Tin Pan Alley

Tin Pan Alley denotes both the New York sheet-music publishing district centred on West 28th Street and the body of American popular song it produced between the 1880s and the 1930s. Staff songwriters including *Irving Berlin*, *George Gershwin* and *Cole Porter* worked to a commercial formula of verse and repeated chorus, plugged relentlessly by song demonstrators and vaudeville performers. Its output — ragtime songs, sentimental ballads, novelty numbers and early jazz standards — established the professional songwriting industry and supplied much of the repertoire later codified as the Great American Songbook.