America’s Music Master

Jerome Kern may have been carried away by an excess of enthusiasm when he paid his now-familiar tribute to Irving Berlin--he “has no place in American music; he is American music”--but the overstatement from one professional to another could at least be plausibly defended. For in the history of American popular music no composer ever succeeded so often, so accurately, so memorably in catching the moods of successive eras and expressing in such apt words and music what people felt and thought and wanted to say and hear. Berlin was a craftsman of prodigious talent and staggering output. His colleague Sammy Cahn once suggested that a songwriter could feel gratified if, after 50 years of work, he had produced a half-dozen immediately identifiable tunes. Berlin, he said, had written 60. The word “standard,” referring to songs that remain favorites generation after generation, might well have been coined just to describe Berlin’s works.

Artists are rewarded for the pleasures they provide. They are cherished when what they have created endures and continues to delight. The comedian George Carlin once satirically described the ephemeral and forgettable nature of most contemporary pop music--”Yesterday at the top of the charts, today a golden oldie!” Many of Berlin’s 1,500 published songs were inevitably of transitory interest, but among them is a catalogue of classics whose astonishing freshness and appeal assures that they will never be thought of as relics of an earlier age. These are songs--”Always,” “Blue Skies,” “Easter Parade,” “White Christmas,” “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” among scores of others--that are likely to be performed for as long as American music lasts.

Berlin led a remarkably creative life, and lived an almost classic American success story. An immigrant whose family fled the pogroms of czarist Russia, with virtually no formal schooling and utterly without musical training, he won fame and riches simply through the overwhelming assertion of his prolific talent. Irving Berlin died the other day at the age of 101. For the better part of his life he was a musical legend. The legacy of that life provides a lasting gift to his country.