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Songwriter Harold Arlen (right) with singer Bing Crosby (left) and Decca Records owner Jack Kapp (center)

Great American Songbook is a term referring to the interrelated music of Broadway musical theater, the Hollywood musical, and Tin Pan Alley, in a period that begins roughly in the 1920s and tapers off around 1960 with the coming of rock and roll. Aside from the enduring popularity of this music in its original context, it also became (and remains) the central repertoire of jazz musicians. (In jazz, such tunes are simply referred to as "standards".) For its devotees, the GAS (as it is sometimes abbreviated) represents a level of musical and lyrical sophistication that has yet to be equalled. (This is sometimes – as in the writings of Gene Lees – a way of casting aspersions on rock music and everything that followed in its wake.)

There is no definitive list of which musicians and lyricists are part of the Great American Songbook. Major songwriters considered part of this group include, but are not limited to:

Irving Berlin, one of the most prolific composers and lyricists of the Great American Songbook.

• Harold Arlen, Ted Koehler ("Over the Rainbow", "Stormy Weather", "It's Only a Paper Moon", "I've Got the World on a String", "I've Got A Right To Sing The Blues")
• Irving Berlin ("White Christmas", "Always", "Blue Skies", "Cheek to Cheek", "Puttin' on the Ritz")
• Hoagy Carmichael ("Stardust", "Georgia On My Mind", "The Nearness Of You", "Skylark")
• Duke Ellington ("In A Sentimental Mood", "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)", "Satin Doll", "Mood Indigo", "Sophisticated Lady", "I'm Beginning to See the Light")
• George and Ira Gershwin ("Someone to Watch Over Me", "S’Wonderful", "Summertime", "Embraceable You", "I Got Rhythm", "Fascinating Rhythm", "The Man I Love", "They Can't Take That Away from Me", "Our Love Is Here to Stay")
• Jerome Kern ("Ol' Man River", "The Way You Look Tonight", "All The Things You Are", "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes")
• Johnny Mandel ("The Shadow of Your Smile")
• Johnny Mercer ("One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)", "That Old Black Magic", "Blues in the Night", "Come Rain or Come Shine", "Jeepers Creepers")
• Cole Porter ("Night and Day", "I've Got You Under My Skin", "Begin The Beguine", "Let's Do It, Let's Fall in Love", "What Is This Thing Called Love?", "Love for Sale", "You're the Top", "Just One of Those Things", "I Get a Kick Out of You", "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye", "In the Still of the Night", "It's De-Lovely", "My Heart Belongs to Daddy")
• Rodgers and Hammerstein ("Oh What a Beautiful Mornin'", "People Will Say We're in Love", "It Might as Well Be Spring", "If I Loved You", "Some Enchanted Evening", "Shall We Dance?", "My Favorite Things")
• Rodgers and Hart ("Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered", "My Romance", "Have You Met Miss Jones?", "My Funny Valentine", "Blue Moon", "The Lady Is a Tramp", "Thou Swell", "Lover", "Where or When", "This Can't Be Love")
• Jimmy Van Heusen ("All the Way", "But Beautiful", "Come Fly with Me", "Imagination" )

In his groundbreaking 1972 study of the Songbook, American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950, songwriter and critic Alec Wilder provided a workable list of the artists who belong in the canon, while also implying a hierarchy of their relative worth^[1]:

• Wilder devotes whole chapters to only six artists: Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, and Harold Arlen.

• Vincent Youmans and Arthur Schwartz share another chapter; Burton Lane, Hugh Martin, and Vernon Duke share one more.

• Wilder gives one chapter to the songwriters he deems the "The Great Craftsmen": Hoagy Carmichael, Walter Donaldson, Harry Warren, Isham Jones, Jimmy McHugh, Duke Ellington, Fred Ahlert, Richard A. Whiting, Ray Noble, John Green, Rube Bloom, and Jimmy Van Heusen.

Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart

Wilder's list is subjective, and focuses on composers more than lyricists. However, his work was highly influential and roughly corresponds with most people's idea of the Great American Songbook.

It is even more difficult to determine how songwriters from the latter half of the 20th century fit into the Great American Songbook canon. Though for many people the Songbook era ended with the rock and roll revolution, some later composers, such as Henry Mancini, Burt Bacharach, and even non-Americans such as Brazilian Antonio Carlos Jobim are sometimes considered to be part of the Songbook. These, and other such composers, may more properly be considered in the context of easy listening, musical theatre, or jazz.

