Tin Pan Alley
American music has its landmarks. New Orleans is the birthplace of jazz and the blues took root in the Mississippi delta. Bluegrass came down from the Appalachian Mountains and Cajun music and Zydeco swirled out of the bayous of Louisiana. Latino drifted in from Mexico and the Caribbean.
There was jazz, swing, and big band jump in the dance halls of St. Louis and Kansas City. Chicago became home to the urban blues, while rhythm-and-blues and rockabilly met in Memphis. Motown was soul, and Nashville, country. So …where is our grandest metropolis, our Gotham, on this musical map? New York wrote the songs.
West 28th street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue was called “tin pan alley” after a reporter noted that when the song writers were pounding away on their pianos, it sounded like the crashing of tin pans.
From the mid-1880s until the depression, this musical row accounted for most of the popular songs of the day. When the phonograph and radio replaced the parlor piano, Tin Pan Alley drifted into silence. But within a decade, a new Broadway address would take its place. And that’s another story.
