Irving Berlin (1888- 1989) was a Jew who wrote the Number One Christmas song of all time. His life spanned more than 100 years and he composed over 1000 songs.
His place of birth is unknown, although his family had been living in Siberia, before they emigrated to New York City in 1893. When his family arrived at Ellis Island, Berlin said he was from Temun, Russia. He wasn’t sure how to spell it; it didn’t matter; some over-zealous Cossacks rode in and slaughtered most of the inhabitants, sending his family west in a hurry.
Few others repaid their adopted country quite so generously as Berlin. Unlike the bullying flag-waving Yankee Doodle Dandy by George M. Cohan, Berlin’s God Bless America is a love letter to this country’s mountains, prairies, and oceans white with foam. If the USA is slipping into Christian White Nationalist fascism, Berlin’s American ideal continues to be worth aiming for, which some citizens prefer singing his unofficial national anthem, rather than the actual difficult-to-sing war song that we are stuck with.
When his father died, 13-year-old Berlin started working on the streets of lower Manhattan singing for pennies, then as a singing waiter in a Chinatown restaurant. In 1907, he published his first song, Marie From Sunny Italy, and in 1911, he had his first major international hit Alexander’s Ragtime Band, an alarm clock that woke up American popular music, and is still one of the most performed songs 112 years later. He began writing at a time when sheet music was the only way to enjoy new music, popular songs were sung at home and the songwriters were abused and exploited by the Tin Pan Alley publishing houses.
Berlin became his own publisher and painstakingly bought back all his early songs and successfully marketed his catalog for each new medium: records, theatre, film, television. He outlived the expiration dates on copyright laws on his earliest work.
For more than eight decades, Berlin composed ballads, dance tracks, novelty tunes, and love songs, writing the music and the lyrics for songs that defined American popular music for much of the 20th century.
Berlin standards include: How Deep Is The Ocean, Blue Skies, Always, Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better, Puttin’ On The Ritz, Heatwave, Let’s Face The Music And Dance, and God Bless Stephen Rutledge.
Fans of more “sophisticated” songwriters can be a bit snooty about Berlin: How can any song that popular be good? But even a crowd-pleaser like White Christmas has a chromatic phrase with a surprisingly daring melodic line.
An apparently simple ballad like Cheek To Cheek has what most lyricists would consider a daunting rhyme scheme with “eek”, yet the lyrics never sound as if they’ve been tailored to the rhymes; they fall naturally:
The cares that hang around me
Through the week
Seem to vanish like a gambler’s
Lucky streak
He avoided flashy rhymes, so he rarely makes the lists of the great lyricists. Yet, he was the master of the most important element in lyric writing: He could set up and resolve a situation in the minimum of lines.
Berlin wrote for songs for Broadway and Hollywood. He composed 17 complete scores for Broadway musicals, including the phenomenal score for Annie Get Your Gun (1946). Among the Hollywood film musical classics with scores by Berlin: Top Hat (1935), Follow The Fleet (1936), Holiday Inn (1942), Easter Parade (1948), White Christmas (1954) and There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954).
His songs have provided memorable moments in other films and television shows, starting with The Jazz Singer in 1927 to Boss Baby: Family Business (2021). Among his many awards are a dozen Grammys, two Tony Awards, and an Academy Award (with 18 nominations).
Berlin’s songs have reached Number One of the charts 25 times and have been recorded by such diverse acts as The Andrews Sisters, Eddie Fisher, Ethel Merman, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Linda Ronstadt, Rosemary Clooney, Diana Ross, Sarah Vaughan, Ruth Etting, Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday, Doris Day, Jerry Garcia, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Ella Fitzgerald, Michael Buble, Lady Gaga, Christina Aguilera, and Cher.
In late summer, 1978, a jaw-droppingly handsome young man with deep blue eyes and square shoulders, stood center-stage with straight posture, and in a sweet pure tenor, sang the 1924 Irving Berlin tune What’ll I Do? for his audition for a musical I was directing. I was impressed with his good-looks and his assured talent. Two years later this young man would tell me that he was in love with me while Harry Nillson sang What’ll I Do? on the stereo in the background. This man would eventually become my boyfriend, then my partner, and now we refer to him around these parts as “The Husband”. I have had 40 years at his side.
What’ll I Do? remains my favorite Irving Berlin song, although I love them all. I also have quite a soft spot for the gun-happy You Can’t Get A Man With A Gun, perfect for our era of “open carry” laws with this lyric:
“Oh, a man may be hot
But he’s not
When he’s shot!
Oh, you can’t get a man with a gun…”
I have only appeared in one Irving Berlin musical: Miss Liberty at The Bathhouse Theatre in Seattle during summer of 1986. It is a rather creaky piece, hopelessly old fashioned, about the conception, construction and unveiling of a very famous statue. But the score is really terrific. I played a singing and tap-dancing Joseph Pulitzer. I was rather good in that role.
Berlin died in 1989 at 101 years old. George Gershwin called him “The greatest songwriter that has ever lived, and composer Jerome Kern concluded:
“Irving Berlin has no place in American music—he is American music.”
