Not Wilder

I finally got around to reading Wilfrid Sheed's The House That George Built. I've been planning on checking it out since it was published last year. It's a journey through pre-rock American popular song, emphasizing the melody writers. All such books must be measured against the definitive text, Alec Wilder's American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950, and I'm afraid Sheed falls short.

Sheed, for the most part, spends a chapter per composer, but rather than analyze the tunes (and it's notes he cares about--he spends little time on lyrics), he writes impressionistically, assuming we aleady know and love them. I'm not demanding he be systematic in his appreciation, but I'd like more than snatches of feelings and biographical anecdotes.

He does attempt to put Gershwin at the center of American popular music, which is a bit unorthodox. (Wilder liked him least of the Big Five--Berlin, Kern, Gershwin, Rodgers and Porter.) And he makes an interesting point about how 1920s tunes shouldn't be compared to the more sophisticated songs of the 1930s, even though we tend to group them together. He also has some decent chapters about relatively less famous songwriters who mostly toiled in movies, such as Harry Warren and Jimmy Van Heusen.

But considering what a talented writer he is and, apparently, how much research he did, the book is unfocused, and turns out to be a disappointing mishmosh.

PS The character in Guys And Dolls is Benny Southstreet, not Benny Southgate.