Music: America's Master Songwriter :Irving Berlin: 1888-1989

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Irving Berlin knew what made his music so timelessly popular. "A good song," he once said, "embodies the feelings of the mob, and a songwriter is not much more than a mirror which reflects those feelings. I write a song to please the public -- and if the public doesn't like it in New Haven, I change it!"

The public liked it. When Berlin died last week at 101, he was the nation's most beloved songwriter, a Russian Jewish immigrant born Israel Baline, who rose from Cherry Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side to pride of place on Tin Pan Alley. Berlin's song is ended. But each time someone gazes up at blue skies, or wonders how deep is the ocean, or says it with music, his melodies linger on.

In comparison with his great contemporaries, Berlin wrote simple songs. Not for him the intricate rhythms and trick accents of a George Gershwin, although the strangely sinister Puttin' on the Ritz twists and turns back on itself like a stutter-stepping snake. Nor did Berlin, who wrote his own words, generally show Cole Porter's kind of cleverness, although he could put some English on a homely sentiment in a song like Lazy (1924): "I wanna peep through the deep/ Tangled wildwood,/ Counting sheep/ 'Til I sleep/ Like a child would./ With a great big valise full of books to read where it's peaceful/ While I'm killing time being lazy."

Berlin's musical signature was the sheer inevitability of his songs, the way they seemed to have always been around, like folk songs. Surely White Christmas is an authentic carol, not a number composed for the 1942 movie Holiday Inn. God Bless America must have been sung first by Washington's troops at Valley Forge, not by Kate Smith in 1938. And didn't Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning emerge from a pioneer encampment and not from a 1918 army musical called Yip, Yip, Yaphank?

Well, no. All three were products of a deceptively sophisticated professional who grew up with the country, reflecting America's experiences in his music. When the Baline family fled the Russian pogroms in 1892 for the tenements of New York, young Israel was four. The Statue of Liberty was only a couple of years older. His father Moses, a cantor, died when the boy was eight, so he hit the streets in search of work. Izzy sang for pennies anywhere he could find listeners, finally landing a job as a singing waiter in a raffish Chinatown bistro; it was there that he wrote his first song, Marie from Sunny Italy, in partnership with the cafe's pianist. When the song was published in 1907, a printer's error had given him a new name: I. Berlin.

"Once you start singing," Berlin said in later years, "you start thinking of writing your own songs. It's as simple as that." Although he could not read or write music (he never did learn), he could pick out a melody on the piano in the key of F sharp. In 1909 Berlin, now calling himself Irving because it sounded tonier, landed a $25-a-week job with a Tin Pan Alley publisher. Two years later, he picked his way into American musical history with Alexander's Ragtime Band. More a march than a rag, it made Berlin famous, erroneously, as the "ragtime king"; what it really made him was king of the pop song.