Barney and Gloria: Revisiting Tin Pan Alley

As New York’s Tin Pan Alley era recedes into the past, scholars have the opportunity to reevaluate the primarily hit-driven narrative of twentieth-century popular music history. Revisiting the colorful careers of its inhabitants reveals the complex economy in which they worked, the power of great corporations and licensing bodies, and the indefatigable spirit required to persist in the music industry for decades. This is the story of two of these inhabitants, Barney Young and Gloria Parker. Barney was a music publisher, composer, personal manager, lawyer, and song plugger. Gloria, who was his co-composer, star performer, and fiancée, was a versatile bandleader, contralto, marimbist, and, most exceptionally, musical glasses virtuoso. Their story encompasses the days of live network big-band broadcasts, the calculated art of song plugging, the creation of BMI, the evolution of music royalties and licensing, the jukebox industry royalties controversy, licensing and copyright lawsuits against ASCAP, BMI, and the major networks, a suit against Disney regarding ownership of the song Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, and Gloria’s role playing the musical glasses in the Woody Allen film Broadway Danny Rose. Perusing Barney’s business records in their archival home at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where they comprise the “Morris and Barnard Young Music Business Records, 1832–1988,” is an opportunity to move toward a more nuanced “popular music” history that incorporates the entire economic landscape of the music industry in Tin Pan Alley, and the vital human stories behind it.