In 1970, with the Beatles freshly dissolved, Ringo Starr released Sentimental Journey, an album of show tunes from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. John Lennon called it embarrassing and critics mauled it, yet it sold 500,000 copies and hit number 22 in the US and number seven in the UK. This episode uses that contradiction to explore the Great American Songbook: what the canon actually is, where it came from, and why melodies written mostly between 1920 and 1960 refuse to fade away.

We visit Tin Pan Alley on West 28th Street, where music publishers crammed into buildings and the sound of dozens of pianos gave the block its name, and we meet the composers who built the canon, including Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, and Oscar Hammerstein II. The conversation explains the 32-bar AABA form, how jazz musicians turned Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm into the rhythm changes, how Alec Wilder’s 1972 study brought academic respect to the genre, and how rock artists from Linda Ronstadt and Willie Nelson to Bob Dylan and Lady Gaga later revived the very music rock and roll supposedly killed.

• Why the songbook is best understood as a shared cinematic universe in which crooners and jazz musicians reinterpret the same source material
• What the 32-bar AABA structure is and why it gave improvisers such a durable playground
• Whether calling the songbook America’s classical music, as Tony Bennett and Jonathan Schwartz did, is a fair comparison
• Frank Sinatra’s hostility toward early rock and roll and the industry shift toward teenage record buyers around 1960
• How Linda Ronstadt’s 1983 to 1986 trilogy with arranger Nelson Riddle rehabilitated the golden age of pop for a new generation