Yankee Doodle Dandy: George M. Cohan and the Broadway Stage

Playwright, composer, actor, director, and producer George M. Cohan looms large in musical theater legend. Remembered today for classic tunes like ＂You’re a Grand Old Flag＂ and ＂Give My Regards to Broadway,＂ he has been called ＂the father of musical comedy,＂ and his statue stands in the heart of the New York theater district. Cohan’s early twentieth-century shows and songs captured the spirit of an era when staggering social change gave new urgency to efforts to define Americanism. He was an Irish American who had the audacity to represent himself as the Yankee Doodle emblem of the nation, a vaudevillian who had the nerve to unapologetically climb the ranks and package his lower-brow style as Broadway.

In Yankee Doodle Dandy, the first book on Cohan in fifty years, author Elizabeth Titrington Craft situates Cohan as a central figure of his day. Examining his multifaceted contributions and the various sociocultural identities he came to embody, Craft shows how Cohan and his works indelibly shaped the American cultural landscape. Informative and engaging, this book offers rich reading for Broadway musical aficionados as well as scholars of musical theater and American cultural history.

Elizabeth T. Craft is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Utah.