When you hear the phrase “tin pan alley,” if you think of anything at all, you probably think of the US music business. The term began to be used around the turn of the 20th Century, and at the time referred to a specific location: 28th Street between Broadway and 6th Avenue. That was where most of the companies publishing music were located.
In the 1800s, “tin pans” became mass-produced items that were cheap and useful, and virtually every home had at least one. They also had sticks, wooden spoons, and the like that could be used to bang on a a metal pan to make a lot of noise. It quickly became so common to bang tin pans to make a noise at a celebration (e.g. a marriage) that an Indiana newspaper reported, in 1874: “Johnny O’Brien, the cow doctor, is married again. The boys gave him a touch of tin pan music.”
At about the same time, though, “tin pan alley” was being used to describe the part of a city (nearly any city) that had the worst reputation for noise, illegal activities, and chaos. The Alexandria Gazette in 1869 ran this story: “Night clear and cold. A slight row occurred in “tin pan alley,” and a colored ball in “Petersburg” was broken up, but no arrests were made at either.”
The Evening Register in New Haven, CT, referred to their own tin pan alley in 1890: “Tin Pan alley branches off from Wallace Street and is, so a witness told Judge Pickett this morning, the worst place in town.” (One of the events the Register reported in that area was a “rumpus”.)
This aspect of “tin pan alley” showed up decades later in the 1953 song Tin Pan Alley Blues:
“They tell me Tin Pan Alley, roughest place in town,
Start cutting and shooting, soon as the sun goes down;
Hey, tell me, what kind of place can that alley be?
Every woman I get, the alley takes her away from me.”
That was written by Bob Geddins, who could very well have been located in the tin pan alley in New York when he composed it.
Tin pan alley had one more association with music — from the late 1800s to the early years of the 20th Century, a low-quality, out-of-tune piano was often described as a “tin pan piano”: “The party consists of the following “star” performers: a yearling calf, a whining pup, an old violin, a creaking well chain, an ancient accordeon (sic), a squealing pig, a tin-pan piano and an old maid’s voice.” (Janesville Daily Gazette, from Wisconsin, 1860).
Once the US music publishing business came to be called “tin pan alley” — even when they were no longer located in the same small area of New York — other cities around the world were said to have their own “tin pan alleys” where music publishers were housed. As recently as the 1950s, Denmark Street in London was called London’s Tin Pan Alley.
As for the raucous hullabaloo made by banging tin pans at a wedding or other event, nobody really needed the phrase “tin pan” to describe it. As early as the 1700s English already had plenty of terms, including “shindy,” “charivari,” “stramash,” “shivaree,” and “skimmington.” And, of course, “noise.”
