Now the Sun Never Sets on Broadway
Yeddo, Shanghai, Singapore, and Bagdad Reflect the Lights and Echo the Jazz of Our Famous Street
Global radio, phonograph, and movie technology by the 1920s meant Broadway’s reach was no longer local to NYC or even national, but worldwide. A 1926 New York Times Magazine article wrote: “Broadway is America’s symbol on foreign shores.”
As the journalist Hollister Noble wrote:
The latest Broadway song hit will circle the earth in sixty days. A few years ago song hits were two seasons late in arriving in continental night life centres. When Broadway danced to Ain’t We Got Fun and The March of the Wooden Soldiers, Berlin lingered over Smiles and Bubbles, while Avalon was just entering Constantinople, and Bagdad [sic] was only recovering from After the Ball is Over.
Broadway’s global popularity continues. Here’s a fascinating NYT article from 96 years later, in 2022, about the difficulties of translating the linguistically complex lyrics of Broadway’s Hamilton into German. (Although, despite its massive American popularity, the Hamburg show closed only a year later.)
I was also struck by the spelling of Iraq’s capital in that above excerpt as “Bagdad.” According to Google Books Ngram Viewer, 1926 – the year that article was published – marked the last year ever when the use of Bagdad in books exceeded Baghdad. Starting in 1927 and for the rest of time, the version with the letter ‘h’ reigned.
As for another old-fashioned city name, what about “Yeddo” in the sub-headline? That was the former name for Tokyo, Japan. Its use by 1926 is more curious, though, since it was renamed “Tokyo” all the way back in 1868.
Now the Sun Never Sets on Broadway: Yeddo, Shanghai, Singapore, and Bagdad Reflect the Lights and Echo the Jazz of Our Famous Street
Published: Sunday, April 4, 1926