Music
"Everything about Coney Island inspired a song: its amusement parks, its rides, its grand hotels." Michael Immerso (Immerso 110)
Though Coney Island began as little more than a sandbar, its existence always focused around entertainment. Thus, there was a constant need for music. Songs greated the guests as they entered the parks, both big and small bands played at concert halls, dance halls, and saloons, and music was even sold by sidewalk vendors for guests to take home. The setting and the people also proved inspirational to composers and song writers who visited or worked at Coney Island.
Music, while possibly never one of the most compelling main attractions at Coney Island, always played a very important role. From the beginning it was always involved in the dance halls on the island. “The men who ran West Brighton’s hotels, bathhouses, and concert halls did not want to improve the masses; they accepted them exactly as they were and catered to their demand for cheap amusement…” (Immerso 6) The people wanted to dance, and it 
is within the love for this “cheap amusement” that we can see how much the boundaries of social propriety were being pushed at Coney Island. With music in the background, men and women were allowed to interact in new ways and enjoy themselves in an environment completely outside of the rigid social system in place at home. Dancing was so important at Coney Island in fact that “during another of Coney’s many fires, seventy thousand people gathered to watch, while just beyond the engulfed area the dancing and concert halls played on” (Immerso 8)
Even with early transportation to the island people enjoyed dancing and music. If the steamboat that some visitors took over to Coney was "not too full there was dancing to 
music provided by a string band, which performed during the entire trip." (Immerso 15) Upon entrance to the various parks, guests were greated with themed songs playing. "Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland", for example, was a hit in its heyday for Dreamland park. It even sold a remarkable 5 million copies of sheet music in 1909.
Major concert bands and performs gave formal shows nightly at the various hotel ballrooms and concert halls and at the larger pavillions. At Culver Plaza for example, the famed cornetist George Washington Arbuckle played with Downing's 9th Regiment Band. (Immerso 35) John Philip Sousa himself was the well respected musical director at Manhattan Beach. Outside of these formal performances, visitors
could see bands and hear music and most major events at Coney. When they opened the Elephant Colossus hotel, for example, there was a brass band playing beneath the giant metal elephant's stomach. All along the Bowery and other main drags musicians played music to bring in customers. Thus music played an integral part of the Coney Island experience for all visitors. As the playwright Elmer Blaney Harris said in 1908, "There is one thing at Coney Island that you can get for nothing, and that is noise...Bands, orchestras, pianos, at war with gramophones, hand-organs, calliopes; overhead, a roar of wheels in a deathlock with shrieks and screams; whistles, gongs, rifles all busy; the smell of candy, popcorn, meats, beer, tobacco, blended with the odor of the crowd redolent now and then of patchouli; a steaming river of people arched over by electric signs...this is Coney Island." (Register 90)
"The Manhattan Beach March" (1893) John Philip Sousa
"Coming Home from Coney Isle" (1906) Jones and Spencer
"Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland" (1910) Henry Burr
"By the Beautiful Sea" (1914) Ada Jones and Billy Watkins
