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Saying It With Songs: Popular Music and the Coming of Sound to Hollywood Cinema . By Katherine Spring . New York : Oxford University Press , 2013.
Increasingly, historians of film music are attending to the conversion-era soundtrack. Whereas scholars who address this period tend focus on scores and their composers1or technologies and industries,2Katherine Spring's Saying It with Songs looks at the discrete unit of the song in order to examine its role in promoting films and shaping narratives. This lens allows her to tell a story about the conversion in which a unique set of players--song pluggers, forgotten singers, and lyricists--all get starring roles. Perhaps even more importantly, Spring extends her focus beyond musicals. Songs were valuable components of films in a variety of genres, and their function in films that were not musicals is certainly understudied. Thus, the title of Spring's book is not only a play on the fabulous Al Jolson vehicle Say It with Songs (dir. Lloyd Bacon, 1929), it also prompts an intriguing question: what exactly does Hollywood cinema say with songs? Spring finds some surprising answers in film archives, legal cases, trade papers, and the films themselves.
The author's conscientious research suits her two-pronged approach: she examines the function of songs for Hollywood's methods of storytelling and its bottom line. Her book is organized according to an argument that takes both commercial and narrative aspects into consideration: "Changes to the relationship between the film and music industries in the late 1920s influenced the form of Hollywood's earliest sound films" (10). To support this point, Spring first unravels the often messy relationship between Tin Pan Alley and the Hollywood studios between 1927 and 1931. This connection forms part 1 of her book, which is all about industry. In chapter 1, Spring provides background on how popular music was written and sold during the 1920s. She takes readers through the sheet music, record, and radio markets to explain how the strategies used by songwriters and entrepreneurs in these fields would play...