In the forties, as jazz accelerated in several directions, an interesting thing happened to Broadway musicals. The European thread of the music, operetta, came to the fore and virtually buried jazz. Beginning with Oklahoma in 1943, composers relegated the African‑based syncopation, swinging rhythms, blue notes, and other elements of jazz to a very few tunes in each score. Why?
The Depression had destroyed lives and livelihoods. It destroyed Harlem—the Renaissance petered out. It also diminished Broadway: there was no money to mount extravagant productions. The writers fled to Hollywood, where they wrote for much larger audiences, including rural folks and people from towns and cities with a less diverse cultural environment. The search for a common musical language for that size of audience led towards a more European-American sound.
Yes, swing had been the thing for America, but not necessarily for all of America. A lot of those folks out there away from the coasts were about to make their presence felt, thanks to new media and big-thinking corporate entertainment. Le Jazz, Not. By the forties, with writers and composers commuting between Broadway and Hollywood, and with recordings and radio replacing sheet music, popular music took a turn to the White: America was bleaching its roots.
Richard Rodgers began working with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein, and together they hammered the jazz out of show tunes in a series of major productions, including Oklaho-ma (1943), Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949), The King and I (1950), and the gloriously/notoriously syrupy Sound of Music (1959). The songs endure: “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,” “People Will Say We’re In Love,” “Some Enchanted Evening,” “I Enjoy Being a Girl,” and “Surrey With the Fringe on Top.”
The other top writing team of the era did likewise: composer Frederick Loewe, another Viennese, along with lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, wrote Brigadoon (1947), My Fair Lady (1956), and Camelot (1960). This was the classic period of great Broadway songwriting, done in a more European style that shuffled Black culture into a corner to wait for more propitious times. It was the defining moment of a mass culture, for better or whatever.
There were exceptions to the trend: some of the older writers continued in a jazz-based, dance-oriented style, including Berlin (Annie Get Your Gun, 1946) and Porter (Kiss Me Kate, 1948; Can-Can, 1953; Silk Stockings, 1955). Eventually jazz influence resurfaced in Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story (1957) and swing-derived works like Frank Loesser’s Guys & Dolls and Jule Stein’s Gypsy. Later the backbeat would come back to Broadway in a big way, as the Rock Musical, and eventually, Hamilton. But in regard to what is generally considered the peak period for show tunes, my friend from the Introduction (“There isn’t any relationship”) was basically right: Broadway and Jazz Alley didn’t even intersect.