From roughly 1920 to 1960, the “Golden Age of American Song” drew on music from Broadway shows, Hollywood musicals, and Tin Pan Alley. Those years also saw the transformation of America’s entertainment landscape. Phonograph records and broadcast radio became available around 1920. Jazz records allowed people anywhere in the country to hear such music for the first time, and by 1930 most American households had at least one radio for listening to the latest tunes. Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer (1927) ushered in Hollywood’s sound era with a musical, and movies quickly became a second home for Broadway-style songs. New songwriters were producing exciting music, and Americans now had new ways to enjoy it.
Unlike many songwriters, Cole Porter (1891-1964) wrote both the music and witty lyrics for all his shows. He composed his first operetta at age ten and wrote over 300 songs while still an undergrad at Yale. He had his first Broadway successes in the 1920s and produced a string of hits in Hollywood and on Broadway. Inspired by King George V’s Silver Jubilee, Porter wrote “Just One of Those Things” for Jubilee in 1935. In his typical extravagant style, he and librettist Moss Hart wrote the show on a four-month luxury cruise, and he composed this song overnight to fill a hole in the second act.
“Moonglow” (1933), a foxtrot, immediately became a popular dance number, with and without lyrics. Canadian Will Hudson (1908-1981) and Ukrainian-born Irving Mills (1894-1985) shared composing credit, though Hudson claimed to have written most of it because his new dance band needed a theme song. Mills, the younger brother of Jack Mills, who headed Mills Music, one of the most influential music-publishing companies of the 1930s, probably provided some final polishing. Regardless of how they apportioned credit, Mills and the company played a key role in promoting jazz and Black songwriters (Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and many others), through publishing compositions, finding agents, or matching composers with lyricists, since songs with words often got more airplay. Lyricist Eddie DeLange (1904-1945) led a dance orchestra with Hudson from 1935 to 1938, featuring many of their own songs.
Composer George Gershwin (1898-1937) and his lyricist brother Ira (1896-1983) became one of America’s most versatile and innovative teams, turning out both musicals and the opera Porgy and Bess. George had studied composition in Paris and soon combined jazz and classical styles in satisfying ways. “Love Is Here to Stay,” is the last thing George wrote, just days before his death from a brain tumor in 1937. Ira wrote the words afterward as a tribute to his brother, and the song first appeared in Hollywood’s The Goldwyn Follies (1938). Ira continued contributing clever lyrics for other composers as well, including Kurt Weill, Jerome Kern, and Harold Arlen, up through the 1950s.
The team of Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) and Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960) produced a string of musicals so beloved that we often forget that each produced wonderful songs and shows with other collaborators, too. Rodgers enjoyed a long partnership with lyricist Lorenz Hart (1895-1943) after the two met at Columbia University in 1919. Together they produced over 500 songs and contributed to 28 musical shows up until Hart’s death. “Bewitched” comes from what many consider their best work, Pal Joey (1940), based on some acrid stories by New Yorker author John O’Hara. The song’s original risqué lyrics reflect the attitude of the character who sings it, an adulterous wife obsessed with a manipulative cad, but over the years, singers have sweetened them into the romantic ballad we know today.
Completely self-taught as both a composer and lyricist, Irving Berlin (1888-1989) had never heard a word of English until his family immigrated to the United States from tsarist Russia when he was five. He left school at eight to help support his family by selling newspapers, got a job as a singing waiter in his teens, taught himself to play piano during breaks at the restaurant, and soon began writing songs. He wrote the tricky words and music for “Puttin’ On the Ritz” in 1927, and it appeared in an early movie musical in 1930, believed to be the first song on film sung by an interracial cast. Since then, Hollywood has also presented it sung by Clark Gable in Idiot’s Delight (his only singing role), Fred Astaire in Blue Skies, and Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein. While Berlin wrote for Broadway as well as Hollywood, “Sisters” (performed in the concert’s second half) comes from the movie White Christmas (1954).
Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (1899-1974) began studying piano at seven, started his first band in his teens, and led his own jazz orchestra from 1923 until his death. He gained fame performing at the Cotton Club in Harlem, but his composing spanned many genres, including sacred music later in his life. Both our Ellington selections started as instrumentals, later acquiring their lyrics by Bob Russell (1914-1970), a composer in his own right. Ellington’s band originally recorded “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” (1940) as “Never No Lament” with an alto sax solo. Similarly, Ellington wrote “Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me” (heard in our next set) as “Concerto for Cootie” (1940), a showpiece for his band’s lead trumpeter, Cootie Williams.
Published in 1938, “I’ll Be Seeing You,” with music by Sammy Fain (1902-1989) and lyrics by Irving Kahal (1903-1942), met its moment after the United States joined the Allies to fight Nazism in World War II. Like many ballads of that time, it spoke to the longings of couples and family members separated by the war. After becoming a Bing Crosby hit in 1944, it provided the title for a popular movie about a soldier on leave struggling with shell shock. Fain initially worked as a singer and pianist before starting his 16-year collaboration with Kahal, who had gotten his start in vaudeville.
“It’s Only a Paper Moon,” with music by Harold Arlen (1905-1986) and lyrics by Yip Harburg (1896-1981), became a hit two years after being introduced in a 1930 Broadway flop. The team had their greatest success in 1939, composing the score for The Wizard of Oz and winning an Oscar for “Over the Rainbow.” By the mid-1930s, Arlen was writing primarily for movies, working with lyricists Ira Gershwin and Johnny Mercer (1909-1976), with whom he wrote “That Old Black Magic” (performed in the second half) for Star-Spangled Rhythm (1942); both a successful singer and a lyricist, Mercer won four Oscars for best original song. Harburg wrote the classic anthem of the Great Depression, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” and continued his social commentary throughout his life, especially in his satire of Jim Crow, Finian’s Rainbow.
