Great American Songbook

The Great American Songbook is the body of popular songs written for Broadway shows, Tin Pan Alley sheet music, and Hollywood films from the 1920s through the 1950s — Gershwin, Porter, Kern, Rodgers and Hart, Berlin, Arlen, and a handful of others. Jazz musicians adopted this repertoire wholesale because it solved a practical problem: these songs paired strong, singable melodies with harmonically rich, functional changes, packaged into compact forms that were perfect launching pads for improvisation. Walk into any jam session today and most of what gets called is still this material, treated as vehicles for blowing rather than as fixed compositions.

Composer	Primary Songbook stream (1920s–1950s)	Example cited in this note
George & Ira Gershwin	Broadway	“I Got Rhythm” — its A-section changes became Rhythm Changes
Cole Porter	Broadway	—
Jerome Kern	Broadway	“All the Things You Are”
Rodgers and Hart	Broadway	“Have You Met Miss Jones”
Irving Berlin	Tin Pan Alley / Broadway	—
Harold Arlen	Hollywood / Broadway	—

Why these songs, and not others, became the repertoire

A song needed two things to survive as a jazz vehicle: a melody strong enough to state once and then abandon for choruses of improvisation, and harmony interesting enough to reward repeated exploration. Songbook composers wrote exactly that — diatonic changes laced with ii-V-I motion, secondary dominants, and turnarounds that keep eight bars from going stale. Compare that to a simple pop tune of the era with static harmony, and you can hear why “I Got Rhythm” or “All the Things You Are” gave improvisers something to actually work with, chorus after chorus.

The 32-bar chorus and its shapes

Most Songbook tunes share a compact architecture built from 8-bar phrases, almost always preceded by a verse that jazz players usually skip straight past to get to the chorus.

AABA Form: two A sections, a contrasting bridge, then a final A — e.g. “Have You Met Miss Jones”, where the bridge cycles through major thirds (B♭ – G♭ – D) before resolving home, a move that foreshadows John Coltrane’s later harmonic experiments.
ABAC Form: less symmetrical, heard in tunes like “There Will Never Be Another You”. Other tunes stretch the 32-bar mold entirely — “All the Things You Are” runs 36 bars and passes through five key centers before its tonic A♭ finally settles.
Song forms are documented in fake books and played from lead sheets — melody and changes only, leaving the arrangement to the band.

For a broader map of how these shapes recur across the repertoire, see Song Forms in Jazz.

When the form becomes the point

Some Songbook tunes were absorbed so thoroughly that their chord changes outgrew the original melody entirely. Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” is the extreme case: its A-section changes became “rhythm changes,” a standalone 32-bar bebop chassis that composers wrote new melodies over for decades — the archetype of the contrafact. “Body and Soul” shows the opposite kind of staying power: its harmony stayed largely intact, but its abrupt bridge into a distant key became a proving ground for reharmonization, inviting every generation of players to find new substitutions inside it.

What the Songbook is not

It’s worth being honest that the Songbook is only one stream feeding the jazz repertoire, not the whole river. The 12-bar blues form runs parallel to it and predates it as a jazz vehicle in its own right, and from the 1960s onward musicians increasingly composed original tunes — by Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock — that stand alongside Songbook standards rather than descending from them. Calling all of jazz repertoire “the Songbook” flattens a real distinction between inherited theater songs and jazz’s own compositional tradition, and it also glosses over the verse, a whole introductory section vocalists still sing that instrumentalists almost never touch.

♫ Listen

Coleman Hawkins — “Body and Soul” (1939 single): two choruses of tenor saxophone that barely touch the original melody, instead treating the chord changes as raw material for continuous, vocal-like invention — listen especially to how he reharmonizes the bridge.
Sarah Vaughan — “Body and Soul” (vocal recording): hear how a singer handles the same tune’s abrupt bridge modulation as a dramatic turn, with phrasing that leans into the harmonic surprise rather than smoothing it over.
Bill Evans Trio — Waltz for Debby (recorded June 1961): shows Songbook repertoire recontextualized through modern, rootless voicings and three-way conversational interplay between piano, bass, and drums.