Most of the songs in the Great American Songbook are written in "verse-chorus form". The verse is a musical introduction that typically has a free musical structure, speech-like rhythms and rubato delivery. It serves as a way of leading from the surrounding (realistic) dramatic context into the more artificial world of song, and often has lyrics that are "in character" and make reference to the plot of the musical. The chorus is the central part of the song. It is usually a 32-bar AABA or ABAC form; the lyrics usually refer to more timeless situations – typically, the vicissitudes of love. This greater generality made it easier for songs to be added or subtracted from a show, or revived in a different show. (While a few songs are always performed in full verse-chorus structure – for instance, "Lush Life" – more often the verse is dropped in performances of GAS songs outside their original stage context.)

Despite the narrow range of topics and moods typically dealt with in these songs, they achieved a marriage of words and music that remains one touchstone of good songwriting. The best GAS lyricists specialized in witty, urbane lyrics with teasingly unexpected rhymes; the songwriters combined memorable melodies (which could be brashly pentatonic – as in a Gershwin tune like "I Got Rhythm" – or sinuously chromatic, as in many of Cole Porter's tunes) and great harmonic subtlety – a good example being Kern's "All the Things You Are", with its winding modulations.

The Complete Ella Fitzgerald Songbooks

Since the 1930s, many singers and musicians have explicitly recorded or performed large parts of the Great American Songbook, to the extent that interpreting material from the Songbook forms a large part of jazz and easy listening music today.

Ella Fitzgerald's popular and influential Songbook series on Verve in the 1950s and 60s collated 252 songs from the Songbook. Amongst other singers, influential interpreters of the Great American Songbook include Sarah Vaughan, Nat "King" Cole, Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Tony Bennett, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mathis, Rosemary Clooney, Barbra Streisand (particularly in her earlier work), Sammy Davis, Jr., Peggy Lee, Dinah Shore, Carmen McRae, Billie Holiday, Perry Como, Dinah Washington, Nina Simone, Vic Damone, Blossom Dearie, Cleo Laine, Jack Jones, Bobby Darin, Dean Martin, Mel Tormé and Al Jolson.

Over the last couple of decades there has been a revival of the Songbook by contemporary musicians. The most notable was in 1983, with popular rock vocalist Linda Ronstadt doing her part to rehabilitate what had been by then classified as "elevator music" or Vintage Pop. In 1983, Stephen Holden of the New York Times wrote that Ronstadt's album What's New "isn't the first album by a rock singer to pay tribute to the golden age of the pop, but is ... the best and most serious attempt to rehabilitate an idea of pop that Beatlemania and the mass marketing of rock LP's for teen-agers undid in the mid-60's. In the decade prior to Beatlemania, most of the great band singers and crooners of the 40's and 50's codified a half-century of American pop standards on dozens of albums, many of them now long out-of-print."^[2] Within a decade, Natalie Cole released a highly successful album "Unforgettable... with Love" which spawned a Top 40 hit "Unforgettable," a "duet" with her father, Nat "King" Cole. Follow-up albums such as "Take a Look" were also successful. Since then, vocalists such as Harry Connick, Jr., Andrea Marcovicci, Michael Feinstein, John Pizzarelli, Daniel Matto, Ysabella Brave, Diana Krall and Michael Bublé have been notable, if not always consistent, interpreters. John Stevens, a 2004 American Idol contestant, also gave exposure to this trend. Established singers in other genres have also had success in treating the Songbook, including Harry Nilsson, Carly Simon, Bette Midler, Barry Manilow, Caetano Veloso, Queen Latifah, Joni Mitchell, Boz Scaggs, Robbie Williams, Rod Stewart and Morrissey. Michael Parkinson devotes a considerable part of his BBC Radio 2 program to this genre of music.

• Classic pop
• Jazz standards
• Lounge music
• Tin Pan Alley
• The Real Book

• Furia, Philip (1992). Poets of Tin Pan Alley. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN ISBN 0-19-507473-4. 

• Wilder, Alec (1990). American Popular Song: The Great Innovators 1900-1950. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN ISBN 0-19-501445-6. 

• Sample list of Songs
• PBS Special on Great American Songbook
• Legends of Jazz series
• The American Songbook Preservation Society
• Songwriters and The Great American Songbook