The Great American Songbook: 201 Favorites You Ought to Know (& Love)

In an age of ubiquitous music and countless new songs releasing every minute, the Great American Songbook endures. After all, the Songbook--that sprawling canon of popular songs, standards, and show tunes from roughly the 1920s through the 1950s--is a foundational text of American pop music. Rare indeed is the song that doesn’t in some way draw on this magnificent corpus, and rare is the person who hasn’t heard at least a few of its most enduring melodies.

Nonetheless, the Songbook is broader and deeper than most listeners can imagine, and on the margins, the question of whether this or that song should be included is the source of regular arguments among scholars and buffs alike. Attempting to plumb its depths can be a daunting prospect.

Enter Steven Suskin, who has been writing about music since the days that Rodgers, Arlen, and Berlin still roamed the streets of Manhattan. In this carefully curated and cheerfully opinionated guidebook, Suskin surveys 201 of the most significant selections from the Songbook, ranging from celebrated masterpieces to forgotten gems. Year by year, he puts songwriters and their contributions in their context, and explains what makes each song such a distinctive treat--whether felicitous melody, colorful harmony, compositional originality, or merely the sheer, irreducible joy of listening to it. Old and new favorites await all readers of this painstakingly compiled, enthusiastically written catalog.

Steven Suskin has led a well-rounded life in the Broadway theater on both sides of the footlights. He fifteen books include The Sound of Broadway Music, Second Act Trouble, Opening Night on Broadway, and Offstage Observations. He produced Forever Plaid and William Finn’s Falsettoland. He has written more than 1,000 columns, reviews, and liner notes for Playbill, Variety, and The Huffington Post, and is currently critic and founding editor of New York Stage Review.