Word: kern
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...again songs they had never forgotten. Musical comedies do not act that way. They make what money they can while they are new, then fade into limbo forgotten except perhaps for a stray tune. But four years ago, even before the first curtain went up, Broadway sensed that Jerome Kern's Show Boat was different...
...levee theme, developed fully in "Ol' Man River" when the Negro chorus comes on stage, sweating under bales of cotton, is the kernel around which Show Boat's music grew. Composer Kern wrote the song for Negro Paul Robeson. Then around it he wove his melodic fabric to fit the libretto which Oscar Hammerstein II craftily extracted from Edna Ferber's novel. Paul Robeson was to have sung in the original U. S. production but it was delayed. Contracts called him to London. He sang in the London show, had his great success. He was in last...
Fifteen years ago newspaper critics were referring to the "inexhaustible Jerome Kern." They had in mind such songs as "They Didn't Believe Me," written in hobble-skirt-times for Donald Brian and pretty Julia Sanderson to sing when they could keep their feet still long enough in The Girl from Utah. "Till the Clouds Roll By" and "An Old-Fashioned Wife" in Oh Boy! followed, then "The Sun Shines Brighter" and "Sirens' Song" in Leave It to Jane, then "Babes in the Wood" in Very Good, Eddie. Matinee audiences were wearing Castle clips and suede-top boots...
...Wodehouse collaborated on some of these early shows. For years he and Kern did ghost-work in London for Producer Charles Frohman. Kern got $15 a week, Wodehouse $12. Sally, Sonny, Stepping Stones, Show Boat, Sweet Adeline. . . . Kern had a superstition that shows whose name started with the letter S went better. At least they earned him enough to keep a house boat off Palm Beach, to indulge his penchant for collecting (and reading) rare manuscripts and first editions, so many valuable ones that at auction three years ago they brought...
...fashion to say that Irving Berlin's "Alexander's Ragtime Band" started the ragtime craze; that the blues came in when William Christopher Handy took "St. Louis Blues" North; that George Gershwin took jazz into the concert rooms. No one ever accused Composer Kern of starting anything. He has simply written a great many songs of which people never seem to tire, polite, modulated tunes reflective of the musical study he put in in Germany. And he was the first to use saxophones popularly, in 1913.* Smoothly played they seemed to suit his music...