There really was a Tin Pan Alley, a stretch of 28th Street in Manhattan between Fifth Avenue and Broadway that became known as the Street of Songs. As a clearing house for the creation and dissemination of popular music, though, Tin Pan Alley extended through the saloons of the Bowery and the theaters of Broadway and ultimately beyond the boundaries of New York City. Tin Pan Alley was as much machinery as geography, an incipient pop music industry that anticipated the phonograph record and the radio while providing a soundtrack of the fin de siecle American synthesis.
There was money – sometimes a great deal of money – to be made from selling sheet music, the only available means to bring new songs across the country and into homes; and the creativity and business acumen of song pluggers with an ear for a tune and an eye to the balance sheet drove Tin Pan Alley. In this sense, the prototypical plugger may have been Milwaukee songwriter Charles K. Harris, who became his own publisher in 1885 and hung a Songs Written to Order sign in his office window soon thereafter. Harris’ greatest hit, “After the Ball,” gained a wide hearing when the composer paid musical theater star J. Aldrich Libbey $500 and a share of the royalties to place the song in the 1892 production A Trip to Chinatown. When “After the Ball” quickly became a hit, Harris turned down $10,000 for the remaining rights, a shrewd decision in light of the five million copies of sheet music the song ultimately sold.
Success on Tin Pan Alley could also be precarious. Novelist Theodore Dreiser’s brother Paul Dresser was a New York staff composer who also realized the advantages of his own publishing house. Dresser made and lost a fortune before writing “My Gal Sal,” but did not live to see the song’s success. At least “My Gal Sal,” which became the title of Dresser’s film biography, was his own work. After “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now” served as the title for the biopic of composer Joe E. Howard, Harold Orlob went to court and successfully established that he had written the melody while a staff composer in Howard’s publishing house.
