Great American Songbook

[2] Although several collections of music have been published under the "Great American Songbook" title, the term does not refer to any actual book or specific list of songs.

The Great American Songbook includes standards by Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Johnny Mercer, Hoagy Carmichael, Richard Rodgers, and Oscar Hammerstein II, among others.

[8] Radio personality Jonathan Schwartz and singer Tony Bennett, both Songbook devotees, have both described this genre as "America's classical music".

It's all the tracks that, when my mother and my father came home from the pub out [of] their heads, they'd sing all these songs.Other pop singers who established themselves in the 1960s or later followed with albums reviving songs from the Great American Songbook, beginning with Harry Nilsson's A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night in 1973[30] and continuing into the 21st century.

During the decade prior to Beatlemania, most of the great band singers and crooners of the '40s and '50s codified a half-century of American pop standards on dozens of albums, many of them now long out-of-print.