What happened to the classic songs of the 1930’s and ‘40s? The standards of the Great American Songbook crooned by Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee or Ella Fitzgerald (and later made unforgettable by Star Trek‘s Data)?
“The B-Side” by Ben Yagoda reads like a detective story sniffing out a homicide, and the deceased is Tin Pan Alley, New York’s epicenter of songwriting and music publishing for decades. A surprising number of its authors and composers – George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Harold Arlen – were Jewish. In fact, Yagoda points out, they were almost all the same age, raised in middle-class New York families, and attended Columbia University.
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