Irving Berlin

Irving Berlin was born Israel Beilin in 1888 in the Russian Empire and emigrated to New York with his family at the age of five. Growing up in poverty on the Lower East Side, he worked as a singing waiter before turning to songwriting, largely self-taught and unable to read or write musical notation in the conventional way. He rose quickly in the Tin Pan Alley sheet-music trade, then moved into Broadway theater and Hollywood film, becoming one of the most prolific and successful American songwriters of the twentieth century.

Berlin's catalog spans ragtime, patriotic anthems, romantic ballads, and holiday standards, marked by simple, direct melodies and lyrics that reached a mass audience across decades of shifting popular taste. Songs such as «White Christmas», «God Bless America», «Blue Skies», «Always», and «Puttin' on the Ritz» became deeply embedded in American culture, with «White Christmas» earning him an Academy Award. His stage work, including the score for «Call Me Madam», brought him a Tony Award as well.

Composer Jerome Kern's remark that Berlin had no place in American music because he simply was American music captures his singular stature: a self-made immigrant songwriter whose work helped define the sound of the nation's popular song for much of the century.