The House That George Built

The House That George Built (With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty) By Wilfrid Sheed (Random House)

Novelist and essayist Wilfrid Sheed has made a worthy contribution to the literature on the Great American Songbook. Titled The House That George Built (With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty), the book is conversational, anecdotal, funny and, above all, opinionated. Great American tunes, whether they originated on Broadway, in a Tin Pan Alley publishing house or on a Hollywood soundstage, are given their due. Sheed makes no claim to musicological expertise but his ideas, built on decades of living as an intense fan as well as a friend and confidante of a number of songwriters and performers, are solid.

In spite of Sheed's impatience with and disdain for most contemporary culture, his approach to writing about the great American music creators is quite modern, taking into account psychological, economic and sociological factors. And for readers accustomed to tabloidstyle gossip, there is plenty of substance abuse, infidelity and mental illness here, though it is tastefully toned down and only used to complete the picture of a songwriter when needed.

The big guns in Sheed's book are, naturally, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern and Richard Rodgers, with ample space devoted to such figures as Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael, Harry Warren and Cy Coleman, among others. Lyricists receive less coverage and a little less respect, though Johnny Mercer and Frank Loesser rate their own chapters. All in all, The House That George Built is a very sturdy structure that it pays to spend some time in.

— Jim Steinblatt


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