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Best Known As: Music Performer Gist: Irving Berlin (May 11, 1888 – September 22, 1989), né Israel Isidore Baline (; , Izrail? Isidor Moiseevi? Bejlin; , Ìzraìl? Ìsìdor Bejlìn; ), was an American composer and lyricist widely considered one of the greatest songwriters in history. He was born near Mogilev, Belarus, which was then part of the Russian Empire. His father, a Jewish cantor at the synagogue, had to uproot the family when he was five because of Russia's pogroms which destroyed their village. They settled in New York City's Lower East Side in 1893, but a few years later, when he was eight years old, his father died suddenly, requiring that he quit school and sell newspapers to help support the family. When he turned fourteen, he left home and began living on the streets of the Bowery. After a few years of doing odd jobs, he found work as a singing waiter in saloons, deriving most of his income from tips. He taught himself to play piano by picking out tunes in the back after the bars closed for the night. While working, he would sometimes sing patriotic songs to the patrons?his Irish boss calling him a "Yiddishe Yankee Doodle!" His talent was first noticed by an employee of a New York music publisher who often visited the saloon, later telling his boss, "I have discovered a great kid." By the time he turned twenty he was hired as a staff lyricist with the Ted Snyder Company. From this early position he began a "meteoric rise as a songwriter" in Tin Pan Alley and then on Broadway, with his first world-famous hit song, "Alexander's Ragtime Band", in 1911. The song sparked an international dance craze in places as far away as Russia, which also "flung itself into the ragtime beat with an abandon bordering on mania." As his music developed over the years, he made every effort to write lyrics in the American vernacular: uncomplicated, simple and direct, with his stated ambition being to "reach the heart of the average American", whom he saw as the "real soul of the country." In his early years he wrote hundreds of songs, many of which became major hits, making him "a legend" before he turned thirty. During his 60-year career he wrote an estimated 1,500 songs, including the scores for 19 Broadway shows and 18 Hollywood films, with his songs nominated eight times for Academy Awards. Besides "Alexander's Ragtime Band", he wrote songs like "Cheek to Cheek", "Blue Skies", and "Puttin' On the Ritz". Some of his songs have become popular themes and anthems, such as "Easter Parade", "White Christmas", "Happy Holiday", "This is the Army, Mr. Jones", and "There's No Business Like Show Business". In 1917, after being drafted by the army to write patriotic songs during World War I, he composed an all-soldier musical revue as a patriotic tribute to the army. Twenty-five years later, during World War II, it was remade into a hit Broadway musical and film, This is the Army. It co-starred Ronald Reagan and had Kate Smith again singing Berlin's "God Bless America", which had already become the unofficial national anthem after she first sang it on the radio in 1938. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, it again became the #1 song after Celine Dion recorded it as a tribute. Berlin's songs have reached the top of the charts 25 times and been re-recorded countless times by singers including Frank Sinatra, Barbara Streisand, Linda Ronstadt, Rosemary Clooney, Diana Ross, Bing Crosby, Frankie Laine, Johnnie Ray, Al Jolson, Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday, and Ella Fitzgerald. Composer Douglas Moore sets Berlin apart from all other contemporary songwriters, and includes him instead with Stephen Foster, Walt Whitman, and Carl Sandburg, as a "great American minstrel" ? someone who has "caught and immortalized in his songs what we say, what we think about, and what we believe." Composer George Gershwin called him "the greatest songwriter that has ever lived", and composer Jerome Kern concluded that "Irving Berlin has no place in American music - he is American music."  read more about Irving Berlin
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