In "The House That George Built," his first book in a dozen years, Sheed gathers his views on the music of the great American songbook. Since childhood, he has been listening to and loving the jazz songs of George Gershwin (the "George" of this book's title), Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, Jerome Kern, Burton Lane, Johnny Mercer, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and some 50 other composers of the 1920s through 1950s. Finally, at an editor's behest, he decided to write about them.
Sheed tells readers at the outset that his book "is a labor of love, not a work of scholarship," something he has "been researching for most of my life without knowing it." He likens the book to a "bull session, with its overtones of the tall story and the overconfident assertion," and it does have an intimacy and charm rare in writing about the arts. Rather than a technical study, or an attempt to define thematic connections or chains of influence among composers, it is a collection of informal disquisitions. Each composer included wrote more than 50 standards, "tunes that are still popular enough over fifty years later for most cocktail lounge pianists to have a rough idea of them, and for their copyrights still to be worth fighting for."
While the songwriters' names may no longer be as familiar as they were to Sheed's contemporaries, their songs probably are. On this season's "American Idol," for instance, contestants sang "Stormy Weather" (Arlen), "Cheek to Cheek" and "Steppin' Out With My Baby" (Berlin), "Don't Get Around Much Anymore" (Ellington), "I Got Rhythm" (Gershwin), "On a Clear Day" (Lane), "Night and Day" (Porter), and "My Funny Valentine" (Rodgers).