Over his long career as a lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein collaborated on both operettas and musicals, most notably with Jerome Kern (1885-1945), who composed for both Broadway and Hollywood with an array of lyricists. Together they produced the path-breaking Show Boat (1927), which radically changed people’s ideas of what a musical could be; it featured a cast of Black and white performers singing together, and its strong plot tackled race relations at a time when the Ku Klux Klan was gaining strength. “All the Things You Are” comes from their musical Very Warm for May (1939) and later appeared in the movie Broadway Rhythm (1944). Stephen Sondheim claimed the lush and intricate melody inspired him to become a composer.
George and Ira Gershwin’s “Fascinating Rhythm” dates from 1924, right after George had introduced Rhapsody in Blue, with himself as piano soloist. The brothers had previously collaborated on individual songs for revues, but that year they co-wrote a whole show, Lady Be Good!, the first of over a dozen musicals. Ira initially disliked the syncopated fragment George kept playing over and over, just as the lyrics imply, but soon became obsessed with the “fascinating rhythm” himself.
We begin the second half with more Gershwin–three of George’s piano preludes that illustrate his blending of jazz with classical forms. He originally planned to compose a set of 24 short pieces to make up a larger work titled The Melting Pot, for their international inspiration. He wound up composing only seven, premiering these three in 1926. He based the first on Brazilian baião, saw the second as “a sort of blues lullaby,” and considered the third Spanish. Together, they offer a good snapshot of jazz-influenced American classical music of the early 20th century.
Unlike most of this concert’s songwriters, Hoagy Carmichael (1899-1981) never composed for either Broadway or the movies, despite his many hits. He originally wrote “Georgia on My Mind” (1930) as an instrumental number, first recorded by his friend, jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke. Stuart Gorrell (1901-1963), a fellow student at Indiana University, where Carmichael first earned money playing piano at fraternity parties, heard the tune at one such party and stayed up all night fitting words to it, the only lyrics he ever wrote. Though now the state song of Georgia, the title originally referred to Carmichael’s sister. Carmichael got the inspiration for his biggest hit, “Stardust” (1927), while pondering a failed romance and initially recorded it as an instrumental. Mills Music assigned one of its contract lyricists, Mitchell Parish (1900-1993), to write words for it in 1929; Parish also wrote lyrics for Glenn Miller and Duke Ellington songs.
“Dream a Little Dream of Me,” with music by Fabian Andre (1910-1960) and Wilbur Schwandt (1904-1998) and lyrics by Gus Kahn (1886-1941) dates from 1931 and has been recorded by artists as diverse as Louis Armstrong, k.d. lang, and “Mama Cass” Elliot, who made it her signature song. Both Andre and Schwandt worked primarily as bandleaders and arrangers, especially of “Latin” dance music. Kahn wrote lyrics with many composers and from 1933 on spent most of his career writing for movie musicals. In a sentence that sums up much of the Great American Songbook, he once explained of his song-writing that “young men and women do not know how to say ‘I love you’ to each other, so we say it for them in 32 bars.”
“Honeysuckle Rose,” by jazz pianist Thomas “Fats” Waller (1904-1943) and lyricist Andy Razaf (1895-1973) got its start as a soft-shoe dance number in a 1929 revue. By age sixteen, Waller had gone from providing keyboard music at his father’s church to playing organ at a Harlem theater and learning stride piano from James P. Johnson. Razaf, Waller’s frequent collaborator, eased his way into the music business by working as an elevator operator in Tin Pan Alley to meet various composers. Together, the team wrote successful Broadway musicals and hundreds of individual songs, but Waller was equally famous for his stride piano playing. Waller’s own recording of “Honeysuckle Rose” is in the Grammy Hall of Fame.
“Just in Time” comes from the 1956 Broadway musical, The Bells Are Ringing, with music by Jule Styne (1905-1994) and lyrics by the team of Betty Comden (1917-2006) and Adolph Green (1914-2002) who won two Tony awards and four Oscars in their over 50-year collaboration. Styne moved with his family from Britain to Chicago as a child and was performing as piano soloist with symphony orchestras in the Midwest before age ten. He preferred pop music to classical, however. He found his first composing success in Hollywood and started writing for Broadway only in 1947. Comden and Green also wrote for both Hollywood and Broadway, with many collaborators, including Leonard Bernstein.
Lyricist John M. Blackburn (1913-2006) and composer Karl A. Suessdorf (1911-1982) wrote “Moonlight in Vermont” in 1944, but not for the contemporary movie musical of the same name. The song is frequently played at Vermont wedding receptions and is considered the unofficial state song. When the legislature voted on making it the official song, the measure failed on the grounds that the melody was too hard to sing! What’s more, the lyrics do not rhyme; in fact, they take the form of several haiku, except for the bridge and the jazzy solos.
Though now beloved for its hopeful message, “What a Wonderful World,” by Bob Thiele (1922-1996) and George David Weiss (1921-2010), almost went unproduced. Thiele spent most of his career recording and promoting jazz and blues musicians, including John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, John Lee Hooker, and B.B. King. Weiss studied at Juilliard, became an arranger for various big bands, and composed songs and film scores. The two men saw the song as a way to overcome the racial, social, and political tensions of the late 1960s, but initially used pseudonyms because in 1967, the head of ABC Records strenuously objected to releasing Louis Armstrong’s now-classic recording of it. Respected as a jazz musician in the United States and around the world, Armstrong was the perfect person to sing it. Both the man and the song embodied music’s unique ability to transform strangers into friends.
Susan Wladaver-Morgan