Let's face the Music by Benny Green

Let's face the Music (First Edition Survey of Great Songwriters, in Jacket)

A Survey of the Golden Age of Popular Song and the Great Songwriters Behind It, by Jazz Broadcaster Benny Green

Bibliographic Specifications

• Title: Let's face the Music: The Golden Age of Popular Song
• Author: Benny Green
• Publisher: Pavilion Books Limited in association with Michael Joseph Limited, London
• Publication Date: 1989
• ISBN-13: 9781851454891
• ISBN-10: 1851454896
• Edition Details: First published in Great Britain in 1989. Published in association with Yorkshire Television.
• Binding: Publisher's blue cloth boards with illustrated dust jacket.
• Physical Format: Large format hardcover, approximately 235 x 175 mm, 224 pages.
• Language: English

Official Condition Report

• The Book: Very Good (VG)
• Exterior / Boards: The blue cloth boards are clean, with a few tiny pale specks near the top edge of the front board. The spine is straight.
• Interior: The text pages are clean and cream-coloured, with no foxing or markings. The binding is tight.
• Provenance: No inscriptions, bookplates or stamps. A printed dedication reads: 'To Beloved Antoinette'.
• The Dust Jacket: Present. The illustrated jacket, with photographs of dancers, shows some surface scuffing, scratches and light marks to the front and back panels, with no major tears. It is protected in a durable archival-type plastic cover.

Synopsis & Historical Value

Let's Face the Music: The Golden Age of Popular Song is Benny Green's survey of the great songwriters of the classic American musical stage and popular song repertoire. Through a series of biographical portraits it follows the careers of figures such as Irving Berlin, Noël Coward, the Gershwins, Jerome Kern, Lerner and Loewe, Frank Loesser, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and Schwartz and Dietz.

Green wrote as a working jazz musician and broadcaster, and his affection for the composers and lyricists of this era runs through the book. It was published in association with Yorkshire Television, and is a handsomely produced large-format volume, well suited to readers and collectors of popular music history and the songbook tradition.

Author Profile: Benny Green

Bernard 'Benny' Green (1927-1998) was a British jazz saxophonist, broadcaster and writer, best known for his radio programmes and books. He was jazz critic for the Observer from 1958, and later literary editor of The Spectator and film critic for Punch.

He wrote more than thirty books, among them a literary biography of P. G. Wodehouse (1981), Benny Green's Cricket Archive (1985), The Last Empires (1986), the autobiography Swingtime in Tottenham, and Such Sweet Thunder: Benny Green on Jazz (2002).

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