THE B SIDE

The latest from Yagoda (Journalism/Delaware Univ.; How to Not Write Bad, 2013, etc.) shows good ears, strong critical instincts and an unabashed love for a variety of music, including the rock ’n’ roll that supposedly closed the pages on the Great American Songbook—the few hundred standards that have endured through a wide variety of distinctive interpretations.

“The songs were composed with sundry goals in mind, producing great art rarely being one of them,” writes the author. “But the songs…took on lives of their own: it turned out they lent themselves to being interpreted in different styles and with different approaches by a range of singers and musicians. They became a repertoire, a canon, repeatedly redefined by distinctive performances.” They had their heyday in the first half of the 20th century, and they were the work of the likes of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and dozens of others. In a conversational style and using an anecdotal approach, Yagoda traces the effects of the broadening from a New York–centric concentration to a wider expanse of vernacular popular music, the shift from sheet music to records and radio, the battle between ASCAP and BMI for licensing, the popular dominance of jazz during the big band and swing eras and its decline with bebop, the ascendance of the singer (who had once been a bit player in the jazz band) and, ultimately, the rock revolution in which songwriter and performer were often the same artist. He makes a convincing case that songwriting was on the decline (and production gimmickry on the rise) before rock and that rock performers have not only helped keep the standards alive, but have extended sophisticated songwriting through the likes of Randy Newman, Jimmy Webb and many others. “The final page had been turned on one songbook,” he concludes. “Another was just starting to be written.” Yagoda appreciates both.

A provocative, consistently engaging counternarrative to the conventional wisdom that rock ’n’ roll killed Tin Pan Alley.