song-plugger (1907), song-plugging (1916)

Benjamin Zimmer bgzimmer at RCI.RUTGERS.EDU
Thu Jun 30 17:22:14 UTC 2005


On Thu, 30 Jun 2005 09:36:23 -0400, Page Stephens <hpst at EARTHLINK.NET> wrote:

>Unless I am mistaken song plugger could be used in two different senses.
>
>The first was a person who worked for a company which sold sheet music.
>
>"In the 1910s and 1920s, if you went into a music store to buy sheet
>music you would likely find a song plugger—a pianist and singer who
>would perform songs for you in the same way we preview CDs in a record
>store today. If you had walked into Jerome H. Remick & Company (one of
>the famous "Tin Pan Alley" companies) in 1915, that song plugger might
>well have been the young George Gershwin. From this humble beginning,
>Gershwin went on to become both the best-known composer of popular
>music and the most popular composer of concert music in America."
>http://www.wwnorton.com/enjoy/shorter/composers/gershwin.htm
>
>The sense in which Benjamin's quotes use it is somewhat different in
>that it deals with vaudevillians who plugged songs in their acts. This
>was also common and is related to a similar phenomenon which involved a
>person who wrote a song and then found some vaudevillian or early
>recording artist who would perform it in return for getting their name
>on the song and a percentage of the profits.

Good point, but I think only the 1907 cite uses "song-plugger" to refer to
a vaudevillian who gets paid by a publisher to perform a song:

>>1907 _Washington Post_ 14 Jul. (Magazine) 2/6 But vaudeville people
>>with any desire to keep up in the first rank must avoid the reputation
>>that comes to 'song pluggers.'

In the later cites, the "plugger" is not the performer but the person
employed by the publisher to lobby on the song's behalf. This practice is
vividly described in the short story by Jack Lait containing the 1918 cite
that I gave:

-----
1918 _Chicago Tribune_ 27 Jan. V4/2 ["The Curse of an Aching Heart: The
Song Writer Finally Got What Was Coming to Him in Royalties." by Jack
Lait, copyright 1917]
The theater is an indispensable ally of the song factory, for it is on the
stage that songs are "made" and popularized. One headliner can sell a
million copies of a likely ditty by singing it one season; and the
vaudeville canaries collect thousands of dollars as brigandage for singing
the "numbers" that they select; I have known one to draw $300 every week
from six publishers at $50 every week from six publishers at $50 each, for
as many songs that she used in her repertoire.
That is the highest and least tainted manifestation of that little known,
unsung institution called "song plugging." It employs thousands of men and
women. The smallest of the penny ante publishers has a dozen. They haunt
dressing rooms of "small time" variety houses, importuning, arguing,
bribing to get singers to "do" their songs. ...
>From two bits to a threat, from a promise to a bank roll, every instrument
that can be of effect is used by the pluggers to induce, force, or
persuade performers to advertise their goods by displaying them vocally,
instrumentally, or in any manner in which a song may be called to the
attention of an ear that has 10 cents with which to buy a copy next day.
...
More than a million songs, probably, have been published in this country,
and every one of them has been "plugged" somewhat as described, for even
the more ethical publishers maintain standing corps of pluggers to
interest the "hicks" in the theatrical bush leagues, who are accustomed to
having it done thus.
-----

And this quote suggests a more nuanced typology of song shillers:

-----
1917 _N.Y. Times_ 23 Dec. X6/1 ["The Argot of Vaudeville"]
The men who endeavor to interest the artists in songs back stage are "song
runners," and the men "planted" in the audience to applaud are "song
boosters" and "song pluggers." The "boosters" are the enthusiasts who join
in choruses or softly whistle choruses, while the "pluggers" specialize in
wild applause.
-----


--Ben Zimmer



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