Word: kern
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...songs are not remembered as having the romance of Jerome Kern's, the wit of Cole Porter's, the lilt of Richard Rodgers', the sophistication of George Gershwin's. But his songs are surely remembered - and as more than exhibits in the museum of old tunes. "God Bless America," "Easter Parade" and "White Christmas" and a couple dozen others run through the mental juke boxes of people who don't care who wrote them or how long ago they were first popular. Like a pretty girl (in another Berlin lyric), his melodies haunt you night and day. They...
...people - but maybe not of other top composers. I wonder if he was ever considered a member of their club, of whether he considered himself one. Oh, they were all chummy. Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein were his producers on "Annie Get Your Gun"; he took over from Kern, who had died suddenly. (Twenty years earlier, Rodgers was not so pleased when, at the request of the star Belle Baker, Berlin had written a song for her to interpolate into an otherwise all-Rodgers-and-Hart score for the Broadway musical "Betsy." The song, "Blue Skies," was the show's biggest...
...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...
...song pulled from radio stations. In the late 80s Berlin turned down Steven Spielberg's pleas to use "Always" as the theme for a film of the same title, saying that he had his own plans for the song. The composer was 90 at the time. (Spielberg substituted Kern's "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes...