Editing Irving Berlin (section)

===Early jobs===
[[File:Irving Berlin 1906.jpg|thumb|left|Berlin at his first job with a music publisher, aged 18]]
Having left school around the age of thirteen,<ref name="FuriaWood1998" /> Berlin had few survival skills and realized that formal employment was out of the question. His only ability was acquired from his father's vocation as a singer, and he joined with several other youngsters who went to saloons on the Bowery and sang to customers. Itinerant young singers like them were common on the Lower East Side. Berlin would sing a few of the popular ballads he heard on the street, hoping people would pitch him a few pennies. From these seamy surroundings, he became streetwise, with real and lasting education. Music was his only source of income, and he picked up the language and culture of the [[ghetto]] lifestyle.<ref name="Early Career of Irving Berlin">{{cite web |last1=Maslon |first1=Laurence |author-link=Laurence Maslon |title=Early Career and Tin Pan Alley |url=http://www.irvingberlin.com/early-career-and-tin-pan-alley |website=Irving Berlin |publisher=The Irving Berlin Music Company |access-date=October 13, 2018}}</ref>

Berlin learned what kind of songs appealed to audiences, writes Bergreen: "well-known tunes expressing simple sentiments were the most reliable."<ref name=Bergreen/>{{rp|17}} He soon began [[Song-plugger|plugging songs]] at [[Tony Pastor]]'s Music Hall in [[Union Square, Manhattan|Union Square]] and, in 1906, when he was 18, got a job as a singing waiter at the Pelham Cafe in [[Chinatown, Manhattan|Chinatown]]. Besides serving drinks, he sang made-up "[[Ribaldry|blue]]" parodies of hit songs to the delight of customers.

Biographer [[Charles Hamm]] writes that in Berlin's free time after hours, he taught himself to play the piano.<ref name=Hamm>Hamm, Charles. ''Irving Berlin: Songs from the Melting Pot'', Oxford Univ. Press, 1997</ref> Never having had lessons, after the bar closed for the night, young Berlin would sit at a piano in the back and begin improvising tunes.<ref name=NYT-obit/> He published his first song, "Marie from Sunny Italy", written in collaboration with the Pelham's resident pianist Mike Nicholson,<ref name="FuriaWood1998" /> in 1907, receiving 33 cents for the publishing rights.<ref name="Starr 2009, pg. 64" /> The sheet music to the published song presented his name as "I. Berlin".<ref name=Freedland>Freedland, Michael. 'Irving Berlin', Stein and Day, 1974</ref>

[[File:Irving Berlin (1907 portrait, NPG.93.388.3).jpg|thumb|Berlin photographed in 1907 in Pach Brothers Studio]]

Berlin continued writing and playing music at Pelham Cafe and developing an early style. He liked the words to other people's songs but sometimes the rhythms were "kind of boggy", and he might change them. One night he delivered some hits composed by his friend [[George M. Cohan]], another kid who was getting known on Broadway with his own songs. When Berlin ended with Cohan's "Yankee Doodle Boy", notes Whitcomb, "everybody in the joint applauded the feisty little fellow."