Alexander's Ragtime Band

Composer Irving Berlin and singer Emma Carus

In March 1911, the Ted Snyder Company in New York City employed the 23-year-old Irving Berlin as a Tin Pan Alley songwriter.[19] One morning after arriving at work, Berlin decided to compose an instrumental ragtime number.[19] By this time, the ragtime phenomenon popularized by pianist Scott Joplin and other African-American musicians had begun to wane,[20] and over a decade had passed since the syncopated genre's initial heyday in the Gay Nineties.[19]

A tireless workaholic, Berlin composed the piece while in the noisy offices of Ted Snyder's music publishing firm where "five or six pianos and as many vocalists were making bedlam with songs of the day."[21] Berlin composed the lyrics of the song as a narrative sequel to his earlier 1910 composition "Alexander and His Clarinet".[7] This earlier composition recounts the reconciliation between an African-American musician named Alexander Adams and his flame Eliza Johnson as well as highlights Alexander's innovative musical style.[lower-alpha 2][8] Berlin's friend Jack Alexander, a cornet-playing African-American bandleader, inspired the title character.[9]

By the next day, Berlin completed four pages of notes for the copyist-arranger.[22] Berlin registered the song in the name of the Ted Snyder Company as E252990 and published it on March 18, 1911.[23] Upon playing the composition for others,[24] listeners criticized the song as too lengthy ("running beyond the conventional 32 bars"), too rangy, and not "a real ragtime number".[25] In fact, the tune is a march as opposed to a rag and barely contains a trace of syncopation.[26] Its sole notability consists of quotes from Swanee River and a bugle call.[18] Due to such criticisms, the tune unimpressed listeners at the Ted Snyder Company.[25]

Collins & Harlan released the first phonograph recording of the song in May 1911.

Undaunted by the lackluster response, Berlin submitted the song to Jesse L. Lasky, a Broadway theater producer planning an extravagant debut for his nightclub theater called the Follies Bergère.[25] Lasky hesitated to incorporate the pseudo-ragtime number into his show.[27] When the show opened on April 27, 1911, Lasky chose only to use its melody whistled by performer Otis Harlan.[27] Thus the song failed to find an appreciative audience.[28]

Fortunately for Berlin, vaudeville singer and baritone Emma Carus liked his humorous composition, and she introduced the song on April 18, 1911, at the American Music Hall in Chicago.[10] She next embarked on a tour of the Midwest in Spring 1911.[10] Consequently, music historians credit Carus for showcasing the song to the country and helping contribute to its immense popularity.[11] In gratitude, Berlin credited Carus on the cover of the sheet music.[11] The catchy song became indelibly linked with Carus in the public consciousness, although rival performers such as Al Jolson later co-opted the hit tune.[29]

Amid the success of Carus' national tour, the comedic duo of Arthur Collins and Byron G. Harlan released a phonograph recording of the song on May 23, 1911, which became the best-selling record in the United States for ten consecutive weeks.[3] Five days later, Berlin performed the song himself on May 28, 1911, in a special charity performance of the first Friars Frolic by the New York Friars Club at the New Amsterdam Theater.[30] A fellow composer in attendance, George M. Cohan, instantly recognized the catchiness of the tune and told Berlin that the song would be an obvious hit.[31] Soon after, Berlin's jaunty melody "sold a million copies of sheet music in 1911, then another million in 1912, and continued to sell for years afterwards."[11] Alexander's Ragtime Band became "the number one song from October 1911 through January 1912."[11]

Although neither Irving Berlin's first commercial hit nor his first composition to attract international attention, "Alexander's Ragtime Band" nevertheless catapulted Berlin's career.[5] American newspapers hailed Berlin's jumpy tune as the decade's musical sensation,[32] and he became a cultural luminary over night.[18] An adoring international press subsequently touted him as the "King of Ragtime",[33] an inaccurate title as the song "had little to do with ragtime and everything to do with ragtime audacity, alerting Europe to hot times in the colonies."[34] Baffled by this new title, Berlin publicly insisted that he did not originate ragtime but merely "crystallized it and brought it to people's attention."[35] Historian Mark Sullivan later claimed that, with the auspicious debut of "Alexander's Ragtime Band", Berlin abruptly "lifted ragtime from the depths of sordid dives to the apotheosis of fashionable vogue."[36]

