Wilfred Sheed
The House That George Built:
With a Little Help from Irving,
Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty.
Random House, 368 pages, $29.95

I found myself fearing for The House That George Built a few pages in, when Wilfred Sheed writes that the guiding ideal in this, his tour of the golden age of American song, will be the bar room “bull session.” Sure enough, Sheed comes out of the gate sounding a little like a bibulous bore. In fairness, anyone talking about the “American Songbook” from 1900 to 1950 can be excused for being somewhat drunk with nostalgia, but Sheed might have spared us a tired passage of memory-theater like the following:

[I] can still feel the pebbles underfoot as my sister and I took turns with “I’ve got spurs that jingle jangle jingle” on the banks of the Delaware River, and can almost hear the piously empty streets of Wildwood, New Jersey, and hear myself muttering Porter’s “Under stars chilled by the winter/ Under an August moon …” (hey, that’s a great line), and I realize that I wouldn’t have remembered that tree or those pebbles and empty streets at all without the illumination of melody.

Sheed’s introduction is also marred by an occasional sloppiness of information, expression, or organization. Was it really “the mid-1940s,” not the 1950s, when radio was killed “by TV and reruns?” Did reruns even exist on TV in the mid-1940s? (For that matter, did TVexist,