Few would argue the premise that Leonard Bernstein’s music sounds prototypically American. Most of his works include numerous passages that would only have been written by someone from the United States, especially one active from the 1940s to the 1980s. His frequent cultivation of musical tropes associated with various types of jazz, blues, Tin Pan Alley, rock, Latin music, and concert music by the likes of Aaron Copland help make Bernstein’s interest in an American sound perhaps the single most significant factor that defines his musical style. This chapter considers how that style developed in terms of when and how he discovered and incorporated major American musical styles. The musical influences blend with other inspirations from Jewish music and Western concert music to render Bernstein one of the most eclectic composers of his generation.

The American Songbook has been a fruitful source of improvisation for jazz musicians, either through artists interpreting those songs themselves, or crafting new songs from their chord changes as bebop musicians did prolifically in the 1940s. This chapter investigates this influence, beginning with the debt that jazz improvisers owe to Tin Pan Alley composers, before turning that relationship around to consider how the success of those same songwriters depended on an ongoing attempt to identify what made jazz appealing to American listeners and distil aspects of that enigmatic essence into the commercially viable object of popular song. In examples like Harold Arlen’s “Stormy Weather,” Irving Berlin’s “Putting on the Ritz,” or any number of Cole Porter compositions, we see the workmanlike creators of Tin Pan Alley incorporating not just musical elements associated with jazz, but also a more general “sensibility,” intended to recreate the music’s blues-informed world-weariness or performative impertinence.

The Crash of ’29 has come, and the Depression anthem “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” is written. The Bonus Army marchers and Cox’s Army descend upon Washington, singing. Rural depression and desperation continue – in folk song, blues, Tin Pan Alley song, and corridos. In “Bloody Harlan,” Kentucky, Florence Reece demands to know “Which Side Are You On?” and Aunt Molly Jackson leads the way in singing the coal miners’ struggle into the national conscience. The nine “Scottsboro Boys” are imprisoned, one of whom – Olen Montgomery – writes his own harrowing “Jailhouse Blues” in condemnation. In New York, Aaron Copland and Charles Seeger agonize over the “correct” way to write revolutionary song, and Black composers Florence Price, William Dawson, and William Grant Still are faced with the mixed blessing of the success of the white-penned Porgy and Bess. The argument over primitivism continues in the Haitian operas of White and Matheus as well as Hall Johnson’s groundbreaking Run, Little Chillun. Down South, the spiritual is transformed into some of the world’s greatest struggle anthems, and John Handcox emerges as the “Sharecropper’s Troubadour” for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Strike songs resound across the West Coast and the industrial heartland, while the queer world swings to the defiant songs of Pansies and Bulldaggers.

Woman suffragists and labor activists continue to sing together, in more than one language, while, in Chicago, the Columbian Exposition of 1893 introduces a new musical genre – ragtime – to the world. Black composers and lyricists – Scott Joplin, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Will Marion Cook, Harry T. Burleigh, Bob Cole, and the brothers James Weldon and J. Rosamond Johnson – work to free themselves from the debasements of the “coon song.” Black operatic singers like Marie Selika Williams and Sissieretta Jones carve out their careers against the tide of popular minstrelsy. A strange new phenomenon – Filipinos in “coon songs” – reflects the latest muscle flex of US Manifest Destiny: the Spanish-American War and the acquisition of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and – for good measure – Hawai’i, all richly captured in popular song. Lili’uokalani’s overthrow and Hawaiian annexation lead to two remarkable musical by-products of US imperialism: the infiltration of Puerto Rican kachi kachi music in Hawai’i and the unique work-song body – the hole hole bushi – of the Japanese plantation laborers – all women. Meanwhile, Tin Pan Alley has a field day with the newly seized territory, transforming a site of misery and loss into a popular music paradise with the likes of “Hula Hula Dream Girl,” “Along the Way to Waikiki,” and “Oh! How She Could Yacki Hacki Wiki Wacki Woo.”

When war broke out in August 1914, it was viewed with a mixture of disbelief and disinterest by Americans The government’s official stance of neutrality was widely supported by the general public, but at the same time there were also voices arguing for preparedness, and once Congress declared war on Germany in 1917, voices against American involvement were quickly silenced. This fundamental shift in public opinion from neutrality to total support for the war effort is mirrored in American sheet music from 1914 to 1919. During the war over 30,000 songs were composed and copyrighted, many in editions of thousands of copies. Sung in parlors, theaters, and bars, these songs — though not a part of official propaganda — had an undeniable impact on the American public’s attitude toward the country’s involvement in the war.

Noting Stravinsky’s recent interest in African American music in the Manchester Guardian, Ernest Newman remarked that Ragtime might have been better received in a cinema or restaurant. As a tribute to vapid entertainment, he averred, the piece was ‘hardly worth the while of a man of original genius’; Stravinsky, Newman claimed, had exhausted his compositional resources and – ‘having nothing urgent or vital of his own to say now’ – was busy ‘larking about boyishly among the more stereotyped musical humours of the day’.2 As a caricature of popular culture, in other words, Ragtime was beneath Stravinsky and, by extension, inappropriate fare for the concert hall. How should we understand this strange act of aesthetic transgression? Isn’t modernism supposed to maintain distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’?