EVERY time you turn around these days, another golden age is being celebrated. Nostalgia gilds the past, bad hairdos and all, and the present, to which we are wedded for better or worse, never quite seems equal to the glorious times we keep compulsively half-remembering.
Some sentimental journeys, however, are justified -- even vital, if we're ever to benefit from traditions inarguably richer than our current efforts. Such is the case with the era celebrated in "The House That George Built," Wilfrid Sheed's bouncily written, impressionistic history of American songwriters from the first half of the 20th century. These are the composers, lyricists and composer-lyricists who found their sound in the Jazz Age and spread it from Tin Pan Alley and Broadway to Hollywood and the Hit Parade.
Golden ages inevitably call for a bit of calendar fudging. History doesn't stop and start on a dime. Sheed's range of dates -- "from the birth of radio circa 1922 until its death by TV and reruns in the mid-1940s" -- serves to a certain extent as a narrative convenience, whose flexibility varies with the author's interest. Burton Lane and Cy Coleman are in; Leonard Bernstein and Kander & Ebb are out. And despite having made his name by the end of World War I, Jerome Kern gazes down from Sheed's "personal Mount Rushmore," a monumental gathering that also includes Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers. The rationale: Kern's quietly revolutionary, jazz-inflected score for "Show Boat" in 1927 puts him smack in the center of the groundswell.
Glad to have all that settled. "The House That George Built," as the author himself points out straightaway, isn't a book for hairsplitting academics, though only the most dunderheaded PhDs would question Sheed's breadth of knowledge. A musicologist he admittedly is not, but he knows the tunes as well as any armchair expert, and he has interviewed a few of the songwriters he loves (as well as surviving friends and family members) and read the available criticism -- notably Alec Wilder's "American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950" and Max Wilk's "They're Playing Our Song." He blends it all together with a literary sensibility that mixes biographical anecdote, cultural history and high-wattage moonbeams of critical insight that light up the old standards.
