1. Allen Forte, The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era: 1924-1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 3.

2. Mary Ellin Barrett, Irving Berlin: A Daughter's Memoir (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994); Laurence Bergreen, As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin (New York: Penguin Books, 1990); Michael Freedland, Irving Berlin (New York: Stein and Day, 1974); Edward Jablonski, Irving Berlin: American Troubadour (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999); Ian Whitcomb, Irving Berlin and Ragtime America (New York: Limelight Editions, 1988); Alexander Woollcott, The Story of Irving Berlin (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1925).

3. Charles Hamm, Irving Berlin: Songs from the Melting Pot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

4. Freedland, Irving Berlin, 156.

5. Alec Wilder, American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972).

6. Forte, The American Popular Ballad.

7. David Carson Berry, "Dynamic Introductions: The Affective Role of Melodic Ascent and Other Linear Devices in Selected Song Verses of Irving Berlin," Int�gral 13 (forthcoming).

8. Quotations from the back flap of the dust jacket of the book under review.

9. Philip Furia, The Poets of Tin Pan Alley: A History of America's Great Lyricists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); idem, Ira Gershwin: The Art of the Lyricist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

10. See Hamm, Irving Berlin, chapter 3 (especially pp. 112-17).

11. Joel Whitburn, Pop Memories 1890-1954 (Menomonee Falls, Wis.: Record Research Inc., 1986).

12. Tim Brooks, [review of Whitburn book], ARSC [Association for Recorded Sound Collections] Journal 21/1 (1990): 134-41.

13. A compilation and index of the weekly lists is found in John R. Williams, This Was "Your Hit Parade" (Rockland, Maine: Courier-Gazette, 1973).

14.  Furia actually overstates the modal contrast: in the verse, only the first eight bars are in minor; the remaining twenty bars are in the relative major.

15. Regarding his musical qualifications, in the prefatory Acknowledgements, Furia admits that his initial musical insights were only "rudimentary," and he thanks Graham Wood, his "research assistant at the University of Minnesota," for helping to refine them (p. ix). (Wood is even given a "with the assistance of . . ." credit on the inside title page, under Furia's name.) As a writer on music himself, Wood has demonstrated his own expertise in the repertory in "The Development of Song Forms in the Broadway and Hollywood Musicals of Richard Rodgers, 1919- 1943" (Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Minnesota, 2000). Thus, the mistakes and misleading statements made by Furia--some of which will be detailed forthwith--suggest that Wood, whatever the nature of his earlier input, had little editorial authority over the final manuscript.

16. Consider, for example, the eight-bar phrase that begins the refrain of "Heat Wave" (1933): 31 syllables are assigned to a melody in which the eighth note receives more weight.

17. Wilder, American Popular Song, 98.

18. Furia is more on the mark when, on p. 95, he ascribes the ABCD form to the refrain of "Lazy" (1924); despite its elaboration of a few basic contour motives, it does superficially conform to such a letter scheme.

19. Wilder, 102, emphasis mine.

20. It seems clear, however, that he was intuitively aware of the key change (to F major) as he approached the refrain, because he introduced ^#4 of F, in preparation for an arrival on V of F, at the verse ending.

21. See Bloom, Hollywood Song: The Complete Film and Musical Companion, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (New York: Facts on File, 1995); American Song: The Complete Musical Theatre Companion, 1877-1995, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (New York: Schirmer/Prentice-Hall, 1996); and Tin Pan Alley: The Complete Popular Song Companion, 3 vols. (New York: Facts on File, 1996).

22. Steven Suskin, Berlin, Kern, Rogers, Hart, and Hammerstein: A Complete Song Catalogue (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1990).

23. See Appendix 2 of Hamm, Irving Berlin.

24. See Appendix 1 (pp. 335-62) of Jablonski, Irving Berlin: American Troubadour.

End of footnotes