The way to Tin Pan Alley : American popular song, 1866-1910 /

This informative survey of publishers, producers, the fickle public, singers, and other entertainers is a chronicle of changes reflected in songs--sentimental ballads, waltzes, rags, marches, and other types--of a people moving from rural, post-Civil War society to industrialized urbanization by the beginning of WW I. Concert, vaudeville, minstrel, and variety show venues are described as the entertainment choice of an increasingly prosperous populace with little knowledge of, or appreciation for, art music. Tawa's attempt to minimize or halfheartedly describe technical musical terms is clumsy and unsuccessful; appropriate vocabulary accompanied by a definitive glossary would have been better. Worthwhile for its own sake and as a prelude to Isaac Goldberg's Tin Pan Alley (1961) and Isaac Goldberg and Isidore Witmark's The Story of the House of Witmark (1939), this book for general readers includes a bibliography of books and songs and an anthology of a dozen songs. -R. Zierolf, University of Cincinnati