‘B-Side’ is another lament of Songbook era’s demise

Book brings praise for era of music with Sinatra, more.

Can we stop mourning the Great American Songbook already?

No, and yes, says Ben Yagoda.

In the often engaging, sometimes infuriating book “The B-Side,” Yagoda, whose past books included such topics as The New Yorker, the art of writing and Will Rogers, explores the rise and fall of the professional songwriting system from the 1920s through the 1960s.

Diving into the lives of the men and women who wrote the songs that made the whole world sing, Yagoda adds heart and backstory to the standards that defined American popular music for half a century.

Such songs, he asserts, share some traits: They’re “sophisticated...and melodic, constructed with, at the minimum, superior craftsmanship, and sometimes with remarkable innovation and artistry.”

During a seeming golden age, the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Lorenz Hart, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein — the A team of American composers from the heart of the Songbook period — consistently churned out superior, distinctive songs that rang true and clean, and yet were malleable enough to be reinterpreted again and again.

And it all came to a crashing halt in the 1950s, Yagoda argues, when rock ‘n’ roll took the popular music business in a different direction (read: downward).

Don’t get him wrong: Rock standards such as “That’ll Be the Day” and “Like a Rolling Stone” are “great songs,” Yagoda admits. “But,” he adds, “they are a different kind of song, their amazing energy generated by an emotional release expressed in three chords, a pounding beat, and shout-out-loud vocals.”

While making this argument, “The BSide” does a good job depicting the world of songwriting in the 1950s, when young songwriters following in the footsteps of giants tried to make their own imprint in a changing world — and, as Yagoda shows despite himself, succeeding. In a time when the Songbook was supposedly closing, superb craftsmen such as Cy Coleman, Burt Bacharach and Stephen Sondheim kept writing new chapters.

Disclosure: I have little patience with “it was better in the old days” arguments about pop culture. Yes, Hollywood’s Dream Factory created “Casablanca,” “Singin’ in the Rain” and “The Searchers”; it also stamped out hundreds of uninspired, even insipid movies that had Jimmy Stewart singing, Humphrey Bogart as a mad scientist and John Wayne as Genghis Khan.

Same with the Great American Songbook era. The crank-‘em-out system that most of those great songwriters worked under yielded some of the best writing ever ( just about anything by Rodgers and Hart), but also some of the worst (“Mama Will Bark,” anyone?).

Sure, many of the bestwritten songs from that era still live and breathe, thanks to brilliant craftsmanship, creativity and a lot of hard work. But so do the bestwritten songs in the postSongbook era; as Yagoda himself notes, Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday” is one of the most recorded songs on the planet, and great writers like Randy Newman (one of many songwriters interviewed for “The BSide”) continue to turn out songs that would have fit neatly in singers’ repertoires 50 years ago.

In tracing the history of songwriting during the Songbook era, Yagoda shows that talent (and a little luck) can trump even the most creativityaverse business model the music industry has to offer, from Tin Pan Alley to tone-deaf record labels. So, regardless of where music is heading, the song — when it’s a great song — remains the same: timeless.

‘The B-Side’ does a good job depicting the world of songwriting in the 1950s, when young songwriters following in the footsteps of giants tried to make their own imprint in a changing world ...