Well, yip, yip, yaphank, and let's all wish a happy 100th birthday to Irving Berlin. This week everybody's doin' it -- celebrating the boy born Israel Baline in Russia a century ago, who came to the U.S., reached for the moon and found that there's no business like show business. God bless America: Berlin's songs are his life.
Isn't this a lovely day? Jerome Kern once summed up Berlin's place in & American popular music by observing: "Irving Berlin has no place in American music. He is American music." Way back when, George M. Cohan spotted the appeal of the man...
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