George M. Cohan is an American institution that most Americans don't know anything about; the closest anyone usually comes to Cohan is through his representation as a fictionalized character in the classic Hollywood film Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), where he was portrayed by James Cagney. Aficionados of the Broadway stage might remember Joel Grey's similarly fine turn in George M! (1968), but both of these ambitious and highly entertaining productions don't do much to convey a sense of Cohan's actual achievements; he may have been the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back in terms of liberating American entertainment, once and for all, from European domination. In a way, Cohan himself was complicit with such re-invention of his legacy; he was happy to approve James Cagney's comment in Yankee Doodle Dandy that he'd never appeared in a film, though Cohan had, in fact, made a few, most of which no longer exist. Cohan spent one day from among his 50 years in entertainment in the recording studio in 1911, making eight records that he felt poor and unrepresentative; Cohan never recorded again. That begs the question -- how does one, a century after Cohan's prime, cut through the hype and make contact with the real George M. Cohan?
It appears that Rick Benjamin and the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra have found the answer in New World's George M. Cohan: You're a Grand Old Rag. Employing expert Cohan interpreter Colin Pritchard, period-conscious comedienne Bernadette Boerckel -- who indeed sings with the clear enunciation and light vibrato favored by historical singers like Ada Jones -- and, for the most part, the original orchestrations created by Cohan's staff arrangers for his productions, Benjamin and the Paragon hit the vein of this distant era and make Cohan's simple creations jump and sparkle. Cohan's work is ruthlessly popular, jingoistic, and straightforward, and it does not well survive modernization, though that has not deterred a cottage industry of sorts to spring up around his work in terms of tributes. New World's George M. Cohan: You're a Grand Old Rag is not a "tribute," but the real thing, and it comes with an excellent essay by Benjamin that strips away the varnish on Cohan's façade and places him in the proper context; a dominant figure in show business whose work was idolized by younger peers like Irving Berlin, setting standards that led to American entertainment as we know it. This is a superb effort and sheds considerable light on a murky, yet highly significant, topic in regard to Americana.
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