Word: kerning
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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...
Personally Kern is the antithesis of the layman's notion of a prosperous Tin Pan Alleyman. There is nothing dapper or brisk about him. He has frizzy grey hair, a beaklike nose down which his spectacles are always sliding. He hates fripperies. He never has been known to wear a new hat. He buys them from his friends when they are through with them. A clean piece of manuscript paper strikes terror to his heart. He writes his tunes on old scores or he may scuff on a piece of paper until it looks properly seasoned. He is quiet...
...Composer Kern's latest scores (Show Boat, Sweet Adeline, The Cat and the Fiddle) have profited by Composer Robert Russell Bennett's orchestrations. Composer Bennett, collaborating now on an opera with Critic Robert A. Simon of The New Yorker (TIME, May 23) uses few superficial tricks but he goes underneath the songs, inserts inner voices, counterpoint. He orchestrated Of Thee I Sing for George Gershwin, Face the Music for Irving Berlin, The Band Wagon for Arthur Schwarz, all Broadway hits...