2/1 Episode #2005
Irving Berlin began his career by writing ragtime songs. He learned to write songs by writing them and publishing them, and seeing what sold. For fifteen years, for as long as ragtime was popular, that’s what he wrote. But he also sensed a change in popular taste and began to write romantic ballads, many of the still shaped by the syncopation that made ragtime raggy. If it worked, he used it.
