AuthorTalk: ‘City Songs and American Life’ by Michael Lasser

Author and syndicated radio host Michael Lasser will speak about the Great American Songbook tradition. His new book is entitled City Songs and American Life, 1900-1950. Nothing defines the songs of the great American songbook more richly and persuasively than their urban sensibility. During the first half of the twentieth century, songwriter such as Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, Dorothy Fields, George, and Ira Gershwin, and Thomas ‘Fats’ Waller flourished in New York City, the home of Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Harlem. Many of these remarkably deft and forceful creators were native New Yorkers. Others got to Gotham as fast as they could. Either way, it was as if, from their vantage point on the West Side of Manhattan, these artists were describing America–not its geography of politics, but its heart–to Americans and to the world at large.