Word: berlins
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...comparison with his great contemporaries, Berlin wrote simple songs. Not for him the intricate rhythms and trick accents of a George Gershwin, although the strangely sinister Puttin' on the Ritz twists and turns back on itself like a stutter-stepping snake. Nor did Berlin, who wrote his own words, generally show Cole Porter's kind of cleverness, although he could put some English on a homely sentiment in a song like Lazy (1924): "I wanna peep through the deep/ Tangled wildwood,/ Counting sheep/ 'Til I sleep/ Like a child would./ With a great big valise full of books to read...
...Berlin's musical signature was the sheer inevitability of his songs, the way they seemed to have always been around, like folk songs. Surely White Christmas is an authentic carol, not a number composed for the 1942 movie Holiday Inn. God Bless America must have been sung first by Washington's troops at Valley Forge, not by Kate Smith in 1938. And didn't Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning emerge from a pioneer encampment and not from a 1918 army musical called Yip, Yip, Yaphank...
...singing waiter in a raffish Chinatown bistro; it was there that he wrote his first song, Marie from Sunny Italy, in partnership with the cafe's pianist. When the song was published in 1907, a printer's error had given him a new name: I. Berlin...
...Once you start singing," Berlin said in later years, "you start thinking of writing your own songs. It's as simple as that." Although he could not read or write music (he never did learn), he could pick out a melody on the piano in the key of F sharp. In 1909 Berlin, now calling himself Irving because it sounded tonier, landed a $25-a-week job with a Tin Pan Alley publisher. Two years later, he picked his way into American musical history with Alexander's Ragtime Band. More a march than a rag, it made Berlin famous, erroneously...
...parade had begun. When his wife Dorothy Goetz died in 1912, Berlin poured out his grief in his first real ballad, When I Lost You. The Ziegfeld Follies of 1919 brought forth A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody; 1924 saw both the tenderly brooding What'll I Do? and the valse triste All Alone. His courtship of heiress Ellin Mackay, granddaughter of an owner of the Comstock Lode, was breathlessly followed in the press, and their secret marriage in 1926, over her father's vigorous objections, made headlines. It also made standards like Always...