Saying It With Songs: Popular Music and the Coming of Sound to Hollywood Cinema

Combining archival research with impressive scholarship, Spring offers a stimulating, provocative, and often paradigm-shifting study of how popular music shaped the very definition of cinema in its transformation from a silent to a sound medium. Lucid and lively, a must-read for anyone interested in the convergence of film and popular song in Hollywood. --Kathryn Kalinak, author of Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood and Film Music: A Very Short Introduction Finally, a book that creatively covers popular song's contribution to the coming of sound. Katherine Spring's SAYING IT WITH SONGS is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the connections between Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley. --Rick Altman, University of Iowa An engaging and thought-provoking exploration of heretofore largely uncharted territory- that transition between the coming of synchronized sound and the emergence of classical Hollywood practice. Combining archival research into the corporate and legal maneuverings of the studios as they move to take over music publishing with nicely articulated readings of films from the late 1920s and early 1930s, Saying It With Songs maps out the boom-and-bust cycle of early musicals and the reaction against them before musical and narrative conventions 'settle' around 1933. --Robynn Stilwell, Georgetown University Essential reading for historians of film and popular music. In it, the author combines impressive scholarship with conceptual clarity, making accessible to readers the complex changes that took place in the motion picture and music businesses resulting from the coming of sound. -he Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television