[78-L] Berlin's "trunk songs"

[Cary Ginell]

In Laurence Bergreen's biography of Berlin, he writes,

"Even Berlin's frequent misfired possessed some residual value. In Tin Pan Alley parlance, they were trunk songs; songs to be saved for the future....In the early stages of his career, Berlin was sufficiently organized to maintain and active backlog of trunk songs, to which he turned when he required inspiration and which he freely cannibalized."

This organization, even early in his career, indicates that Berlin probably did not literally keep his old, failed songs and fragments in a trunk, but in some other receptacle - probably a filing cabinet as Mike suggests. Berlin was a conservative; meticulous, miserly, insecure, and insecure, but he was a thorough professional, even from the beginning. The specific passage in the biography referring to "God Bless America" indicates precisely where the song fragment came from:

This was the anthem he had deleted from the score for "Yip! Yip! Yaphank" nearly twenty-one years before, but had kept on file, along with countless other fragments. Had it been left to Berlin to dig out the antique song himself, he might never have found it, but he turned to his secretary, Mynna, and said, "Go to the 'Yip! Yip! Yaphank!' file and get a copy of 'God Bless America.' Even Mynna, who was well organized, had a difficult time locating the song, because the transcript had no title, but eventually she was able to produce it for her boss."

Cary Ginell

> 
> >  >  C'mon, did he really use a steamer trunk???  That is such a cliche.
> 
> On 8/21/2011 5:56 PM, David Lewis wrote:
>  > Berlin famously had a "steamer trunk;" he had several, in fact. He 
> even referred to certain
>  > of his pieces as "trunk songs." . . .   Why would you question such a 
> small detail as that,
>  > other than just to bicker?
> 
> 
> Actually it was meant as a joke, as is most of the rest of this posting.  But it is also legitimately asking if you have specific authoritative info of the existence of a steamer trunk rather than a file cabinet or other normal office accommodations, such as a photograph including such a trunk in his office or home, or a contemporary account describing his office, such as the article I just came across describing the weird things in  Robert Benchley's Manhattan apartment written shortly after his death.  We know of Irving's transposing piano, and of some of his other quirks. Maybe he was old fashioned and still used a trunk, but gosh, he had an established office and staff and was still writing in the 1960s.
>