Word: berlin
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...That was the September song, as catalogued in a USA Today story published a week after the attacks. Now that it's December, a lot of us are singing, humming or truculently enduring "White Christmas." Berlin wrote both those songs, and another hundred or so that still tinkle away on a rickety player piano in the attic of your memory. Berlin was born in the 19th century, but here it is the 21st, and we can?t put his music to rest...
...that cozier place we retreated to, Berlin was waiting, hibernating. That old feeling? He surely had it No one could be older (Berlin died at 101 in 1989); and no one knew better how to set a feeling to music insinuate it in the public ear. If the musical sophisticates razzed him for writing candy corn, he public gobbled it up. If he never achieved the acceptance of Jerome Kern, George Gershwin or Richard Rodgers, well, hell, they needed someone else to write their lyrics; Berlin did it all himself. If he seemed an immigrant all-American, that's because...
...career that spanned 60 years, Berlin wrote all kinds of songs, about 1,250 of them, which are now collected in "The Complete Lyrics of Irving Berlin" (Knopf, 530 pp., $65), a handsome tome edited by Robert Kimball and Berlin's second daughter Linda Emmet. The volume - fourth in an invaluable series that previously collected the pop poetry of Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin and Lorenz Hart - supplements all of Berlin's musical words with biographical data, short essays on the most important songs and several hundred unpublished works. It's a book you could live in, happily, for weeks...
...anything better than you. No you can't. Yes I can. No you can't. Yes I can. No you can't. Yes I can, yes I can!" Huh?) But the book makes the best case for what showbiz historian Ethan Mordden has described as a "casual timelessness" of Berlin's songs...
...Berlin was in and out of vogue, and he often had so little self-confidence that he'd put a new number in his capacious trunk if anyone around him said it was less than fabulous. But he figured his songs would come back, because they always did, always do - some annually, like "White Christmas" and "Easter Parade," others in the musical-mothball equivalent of the Army Reserves. He was an astute observer of the national mood; he knew it is often changed by events over which Americans have no control, as when it is shocked into war. "There...