In 1956, Hank Beebe was a young composer just getting started in the New York theater when he auditioned for something his agent had called “the Chevy show.” It sounded like a big break. “I thought he meant the television show with Dinah Shore,” Mr. Beebe said.

Not quite. The show was a corporate musical introducing Chevrolet’s 1957 product line.

In almost every respect, the Chevy show resembled a Broadway production, with a book, new music, a full cast of professional actors and an orchestra. But it would never be seen by the general public. Midwestern dealers, Chevy executives and Chevy employees attended the main production in Detroit, while touring actors traveled to perform for dealers farther afield.

The run was intentionally short. Very short. Opening night would also be closing night.

Mr. Beebe got the job, which turned out to be his first in a long list of industrials, the corporate entertainments that companies including the Big Three automakers, Coca-Cola and Westinghouse produced by the hundreds from the 1950s to the early 1980s. All over the United States, conventions and business meetings echoed to the sounds of tap-dancing feet, ringing choruses and catchy lyrics celebrating tail fins, shower heads and mouthwash.

Steve Young, a writer for “Late Show With David Letterman,” and Sport Murphy, a singer and songwriter, have revisited this forgotten world in a profusely illustrated history, “Everything’s Coming Up Profits: The Golden Age of Industrial Musicals” (Blast Books). Mr. Young stumbled onto the subject in the early 1990s, when he was searching out comic material for “Dave’s Record Collection,” a running bit in which the host played excerpts from weird albums, and he brought home “Go Fly a Kite,” a souvenir recording from a utility executives’ conference that General Electric held in Williamsburg, Va., in 1966.