Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Notes to the Reader
- Introduction: Encountering the City
- 1 The City's Clangor
- 2 Broadway's Melody
- 3 Harlem's Renaissance
- 4 Recordings, Radio, and Talkies
- 5 Starting the Century
- 6 The Flapper and the Jazz Age
- 7 The Great Depression
- 8 World War II
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Notes to the Reader
- Introduction: Encountering the City
- 1 The City's Clangor
- 2 Broadway's Melody
- 3 Harlem's Renaissance
- 4 Recordings, Radio, and Talkies
- 5 Starting the Century
- 6 The Flapper and the Jazz Age
- 7 The Great Depression
- 8 World War II
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
Summary
One day in June 1928, about two-thirds of the way through Prohibition's fourteen-year-run, Nora Bayes asked Eddie Dowling to call on her. He managed New York City's legendary Palace Theater, and she had starred on Broadway and in vaudeville earlier in the century. Lately, though, she had been ill and was unable to work. Even though she had had a hand in writing “Shine on Harvest Moon” twenty years earlier and had performed all over the country for decades, her star had faded. During her six-year absence from Broadway, the ethnic and “coon songs” that she favored had lost their appeal. Dowling went to see her apprehensively; he knew how demanding she could be. She didn't ask for a spot on the bill, though. Instead, she sang him a few of her old songs and asked if he would find the large photographs of her in her prime and hang them in the lobby the following morning just as if she were starring at the Palace again. He could take them down before the matinee, but she wanted to know when she drove by that her pictures were on view. She had her driver take her past the Palace the next morning on her way to the hospital. She had surgery for cancer but died on the operating table.
Fifteen months later, the stock market crashed. Radio and the talkies helped to kill off vaudeville, and within four years of Bayes's death, the Palace had replaced live acts with movies. If you could afford a night on the town in the 1930s, you might end up in Harlem after midnight, but first you made for Broadway. Those who couldn't afford either went to the movies or listened to the radio instead. Either way, vaudeville had become the oldest hat in town. The country was changing, and that meant Broadway was changing, too. In the 1940s, for the duration of the war, even the lights went out.
In 1918, the journalist John Reed described Broadway as “gashing the city like a lava-stream.” The radio and newspaper columnist Walter Winchell is said to have called it a “main artery of New York life—the hardened artery.” For more than a century, Broadway has been as much an idea as a place, a subject for waxing poetic and profane.
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- Information
- City Songs and American Life, 1900–1950 , pp. 29 - 48Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2019