Where does the phrase ‘Tin Pan Alley’ come from?
There’s a convincing argument to be made that pop music as we know it stems from West 28th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in the Flower District of Manhattan, New York City. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, this was the world’s nerve centre for music publishing and songwriting and would later go by the nickname ‘Tin Pan Alley’. It was the business practises pioneered here that would inform the early days of pop music.
Offices full of songwriters would write the track of the day, send them down to the printing presses, and publish the sheet music within days of their creation. The popularisation of the vinyl record in the 1930s threatened to kill Tin Pan Alley as a whole. Instead, it merely forced it to evolve into the Brill Building scene that gave the world some of the greatest pop music of the 1950s and 1960s.
If anything, it was rock ‘n’ roll that was the ultimate nail in the coffin for the very concept. Record labels started relying on artists themselves for their songwriting output and hiring in-house songwriters for those who couldn’t. The self-contained nature of Tin Pan Alley, less a street and more a business, wouldn’t last much longer after that.
Yet its influence was felt all over the world. By the 1920s, Denmark Street in Central London’s West End became known as “Britain’s Tin Pan Alley”, due to its collection of music shops. Because of that, more music industry types started setting up their offices there, which meant that it, too, suddenly became the stomping grounds for all of London’s songwriters.
How did it get the name ‘Tin Pan Alley’?
By now, the phrase “Tin Pan Alley” is so enmeshed with pop music that we don’t really question it, but step back a little and you’ll realise just how weird a name it is. Well, the truth is that, like most things from the late 1800s, we don’t really know for sure. However, there are a few theories that get passed around.
The most likely option comes from a throwaway line Monroe H Rosenfeld wrote in the New York Herald. Due to the sheer number of “cheap upright pianos” being played by the songwriters working on that street, he likened the noise one heard walking down it to the banging of tin pans together in an alley.
It must be said that the original article containing this term has never been tracked, but Rosenfeld has been credited with the term by several other sources, like The Grove Dictionary of American Music. The most likely choice is that this article circulated among those who worked there, and they took on the name as an unofficial badge of honour.
The first time we can locate an article referring to it as such is from 1908, when The Hampton Magazine published a report on the street with the headline “Tin Pan Alley”. An inauspicious name, perhaps, but its legacy speaks for itself as an indelible part of music history.
