On this episode we’re spending some time with The Great American Songbook — and beyond.

“The Great American Songbook” isn’t really one book, and there isn’t a universally agreed-upon list of songs that belongs in it. It’s a name we use for a remarkable body of American popular music, especially songs written for Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley from roughly the 1920s through the 1950s. Names such as George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Jerome Kern, Hoagy Carmichael, and Dorothy Fields show up again and again. But these songs didn’t stop living when that era ended. Singers from very different generations have kept returning to them, which is where we’ll begin.