Tin Pan Alley

• 1. Introduction

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  Tin Pan Alley was a stretch of West 28th Street in Manhattan, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, and for decades it was the beating heart of American popular music. Picture a block where every window rattled with a different piano, every office held a songwriter hawking a tune, and every visitor left humming something new. The name itself came from the noise: journalists described it as the sound of tin pans being banged in an alley. From around 1885 onward, this single city block shaped what millions of Americans sang in their parlors, danced to in ballrooms, and eventually heard through their radios. The questions worth asking are how a narrow strip of Manhattan came to own the country's musical imagination, why it drew Jewish immigrants and vaudeville stars and future legends alike, and what finally brought it down.

• 2. The Name and Its Origins

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  Monroe H. Rosenfeld, writing in the New York Herald, is most often credited with coining the term "Tin Pan Alley" as a derogatory description of the collective racket made by many cheap upright pianos all playing different tunes at once. The Grove Dictionary of American Music traces Rosenfeld's first use of the phrase to 1903, though no article by Rosenfeld himself using the phrase has ever been found. An unattributed piece on the subject did appear in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in May of that year.

  A competing account, published in a 1930 book about the music business and cited by Simon Napier-Bell, traces the name to a specific interview with songwriter Harry von Tilzer. Von Tilzer had modified his expensive Kindler and Collins piano by slipping strips of paper down the strings, giving it a sharper, more percussive sound. A journalist listening to it reportedly said: "Your Kindler and Collins sounds exactly like a tin can. I'll call the article 'Tin Pan Alley'." Whatever the true origin, the name had firmly attached itself to the district by the fall of 1905, when The Evening World published a piece about 28th Street titled "The Song Claque Nuisance."

  By 1907, the term had evolved in meaning from a description of a noisy block to a shorthand for the hit-song writing business as a whole. The name crossed the Atlantic too, applying itself to Denmark Street in London's West End, which had become known as "Britain's Tin Pan Alley" by the 1920s because of its concentration of music shops.

• 3. Before the Alley

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  J.N. Pattison, a pianist and composer active from 1862 through 1890, published sheet music out of a piano and organ salesroom in Union Square in downtown Manhattan, making him one of the rare musicians of his era to publish his own work. He operated against the backdrop of a publishing industry still dominated by European art songs, partly because American music was expensive to produce and American compositions made up only about 10 to 30 percent of what was printed in the country.

  Copyright law in the mid-19th century offered songwriters little protection; publishers simply printed their own versions of whatever tunes were popular. Stronger copyright statutes later in the century changed the calculation, encouraging songwriters, composers, lyricists, and publishers to cooperate for shared financial gain. The commercial center of popular music publishing drifted through Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Cincinnati before landing in New York.

  The two most entrepreneurial New York publishers, Willis Woodard and T.B. Harms, were the first firms to specialize in popular songs rather than hymns or classical music. They set up in the entertainment district around Union Square. Witmark was the first publishing house to relocate to West 28th Street as theaters and music venues pushed uptown, and by the late 1890s most publishers had followed. Regional publishing centers in Chicago, New Orleans, St. Louis, and Boston continued to operate, but when a local tune broke through, a New York firm typically bought its rights.

• 4. The Business of Songs

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  Isadore Witmark had previously sold water filters before entering the music business. Leo Feist had sold corsets. Joe Stern sold neckties, and Edward B. Marks sold buttons. The men who built Tin Pan Alley came from sales, and they ran their music houses accordingly.

  When an unknown songwriter sold a tune, the publisher often added a staff member's name as co-composer to keep a higher share of royalties in-house. Alternatively, all rights were purchased outright for a flat fee, including the right to put someone else's name on the sheet music as the composer. Many Jewish immigrants found their way into the industry as publishers and songwriters. Among those who frequented the Alley were Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, George M. Cohan, Dorothy Fields, Scott Joplin, and Fats Waller.

  "Song pluggers" were the industry's salesforce: pianists and singers paid by publishers to demonstrate tunes and drive sheet music sales. Most music stores employed them on staff. Other pluggers traveled on behalf of publishers to introduce new material to the public. George Gershwin, Harry Warren, Vincent Youmans, and Al Sherman all worked as pluggers early in their careers. A more aggressive tactic was known as "booming": a publisher's crew would buy dozens of tickets to a public event and sing the target song repeatedly until the crowd had absorbed it. Louis Bernstein of Shapiro, Bernstein and Co. recalled taking his crew to cycle races at Madison Square Garden, where they had a pianist and a singer with a large horn singing a song thirty times a night to crowds of twenty thousand people. When the audience left, they were singing the song whether they wanted to or not.

