It was around 1910 that the American popular theater picked up its characteristic accent. It was a musical accent, and it came from jazz. Although Broadway did not employ actual jazz, it swiftly assimilated jazz syncopation and swing. As projected by white theater bands and carried over into popular songs, this jazz accent contributed more than anything else to the appeal of a new kind of musical show.

Theatergoers had also begun to demand stories that were American and up-to-date, and so the writers of the song lyrics learned to make up smart, catchy verses full of American locutions. To distinguish them from operettas — with their Old World ambience, aristocrats, and waltzes — these new shows were called musical comedies, or musicals.

The rise of the musical in the 1920s and 1930s was closely tied to the great outpouring of popular songs in this era. It was truly a golden age for song. Not all of them were written for musicals, of course. (Ellington, for example, wrote many songs that had no link to the theater.) But the theater provided songwriters with an extra fee and gave songs invaluable exposure, magnified after 1926 by “talking pictures.” Theater songs were popularized by the very successful movie musicals of the 1930s, as well as by radio and 78 rpm recordings.

The two principal composers of early American musical comedy were also composers of many favorite tunes: Jerome Kern and George Gershwin. Kern’s masterpiece, Show Boat (1927), has returned to the stage again and again, and Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935), which is more like a jazz opera than a musical, occupies a solid place in the operatic repertory.

Gershwin’s actual musicals are seldom heard because most of the plots now seem so silly — but there are exceptions, notably Of Thee I Sing (1931), a hilarious spoof of the presidential election process. There is a song from this show in Listening Exercise 5, page 27.