Word: loessers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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World War II made Loesser a complete songwriter. Eager to contribute an anthem to the infantry, he wrote Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition, and this time the dummy tune became the published song -- and a big hit. When he returned to movies, writing pile-driving boogie-woogie (Rumble Rumble Rumble) and patter songs (Can't Stop Talking) for hyperactive Betty Hutton, he had the credit he wanted: songs by Frank Loesser...
...alone comprises its own Top 10 eternal hit parade. The ballads If I Were a Bell and I've Never Been in Love Before and the up- tempo Fugue for Tinhorns and A Bushel and a Peck distinguish any musical. But the savor of Guys and Dolls is in Loesser's capturing of the Damon Runyon Broadway wit, and by extension the unique pizazz of big-town America. No one had put a medical dictionary to music and turned it into a declaration of psychosomatic desperation, as in the nonpareil Adelaide's Lament. Nobody ever heard a love plaint like...
...nearly unprecedented role of composer, lyricist and librettist for a Broadway show, Loesser adapted Sidney Howard's 1924 play They Knew What They Wanted, the story of a naive Italian-American grape grower who tricks a pretty waitress into marriage. The result, after five years' work, was The Most Happy Fella, a rich and deeply felt pastiche of popular and operatic vocabularies. If none of its 40-plus songs have quite the lasting power of Guys and Dolls' tunes, the show has an emotive force rare on Broadway; the feeling is big enough to fill an opera stage...
After Greenwillow, a daring flop, and How to Succeed, his longest-running hit, Loesser worked on two more shows: Pleasures and Palaces, which closed in Detroit, and Senor Discretion, for which he had composed drafts of all the songs. This workaholic was a smokeaholic too; in his study, cigarette butts would pile up like a Watts Tower of spent nicotine. Loesser called them coffin nails, and he was right: he died of lung cancer...
...left behind legacies that perhaps only Frank Loesser could turn into hit songs. Music, no matter what its pedigree, can be great music. A tempestuous composer can be a sweet guy -- a goodnik. Loud, of course, is good. And Loesser is more...