Word: loessers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...there was one Hollywood figure who appreciated Hutton's talents, and who matched her drive with his, that would be Frank Loesser. As lyricist or total songwriter he authored dozens of movie hits before graduating to Broadway and composing the scores for Guys and Dolls, A Most Happy Fella and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. He's also the subject of a toe-tappingly terrific new bio-doc, Heart & Soul: The Life and Music of Frank Loesser. But in the '40s he was under contract to Paramount, and there he wrote many of Hutton's signature songs...
...wrote in a 1991 TIME tribute, Loesser was born into an educated German-Jewish family that prized classical music; his father was a piano teacher, his brother Arthur a keyboard prodigy and later a professor at the Cleveland Institute of Music. To the Loessers, popular music was infra dig, but Frank loved it. Like the cantor's son in The Jazz Singer, or pert Owl Jolson in the Tex Avery cartoon I Love to Sing-a, he had to battle his family's resistance to mainstream pop. Indeed, Loesser's nearly operatic score for The Most Happy Fella might have...
...that Loesser was as needy as Hutton; nobody could be. A Runyonesque character like the ones he put into Guy and Dolls, he was the classic little guy buoyed by an irrepressible belief in himself. With oceans of vim and a tough demeanor, Loesser was known to insult co-writers and directors and blow his top at rehearsals. He once got so mad at the way Isabel Bigley, Guys and Dolls' original Sister Sara, was mangling one of his songs that he socked her. Yet under the Cagney bully-bravado shone a big heart and the impulse to help other...
...passion in the signature tune If I Were a Bell ("If I were a bell, I'd be ringing ... if I were a lamp, I'd light"), in the 1950 Broadway hit Guys and Dolls; in Los Angeles. Undeterred by a rehearsal during which fiery composer Frank Loesser, underwhelmed by her rendition of Bell, slapped her in the face, Bigley won a Tony Award for the part...
...Before Dylan, pop music wallowed and exulted in the love song; the body of get-lost songs was small. If pop approached the topic, it was usually an invitation to mutual hermitting. ("Let's get lost," Frank Loesser wrote and Mary Martin sang, "lost in each other's arms.") It's true that songs of emotional defiance had been a sub-genre of blues. In folk music, John Jacob Niles, the Kentucky balladeer with the dramatic delivery and the pure falsetto, had written "Go Away from My Window," covered by Harry Belafonte and Joan Baez - and adapted by Dylan...