Books : The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty
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by: Wilfrid Sheed
List Price: $16.00Amazon.com's Price: $10.88 You Save: $5.12 (32%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 780
EAN: 9780812970180
ISBN: 0812970187
Label: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Manufacturer: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 368
Publication Date: May 13, 2008
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Release Date: May 13, 2008
Sales Rank: 62353
Studio: Random House Trade Paperbacks
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
From Irving Berlin to Cy Coleman, from “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” to “Big Spender,” from Tin Pan Alley to the MGM soundstages, the Golden Age of the American song embodied all that was cool, sexy, and sophisticated in popular culture. For four glittering decades, geniuses like Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Harold Arlen ran their fingers over piano keys, enticing unforgettable melodies out of thin air. Critically acclaimed writer Wilfrid Sheed uncovered the legends, mingled with the greats, and gossiped with the insiders. Now he’s crafted a dazzling, authoritative history of the era that “tripled the world’s total supply of singable tunes.”
It began when immigrants in New York’s Lower East Side heard black jazz and blues–and it surged into an artistic torrent nothing short of miraculous. Broke but eager, Izzy Baline transformed himself into Irving Berlin, married an heiress, and embarked on a string of hits from “Always” to “Cheek to Cheek.” Berlin’s spiritual godson George Gershwin, in his brief but incandescent career, straddled Tin Pan Alley and Carnegie Hall, charming everyone in his orbit. Possessed of a world-class ego, Gershwin was also generous, exciting, and utterly original. Half a century later, Gershwin love songs like “Someone to Watch Over Me,” “The Man I Love,” and “Love Is Here to Stay” are as tender and moving as ever.
Sheed also illuminates the unique gifts of the great jazz songsters Hoagy Carmichael and Duke Ellington, conjuring up the circumstances of their creativity and bringing back the thrill of what it was like to hear “Georgia on My Mind” or “Mood Indigo” for the first time. The Golden Age of song sparked creative breakthroughs in both Broadway musicals and splashy Hollywood extravaganzas. Sheed vividly recounts how Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern, and Johnny Mercer spread the melodic wealth to stage and screen.
Popular music was, writes Sheed, “far and away our greatest contribution to the world’s art supply in the so-called American Century.” Sheed hung out with some of the great artists while they were still writing–and better than anyone, he knows great music, its shimmer, bite, and exuberance. Sparkling with wit, insight, and the grace notes of wonderful songs, The House That George Built is a heartfelt, intensely personal portrait of an unforgettable era.
A delightfully charming, funny, and most illuminating portrait of songwriters and the Golden Age of American Popular Song. Mr. Sheed’s carefully chosen depictions and anecdotes recapture that amazingly creative period, a moment in time in which I was so fortunate to be surrounded by all that magic.”
–Margaret Whiting
From the Hardcover edition.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - The House that George Built
It is amazing to think that there were people walking about the streets of Hollywood and Broadway with those fabulous songs ringing in their heads yearning to be written down for the first time. and Wilfred Sheed writes like a happy man expounding on a theme at a slightly tipsy dinner table late at night. I read the whole thing in two evenings.
Rating:  - I couldn't put it down (even under the worst of circumstances)
Lots of good insights in the reviews of this book. The writing style is circuitous, occas. redundant, but I think Mr. Sheed was just awash in so much information, so many memories & emotions, such affection for the music and the people who blessed the world with it, that I can forgive him.
Kathryn Atwood's 11/25/07 review is almost precisely what I'd have written if she hadn't already. I love her sentence, "Sheed's insights....will deliver many 'aha!' moments"--and they certainly ... Read More
Rating:  - Not quite the popular song primer it could have been
"The House That George Built" by Wilfred Sheed seems at first glance to be the perfect primer to the story of our greatest American songwriters. Not since composer Alec Wilder's groundbreaking reference guide "American Popular Song" has there been a comparable effort to tie together the compositional timelines of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern & Cole Porter, plus all of the lesser known songwriters they influenced. The main four were somewhat engaged in a friendly competition for ... Read More
Rating: - But what about the songs?
I have to agree with many of the other reviewers that refer to the author's "cute" and "self-absorbed" writing style. I could forgive that, however--the man did actually meet and/or know many of the figures he writes about, so his pedestal-perching is somewhat deserved. What I can't overlook is how he glosses over what I thought this book would be all about--the songs themselves. He drops titles here and there, but rarely goes into any depth regarding their creation or impact. More space is devoted ... Read More
Rating: - Sausage Better than the Sizzle
There are some wonderful stories and insights in this book, but the reader has to battle through Sheed's annoyingly 'cute' prose to get to them. If you can ignore his style, you will learn new things about each of the great American songwriters. The chapters on some of the less heralded composers - such as Lane and Whiting - are major contributions to our understanding of an art form that had a glorious but all too brief flowering.
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