oxford’s description of the book calls it “widely recognized as the definitive book on American popular song” and says it “achieved immediate praise and recognition upon its publication”; the description also speaks of Wilder’s “strong personal biases.”³ The book was a finalist for the National Book Award in Arts and Letters in 1973.⁵ In the mid-1970s it became the basis of the radio series American Popular Song with Alec Wilder and Friends, which Wilder hosted on NPR with Loonis McGlohon and which won a Peabody Award.¹ An unsigned review of Allen Forte’s The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era, 1924–1950 (1995) at JazzStandards.com judged Wilder’s book less analytical than Forte’s study of the ballads of those years and wrote that the two “should be seen as complementary and not substitutes for one another.”⁶ Zimmerman called Wilder’s book “the most coveted text on my bookshelves.”⁴ In 2022 Oxford published a third edition, revised by Robert Rawlins and described by the publisher as “a much-needed revision.” It replaces the original’s piano-score examples with lead-sheet notation. Its new final chapter, “Additional Songs and Composers,” adds more than fifty songs, among them several of Wilder’s own, and the publisher says the chapter seeks “greater representation for women and African American composers.”³

Key contributions

• The American popular song of 1900 to 1950 judged as composition, by melody, harmony and rhythm as written.
• A history built composer by composer, on the premise that a few innovators made the American song what it was.
• The theater as the source of the most sophisticated innovations, with the craftsmen who wrote outside it nearly as inventive as the best theater composers.

See also

• Pop as craft — the debate over pop as a craft