Word: lyricists
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...expression in songs of fallen virtue (The Picture That Is Turned Toward the Wall) and tippling ("When you stumbled and fell in the hallway, I knew you'd been drinking again"). But with the turn of the century music publishers drew the line at ballads about sin. When Lyricist Arthur J. Lamb submitted A Bird in a Gilded Cage in 1900, Louis Bernstein refused to take it until the bird was changed from a kept woman into an old man's wife...
...Every Voice's rolling phrases and solemn, striding music (hintful of the Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana) are not new. They were whipped out in 1900 by two Negroes for a Lincoln's Birthday celebration of Negro schoolchildren in Jacksonville. Author is the late James Weldon Johnson, writer, lyricist, educator, first Negro to become a U.S. consul, secretary for 14 years of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Composer is his equally famed brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, popular song writer (Under the Bamboo Tree, Nobody's Lookin' but the Owl and the Moon), collector...
...color, curling brush strokes that recalled Van Gogh's, he painted sunclean, little nudes in airy land scapes, glowing dunes and beaches of health and optimism. From the painter of Germany's grim, Gothic, post-war Walpurgisnacht, George Grosz was converted in the U.S. to a German lyricist celebrating love and nature with the old-time fervor of a Franz Schubert. Now he confesses: "I had been too nervous, too vain, too ambitious, now I can sit in the dunes and feel humble and shy and say a little prayer...
...idea of having "Harvard Blues" introduced at Harvard by the singer and leader who first presented it, in the presence of the lyricist, George Frazier, scut Milt Ebbins, Basie's manager, into ecstasies, and before the evening was over he had his publicity man at work spreading the tidings among the trade papers. One of his stunts, of which he has now ample photographic records, was to have the Count presented with on honorary degree of Doctor of Swingology....Sally Scars, the Boston debutante who just loves jazz and everything about it, has been singing at the Cocoanut Grove this...
Biggest hit of the moment is the novelty handclapping number Deep in the Heart of Texas. Its childishly simple but rollicking tune has only 30 notes; to fill out a 32-bar chorus, the melody has to be repeated. With Deep in the Heart of Texas, two newcomers, Lyricist June Hershey and Composer Don Swander (in private life, Mr. & Mrs. Swander), hit their first jackpot. With the royalties from sheet-music sales (200,000 to date) and records (nine versions), the Swanders can now buy the ranch they have dreamed about...