Editing Irving Berlin (section)

==Music styles==
{{quote box|align=right|width=25em|bgcolor = LightCyan|quote=His music has that vitality—both rhythmic and melodic—which never seems to lose any of its exuberant freshness; it has that rich, colorful melodic flow which is ever the wonder of all those of who, too, compose songs; his ideas are endless.|source= — composer [[George Gershwin]]<ref name=Gershwin>Wyatt, Robert; Johnson, John A. ''The George Gershwin Reader'', Oxford Univ. Press (2004)</ref>{{rp|117}}}}

Composer [[Jerome Kern]] recognized that the essence of Irving Berlin's lyrics was his "faith in the American vernacular", an influence so profound that his best-known songs "seem indivisible from the country's history and self-image". Kern, along with [[George Gershwin]], [[Richard Rodgers]], [[Oscar Hammerstein II]] and [[Cole Porter]], brought together Afro-American, Latin American, rural pop, and European operetta.<ref name=NYT-87/>

Berlin, however, did not follow that method. Instead, says music critic [[Stephen Holden]], Berlin's songs were always simple, "exquisitely crafted street songs whose diction feels so natural that one scarcely notices the craft....they seem to flow straight out of the rhythms and inflections of everyday speech."<ref name=NYT-87/> Berlin can be credited with helping develop Jazz music. Jeffrey Magee wrote how his song "Everybody Step" was credited by composers such as Gershwin as one of the most important songs for learning jazz music. Berlin achieved this by using varying rhythms, such as the conventional rag and blues rhythms, as well as bringing in references to African American music.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Magee |first=Jeffrey |date=2006 |title="Everybody Step": Irving Berlin, Jazz, and Broadway in the 1920s |journal=Journal of the American Musicological Society |volume=59 |issue=3 |pages=697–732|doi=10.1525/jams.2006.59.3.697 }}</ref> It led composer [[George Gershwin]] to claim that he learned from Berlin that ragtime, which later became jazz, "was the only musical idiom in existence that could aptly express America".<ref name=Gershwin/>{{rp|117}}

Among Berlin's contemporaries was Cole Porter, whose music style was often considered more "witty, sophisticated, [and] dirty", according to musicologist [[Susannah McCorkle]]. Of the five top songwriters, only Porter and Berlin wrote both their own words and music. However, she notes that Porter, unlike Berlin, was a [[Yale]]-educated and wealthy Midwesterner whose songs were not successful until he was in his thirties. She notes further that it was "Berlin [who] got Porter the show that launched his career."<ref name=McCorkle/>{{rp|76}}