Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [908]
By the time Keith and Albee moved into New York’s Union Square Theater in 1893, they had industrialized the master’s approach. The Union Square offered “continuous performance,” repeating acts throughout the day. Each was no less than seven and no more than twenty minutes long and fit for family viewing. The theater itself was refined too, staffed with a corps of boy ushers in Turkish costumes and with ladies’ room maids in lace caps and frilly aprons. Perhaps most important, the managers hired bouncers to cope with any men or boys who, accustomed to stag-house laxity, might shout obscenities at female performers from the galleries. They also banned smoking, hat wearing, whistling, stamping, spitting on the floor, and crunching peanuts. Not surprisingly, Brighton Beach and Manhattan Beach established tasteful music halls in which they offered patrons the new and respectable vaudeville.
THE ROOTS OF TIN PAN ALLEY
Union Square’s sheet music houses had long served primarily as distribution agencies for established songwriters, but in the 1880s, in tandem with the rise of vaudeville, they began producing what one advertised as “Songs Written to Order.” In 1886 Witmark and Sons, a Jewish firm like many of the new companies, segued from commercial printing into sheet music publishing and song production. The youthful brothers quickly discovered that test marketing before live audiences was the key to success. At first they kept the operation in the family: Julius, “the boy soprano,” became a popular performer at Tony Pastor’s, and gave stage-play to songs Isidore wrote. Those that caught on were quickly printed up and marketed.
As new entrepreneurs poured into the business, song salesmanship became a ferociously competitive affair. Rival song “pluggers” stalked popular vaudeville vocalists, snared them on streetcorners, and sang them their songs amid the passing throng. To get real stars to work their ditties into an act, pluggers would buy them drinks or dinners in Union Square restaurants, pay their board bill, purchase their railroad tickets to distant cities. They also wooed bandleaders, managers, and waiters, hired boys in the galleries to take up the chorus, and got organ grinders to spread their melodies throughout the city. In addition, they cultivated the growing number of vaudeville agents who worked in the Union Square area booking agencies supplying acts and songs to theaters and amusement parks across the country.
In the 1890s the stakes and purses grew larger, as evidenced by the Cinderella success of Charles K. Harris. Like most free-lance songwriters, Harris was at the bottom of the emerging industry, way below publishers and performers. When the Witmarks offered him an eighty-five-cent royalty check for one effort, the enraged Harris opened his own company and began churning out melodramatic songs about women wronged and vice reproved. In 1892 Harris wrote “After the Ball,” a pathetic tale of a young man doomed to eternal bachelorhood (“Long years have passed, child, I’ve never wed / True to my lost love, though she is dead.”) Harris got songstress May Irwin to introduce it at Tony Pastor’s, and within a few years it sold over two million copies.
Other million-plus sellers followed in the early 1890s, with some of the biggest hits packaging and marketing images of life in New York. “The Bowery” (1892), first sung in the musical comedy A Trip to Chinatown, was about the misadventures of a genteel young man who, on his first visit to the metropolis, disregarded advice to stay away from the working-class boulevard:
Oh, the night that I struck New York, I went out for a little walk.
Folks who are onto the city say, better far that I took Broadway.
But I was out to enjoy the sights: