Word: berlin
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...composer had no love for him. This was Harry Warren, the Italian-born song-plugger who became Hollywood's top song-maker. In 1944, during the Allied air assault on Germany, Warren snapped, "They bombed the wrong Berlin." Edward Jablonski, Berlin's biographer and a confidant for many years, attributes the slur to jealousy "at a time when Warren's own Hollywood career was in decline." This is way off: Warren had five #1 songs in the 40s (including "Chattanooga Choo-Choo" and "On the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe"); Berlin had only one (all right, it was "White Christmas...
...Oddly, or aptly, Warren was the composer Berlin most resembled in immigrant background (Warren was born in Brooklyn of Italian parents), natural melodic gift and lack of formal musical training. Most of the others - Kern, Rodgers, Hammerstein, Larry Hart - were of German Jewish stock from the educated middle-class; Berlin was a Russian Jewish immigrant, raised on the Lower East Side, quickly out of school and into the showbiz fringe as a singing waiter. Their music came from honing a natural talent with years of study; his songwriting gift was a freak of nature. No wonder he fretted that this...
...Most important, they wrote music people thought was important. Kern and Hammerstein made the Broadway musical respectable with "Show Boat." George and Ira Gershwin were the first songwriters to win a Pulitzer Prize for a musical ("Of Thee I Sing"). Berlin did some work for Broadway in this period, but mainly he ground out one-off songs. You could say that he made nothing but hits and money. He talked grandly about writing a "folk opera" (Gershwin finally did); Puccini supposedly wanted to collaborate with him on an opera. But Berlin was compelled to keep writing in a form that...
...swellegant, elegant friends must have thought - Irving was sooo square! He may even have believed the cornball emotions in his songs. In 1925, Berlin was polishing his song "Always" (which originally began, "I'll be loving you, Mona") around the time he was working with director George S. Kaufman on the Marx Brothers show "The Cocoanuts." Kaufman said he thought "'Always' was a long time for a romance" and suggested to Berlin "that the opening line might be a little more in accord with reality - something like "I'll be loving you Thursday.' But Irving would have none...
...MUSIC Berlin didn't always anticipate the musical fashion of the time. Often he imitated it. As a glance at "The Complete Lyrics of Irving Berlin" reveals, he wrote a zillion rag tunes ("That Mysterious Rag," "Ragtime Violin!", "Ragtime Mockingbird," "Ragtime Jockey Man," "Ragtime Soldier Man," "That International Rag") before and after "Alexander." He based whole songs on other people's airs ("That Mesmerizing Mendelsohn Tune," from Mendelsohn's "Spring Song"). He'd drop a snatch of a public-domain song in one of his (the bugle call and "Swanee River" in "Alexander's Ragtime Band"; "There's No Place...