In important ways, it is proper to begin discussions of strategies of music and lyric composition in Modernism and Popular Music with the Gershwin brothers. They worked at the heart of commercial popular music in the United States in the early twentieth century, New York City, and, in the face of the racism of American society, they were the first to introduce elements of African American jazz to commercial music in the United States. In fact, Cole Porter – Protestant, from Indiana and living outside New York – felt throughout his life that the kind of popular music he was writing was significantly “outside” the work in New York, that he himself didn't fit into the popular music scene. And Fats Waller, a lifelong New Yorker, developed a music that was also “outside” the New York City mainstream of Tin Pan Alley in his stride piano of Harlem. In many ways, then, Jewish American composers and lyricists, striving to articulate in music what Irving Berlin described as “what the people want, what they understand, what hits them and hits me,” accomplished situating themselves, as Charles Hamm says, “in the absolute center of American popular culture” by pursuing the “twofold strategy” of the new immigrants in the early twentieth century: “(a) trying to become ‘invisible,’ by modifying all obvious signs of ethnic origin (dress, language, sometimes their names and even physical appearance) in an attempt to be indistinguishable from ‘mainstream’ Americans; and (b) trying to make positive and visible contributions to American life and culture.