Although not a traditional ragtime song,[6] Berlin's jaunty composition kickstarted a ragtime jubilee—a belated popular celebration of the musical style which African-American composers such as Scott Joplin had originated a decade earlier in the 1890s.[lower-alpha 3] The positive international reception of "Alexander's Ragtime Band" in 1911 led to a musical and dance revival known as "the ragtime craze".[13]

Irene and Vernon Castle, c. 1912

At the time, ragtime music caught "its second wind" and ragtime dancing spread "like wildfire."[37] One dancing couple in particular who exemplified this faddish sensation were Vernon and Irene Castle.[38] The charismatic, trendsetting duo frequently danced to Berlin's "Alexander's Ragtime Band" and his other modernist compositions.[26] The Castles' modern dancing paired with Berlin's modern songs came to embody the ongoing culture clash between the waning propriety of the Edwardian era and the waxing joviality of the Ragtime revolution on the eve of World War I.[39] The Daily Express wrote in 1913 that:

In every London restaurant, park and theater, you hear [Berlin's] strains; Paris dances to it; Vienna has forsaken the waltz; Madrid has flung away her castanets, and Venice has forgotten her barcarolles. Ragtime has swept like a whirlwind over the earth.[40]

Writers such as Edward Jablonski and Ian Whitcomb have emphasized the irony that, in the 1910s, even the upper class of the Russian Empire—a reactionary nation from which Berlin's Jewish forebears had been compelled to flee decades earlier[41]—became enamored with "the ragtime beat with an abandon bordering on mania."[42] Specifically, British socialite Lady Diana Cooper described Prince Felix Yusupov, an affluent Russian aristocrat who married the niece of Tsar Nicholas II and later murdered Grigori Rasputin, as dancing "around the ballroom like a demented worm" and shouting, "More ragtime!"[41]

Hearing of such behavior, commentators diagnosed such individuals as "bitten by the ragtime bug" and behaving like "a dog with rabies."[43] They declared that "whether [the ragtime mania] is simply a passing phase of our decadent culture or an infectious disease which has come to stay, like la grippe or leprosy, time alone can show."[44]

Publicity photograph of Irving Berlin with actors Tyrone Power, Alice Faye, and Don Ameche on the set of Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938).

As the years passed, Berlin's "Alexander's Ragtime Band" had many recurrent manifestations as many artists covered it: Billy Murray, in 1912;[45] Bessie Smith, in 1927;[18] Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, in 1930;[46] the Boswell Sisters, in 1934;[15] Louis Armstrong, in 1937;[18] Bing Crosby and Connee Boswell, in 1938;[18] Johnny Mercer, in 1945;[18] Al Jolson, in 1947;[18] Nellie Lutcher, in 1948, and Ray Charles in 1959.[18] Consequently, "Alexander's Ragtime Band" had a dozen hit covers within the half-a-century prior to 1960.[18]

Reflecting decades later upon the song's unlikely success, Berlin confessed his amazement at its immediate global acclaim and continued popularity.[47] He ascribed its unexpected success to the farcical and silly lyrics which were "fundamentally right" and "started the heels and shoulders of all America and a good section of Europe to rocking."[47]

In 1937, 20th Century Fox approached Irving Berlin to write a story treatment for an upcoming film tentatively titled Alexander's Ragtime Band.[48] Berlin agreed to write a story outline for the film which featured twenty-six of Berlin's well-known musical scores.[49] During press interviews promoting the film prior to its premiere, Berlin decried articles by the American press which painted ragtime as jazz's forerunner.[50] Berlin stated: "Ragtime really shouldn't be called 'the forerunner of jazz' or 'the father of jazz' because, as everyone will tell when they hear some of the old rags, ragtime and jazz are the same."[50]

Released on August 5, 1938, Alexander's Ragtime Band starring Tyrone Power, Alice Faye, and Don Ameche became a smash hit and grossed in excess of five million dollars.[51] Soon after the film's release, writer Marie Cooper Dieckhaus filed a plagiarism lawsuit.[52] After Dieckhaus presented evidence at the trial, a federal judge ruled in Dieckhaus' favor that Berlin had stolen the plot of her unpublished 1937 manuscript and used many of its elements for the film.[53] Dieckhaus had submitted the unpublished manuscript in 1937 to various Hollywood studios, literary agents, and other individuals for their perusal.[52] The judge believed that, after rejecting her manuscript, Berlin nonetheless appropriated much of her work.[52] In 1946, an appellate court reversed the ruling on appeal.[54]