In the preceding chapters, I have discussed the popular music of the Gershwins, of Cole Porter, of Fats Waller. In doing this, I have focused on the relationships among music, language, and culture – and, particularly, on social, psychological, and linguistic aspects of the modernist culture of America between the two world wars. George and Ira Gershwin's parents were recent immigrants to America when Ira (Isadore) was born in December 1896 (the family was living on the lower east side of Manhattan) and George (Jakob) in September 1898 (the family was living in Brooklyn); the Gershwins lived a secularized life in America, and they were never poor. Cole Porter was born in Peru, Indiana, to a wealthy family in 1891; he attended Yale and served in World War I. Thomas Waller was born on 134th Street in New York in 1904, in the heart of Harlem, of parents who had married in Virginia and moved to New York to raise their family; Waller's father, Edward Martin Waller, worked in a stable and, before Waller's birth, became a deacon in the Abyssinian Baptist Church, where his wife Adeline – Waller's mother – sang in the choir and played the piano and organ for services.