Word: harte
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Tuneful, tasteful, Soulful, smart. Music: Rodgers. Lyrics: Hart. - Irving Berlin...
...smooth! It's smart! It's Rodgers! It's Hart! - Cole Porter...
...Richard Rodgers, the Broadway composer whose centenary was celebrated with the fireworks of theatrical huzzahs on June 28th, enjoyed long collaborations with the two most prominent lyricists of the American musical. He worked with his first partner, Lorenz Hart, from 1919 until Hart's death, at 48, in 1943. And he teamed with Oscar Hammerstein II from the epochal "Oklahoma!" in 1943 to Hammerstein's death...
...Rogers' Hart phase should be the apprentice work, leading to the fullness of the Hammerstein years. Yet if you listen with alert ears and a clean-slate mind, you might think that the R&Ham songs had come first; for they are ripe with sentimental Americana, fashioned in long melodic lines for big, fluty voices, and grounded in the turn-of-the-century operetta form. They seem far more innocent, more remote from our day, than the R&Hart oeuvre...
...Read the words to those tunes - ideally, in "The Complete Lyrics of Lorenz Hart," currently out of print but well worth tracking down. Listen to the songs - ideally, on the 1956 double-album, "Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers & Hart Song Book," the most magnif of Ella's eight Verve song books, with sensitive charts by Buddy Bregman. Or you could just punch the buttons on your mental juke box, and ascend to rapture...