The Music Downtown

Tin Pan Alley.

In its early years during the late nineteenth century, Tin Pan Alley was literally an alley—West Twenty-eighth Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue in New York City. Later, the phrase was used to identify the dozens of companies in the booming sheet-music business, most of them still based in Manhattan. By 1910 sheet music was so popular across America that the local Woolworth's store in any midsized city was likely to stock more than a thousand titles. Music stores employed pluggers—singers who would perform any song upon a customer's request. The price for the sheet music itself usually ranged from a penny to ten cents. Top songwriters included George M. Cohan, Irving Berlin (who wrote more than three hundred songs during the decade), Jerome Kern, brothers Harry and Albert Von Tilzer, Harry Ruby, Gus Kahn, Eddie Green, Richard Whiting, Harry Carroll, and Percy Wenrich. Between 1910 and 1919 Tin Pan Alley...

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