Composer and lyricist. Born Israel Baline, on May 11, 1888 (his exact place of birth is unknown). Berlin was one of eight children; his father was a cantor in a synagogue. The family fled pogroms, emigrating from Tolochin, Belorussia, to the United States in 1893. While growing up in a New York City tenement, Berlin joined a synagogue choir. His father died when he was eight years old; at age 14, he began singing popular songs on street corners and in restaurants in order to help support the family. From 1905 to 1907, he worked as a singing waiter at a café in Chinatown and learned to pick out tunes on an upright piano. He wrote the lyrics to his first published song, “Marie from Sunny Italy,” in 1907, with music by a pianist at the café. The song was published mistakenly under “I. Berlin” and from then on he called himself Irving Berlin.

With only an elementary knowledge of how to read music—he never really learned how to read harmony and played only in the key of F sharp—Berlin composed by picking out, by ear, notes that a pianist-arranger then wrote down. From 1907 to 1911, he wrote several popular songs, including “Sadie Salome, Go Home,” a parody of part of Richard Strauss' Salome. In 1911, he wrote “Alexander's Ragtime Band,” the song that made him an international celebrity. Berlin became one of the most popular composers of ragtime, the jazzy dance music that became a veritable craze. He wrote three more ragtime hits in 1911: “The Mysterious Rag,” “The Ragtime Violin,” and “Everybody's Doin' It Now.”

Berlin wrote his first complete Broadway score for Watch Your Step, which debuted in December 1914. In 1917, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and stationed at Camp Upton, on Long Island. While in the army, he was commissioned to write a musical, Yip, Yip, Yaphank (1918), performed by army personnel as a benefit to build a service center at Camp Upton. The musical included the hit song (sung by Berlin) “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning.” After being discharged as a sergeant in 1919, Berlin formed his own music publishing firm, the Irving Berlin Music Company. In 1921, with funding from Sam H. Harris, a prominent theatrical producer, and Joseph Schenk, the movie mogul, Berlin opened the Music Box Theatre in Manhattan—the first theater designed to showcase the works of only one composer.

Over the next four decades, Berlin wrote successful stage and film musicals which included many American standards, such as “Puttin' on the Ritz” (1929), “Say It Isn't So” (1932), and the now classic song “Easter Parade” (1933). In 1938, on the eve of World War II, Berlin's patriotic song “God Bless America,” which he had written during his army service but never released, was unofficially adopted as a second national anthem.

Berlin wrote the scores for a number of feature films, beginning in 1935 with the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical, Top Hat. The 1942 film Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby, featured “White Christmas,” a song that Berlin had written several years earlier while staying in sunny Hollywood working on the 1938 film version of Alexander's Ragtime Band. “White Christmas” soon became Crosby's signature song and a holiday standard. Other notable films that Berlin wrote songs for included Follow the Fleet (1936), On the Avenue (1937), Second Fiddle (1939), and There's No Business Like Show Business (1954).

During World War II, Berlin wrote another all-soldier stage musical, This Is the Army (1942). His most successful stage musical was Annie Get Your Gun, starring Ethel Merman. The show opened on Broadway in May 1946 and ran for over 1,000 performances. He also wrote the score for the 1950 film version. Other post-World War II stage successes for Berlin included Miss Liberty (1949) and 1950's Call Me Madam, also starring Merman. In 1962, after a four-year attempt at retirement, Berlin returned to Broadway with Mr. President, becoming one of the oldest composers ever to write the score for a musical comedy production.

In recognition of his now-legendary patriotism, Berlin received the Army's Medal of Merit from President Harry Truman in 1945; he also received a Congressional Gold Medal from President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1955 for “God Bless America” and his many other patriotic contributions to popular music. In 1974, upon his official retirement, Berlin presented his piano to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. In 1977, President Gerald Ford awarded Berlin the Medal of Freedom for his patriotic contributions during the two world wars. Through two of his foundations, The God Bless America Fund and This Is the Army, Inc., Berlin donated millions of dollars from royalties to the Army Emergency Relief Fund and the Boy and Girl Scouts of America, among other organizations.

In 1988, musical luminaries ranging from Frank Sinatra to Willie Nelson turned out at an all-star tribute at Carnegie Hall in honor of Berlin's 100th birthday. Regarded by many people around the world as the best all-around popular songwriter of the century, Berlin died on September 22, 1989. Berlin's wife of 62 years, Ellin McKay, died in 1988; he was survived by three daughters, nine grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.