SOURCE: "I Like Small-Town Audiences," in The Rotarian, Vol. LV, No. 3, September, 1939, pp. 10-13, 59-60.

In the following essay, Cohan reminisces about the early days of his career and the joys of playing before small-town audiences.

The boys who write the blurbs about George M. Cohan for the newspapers have me all wrong. They have given the public the idea that I and all my family have always been "big towners," and that we had been born and bred and fed on Broadway. The most that Broadway can claim of one or of all the four Cohans are the feathers that "the road" stuck in our caps.

We were all four small-town folks, when you get right down to it. Boston was really a small town when it gave Jerry Cohan, my father, to the world. Providence, Rhode Island, was what the profession affectionately called a "tank town...