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  • Saying It with Songs: Popular Music & The Coming of Sound to Hollywood Cinema by Katherine Spring
  • Kate Guthrie (bio)
Katherine Spring Saying It with Songs: Popular Music & The Coming of Sound to Hollywood Cinema New York: Oxford University Press, 2014: 229pp.

Whether in pursuit of employment or stardom, myriad people have, at one time or another, fallen prey to the bewitching glamour of Hollywood. In the late 1920s, it was the turn of songwriters, who migrated in their dozens from east to west to reap the benefits of the sound-film boom. Technological advances had at last made synchronised sound commercially viable and movie magnates were eager to embrace it. By December 1930, the vast majority of these hopeful musicians would find themselves without a contract. But in the interim, their productivity had helped to transform the relationship between popular music and film: a little more than four years previously, feature-length synchronised sound film had been a pipe dream; at the start of the new decade, more than half of the sound films produced by leading companies contained a popular song.

Despite the astonishing proliferation of popular music on early sound film, the medium’s seminal half-decade has attracted only modest scholarly attention. In part, this may simply reflect the fact that popular-music studies remains a relatively young discipline, with much unchartered terrain still to be explored. Katherine Spring’s new book, on the other hand, suggests that this has been a more calculated oversight. The ‘sheer quantity of songs […] in early sound films’, she argues, has made scholars uncomfortable, because it points to music’s appropriation by an industry more concerned with maximising profits than with producing works of art (3). The value of this as a claim about contemporary attitudes is questionable: the extent to which popular-music studies perpetuates traditional aesthetic hierarchies remains open for debate. As an observation about historical attitudes towards sound film, however, it is astute. Hollywood’s earliest interactions with the popular music industry were driven by the former’s desire to capitalise on the latter’s lucrative business. But with the novelty of popular song on the big screen quickly wearing thin, early attempts to incorporate such music were increasingly seen to undermine the narrative conventions established by silent cinema.

How this tension between ‘commerce and story-telling’ came about, and subsequently played out, forms the crux of Spring’s rich account (1). Her particular concern is ‘non-musical’ films, such as Westerns, comedies and crime dramas – a focus that offers a refreshing change from the more common subject of how Broadway adaptations paved the [End Page 237] way for the film musical. As Spring is careful to note, however, during the period in question the distinction between musical and non-musical film was less rigid than it subsequently became. In part because of the dominating influence of Broadway, and perhaps also because of the novelty factor, non-musical genres frequently featured popular song in both diegetic and non-diegetic capacities. But even as these instances tapped into the representational conventions established by Broadway, incorporating popular song into non-musical films also posed a distinct set of challenges, not least that the appeal of these films to alternative generic conventions (such as those of romantic comedy or detective drama) heightened the disruptive potential of popular song.

The first part of the book explores Hollywood’s relationship with Tin Pan Alley. The opening chapter sets the scene with a broad overview of how America’s Manhattan-based popular music industry functioned in the 1920s. In particular, Spring explores how popular song was promoted through a network of radio broadcasters, music publishers, Broadway producers, song-writers, and performers – a complex of media outlets that created and sustained a market for popular music. The second chapter goes on to describe how, when Hollywood began its conversion to sound, its major players bought into this network. Spring draws on a wealth of archival research, as she details how the final years of the decade saw major American film companies rush to invest in music publishing firms and to establish in-house song-writing departments. The driving force behind this short-lived...

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