Word: lyricist
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DIED. Carolyn Leigh, 57, lyricist of such spirited pop standards as Witchcraft, Hey Look Me Over, and The Best Is Yet to Come; of a heart attack; in New York City. By the age of 25 Leigh had penned more than 200 unpublished song lyrics. In 1954, after visiting her father in a hospital where he was recovering from a heart ailment, she wrote Frank Sinatra's hit Young at Heart (with Composer Johnny Richards). Later she created the lyrics to the Broadway musicals Peter Pan and Little...
Thus it was that the group's chief lyricist, John Lennon, began tuning in on U.S. Folk Singer Bob Dylan (The Times They Are A-Changin'); it wasn't Dylan's sullen anger about life that Lennon found appealing so much as the striving to "tell it like it is." Gradually, the Beatles' work began to tell it too. Their 1965 song, Nowhere Man ("Doesn't have a point of view, knows not where he's going to") asked: "Isn't he a bit like...
...Lawrence sang Someone to Watch over Me in Oh, Kay! (1926); in Girl Crazy (1930), young Ginger Rogers sang But Not for Me and Embraceable You, and Ethel Merman razed the roof with I Got Rhythm. Of Thee I Sing (1931) won Ira the first Pulitzer Prize for a lyricist. For George's crowning triumph, Porgy and Bess (1935), Ira contributed about half of the lyrics (the others were by DuBose Heyward). The brothers repeated their success in Hollywood, especially with Fred Astaire: Shall We Dance included They All Laughed and Let's Call the Whole Thing...
...collaborations with George, and with a host of other composers including Jerome Kern, Vincent Youmans, Kurt Weill and Vernon Duke, Ira could write lyrics that appeared clumsy or cliched; he could skip or cram syllables into a melodic line. But no lyricist used slang phrases earlier or as cleverly; none devised catchier titles; nobody got to the dramatic point faster than Ira. One reason so many Gershwin songs are so memorable is that Ira punched through the theme in the first few words ("They're writing songs of love,/ But not for me"). And in at least one song...
DIED. James Hubert ("Eubie") Blake, 100, durable ragtime composer and lyricist (Charleston Rag and I'm Just Wild About Harry); just five days after his centennial, following a bout of pneumonia; in Brooklyn. A onetime bordello pianist and a contemporary of Scott Joplin, Blake electrified Broadway in 1921 with his music for Shuffle Along. For the next 25 years the modest, unassuming composer enjoyed steady success before sliding into semiobscurity. His music was rediscovered in the '60s and eventually celebrated in such Broadway shows as 1979's Eubie...