Dominic Vautier 1/7/2012
This song was a landmark. Nevertheless it was criticized heavily for it's irregular and poor composition. It was universally condemned by ragtime purists as just a lousy march with equally lousy lyrics, but the song still became immensely popular and launched a long and very productive career for an uneducated, unknown Jewish immigrant named Irving Berlin. This guy couldn't even read music much less play a piano. Even he himself admitted that he was a "musical ignoramus".
But the scope of this man's genius turned out to be absolutely staggering. He did everything well--burlesque, barbershop, popular and Broadway plays. The man alone wrote over 800 hit songs.
And this was his first really big one.