  Vaudeville performers visiting New York would stop at multiple Tin Pan Alley firms to stock up on material. Famous stars received free copies of new numbers or were paid to perform them, since publishers understood that a recognizable name singing a song was the most effective advertisement available.

• 5. Music, Race, and Modernity

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  Tin Pan Alley began with melodramatic ballads and comic novelty songs, but it proved willing to absorb whatever styles were capturing public attention. Ragtime and the cakewalk arrived first, then jazz and blues, though the Alley's integration of the latter two was incomplete. The business was oriented toward songs that amateur singers or small-town bands could perform from printed sheet music, which meant its engagement with African American musical forms was selective and often filtered.

  Scholars have described Tin Pan Alley's relationship to modernism as a channel for what one analysis called "a vernacular African-American impact coming from ragtime, 'coon' songs, the blues and jazz," alongside input from white highbrow and middlebrow culture. These styles were not merely adopted for artistic reasons; they fueled the economic engine that kept the Alley running and gave composers room to experiment continuously. In the 1910s and 1920s, pop songs and dance numbers built on jazz and blues forms poured out of the 28th Street offices in large volumes.

• 6. Law, Lobbying, and ASCAP

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  On the 11th of June, 1895, a group of Tin Pan Alley music houses established the Music Publishers Association of the United States. One of the organization's early goals was to lobby Congress to pass the Treloar Copyright Bill, which would have extended copyright terms for published music from 24 years to 40, with an additional 20-year renewal period rather than the existing 14. The bill would also have brought music under the Manufacturing clause of the International Copyright Act of 1891. The effort failed.

  The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, known as ASCAP, was founded in 1914 to protect the financial interests of established publishers and composers. Membership was not open to all comers; new members required sponsorship from existing ones.

  Decades later, Bob Dylan offered the bluntest eulogy for what Tin Pan Alley represented. In 1985, he stated plainly: "Tin Pan Alley is gone. I put an end to it. People can record their own songs now." Dylan was referring to the conventions of professional songwriters writing for other performers, a model that artists of his generation had displaced by the 1960s.

• 7. War, Propaganda, and Limits

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  During the Second World War, the federal government looked to Tin Pan Alley as a source of patriotic material. The Office of War Information, which oversaw the project, believed the music industry held "a reservoir of talent and competence capable of influencing people's feelings and opinions" and that it might exercise "even greater influence during wartime" than George M. Cohan's "Over There" had during the First World War. Congress debated whether musicians and entertainers should be exempted from the draft to keep them available for morale work at home; the proposal was contested by those who felt only more direct contributions to the war effort justified exemption.

  The government's hopes ran into a practical obstacle. As Kathleen E. R. Smith wrote in her book God Bless America: Tin Pan Alley Goes to War, "escapism seemed to be a high priority for music listeners," meaning the composers of Tin Pan Alley struggled to write a war song that would appeal both to civilians and the armed forces simultaneously. By the time the war ended, no single song had emerged that matched the cultural reach of "Over There" from the previous war.

  The question of whether Tin Pan Alley produced more war-related songs during World War II than during World War I remains unresolved. John Bush Jones, in The Songs That Fought the War: Popular Music and the Home Front, cites Jeffrey C. Livingstone's claim that output during World War I was actually higher, while Jones himself argues that documentary evidence suggests World War II output was probably the greatest in any American war. The debate remains open.

• 8. Legacy and Place

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  On the 10th of December, 2019, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated five buildings at 47-55 West 28th Street as individual landmarks, following advocacy by the "Save Tin Pan Alley" initiative of the 29th Street Neighborhood Association. Project director George Calderaro and other supporters then formed the Tin Pan Alley American Popular Music Project to carry the effort forward.

  On the 2nd of April, 2022, the City of New York officially co-named the stretch of 28th Street between Broadway and 6th Avenue as "Tin Pan Alley," a name the block had informally carried since the turn of the 20th century.

  Brill Building songwriter Neil Sedaka described that later institution as a natural outgrowth of Tin Pan Alley, noting that older songwriters were still working in Tin Pan Alley firms while younger ones like Sedaka found their work a few blocks away. Bob Geddins's blues song "Tin Pan Alley (AKA The Roughest Place in Town)," recorded by Jimmy Wilson, reached the top ten on the R&B chart in 1953 and became a favorite of Stevie Ray Vaughan, who covered it many times. A Times Square bar named Tin Pan Alley, which operated from the 1970s into the early 1980s under owners Steve d'Agroso and Maggie Smith, later inspired the HBO series The Deuce, which renamed it The Hi-Hat.