Word: tunesmithing
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...little man shaped like a cigar stub played a few bars on the piano, trying out his tune on his new partner. Lyricist Sammy Cahn, who used to play fiddle in a burlesque house, grunted: "It seems to me I've heard that song before." Before Tunesmith Jule Styne could think of something nasty to reply, Sammy Cahn said hastily: "I mean it's a good title -I've Heard That Song Before." According to Messrs. Styne & Cahn, this is how the title to their first hit was born. Since then most of their major decisions...
...recorded it, thinking it was an old folk tune. A record distributer looked it up, discovered it was only twelve years old, and held by the U.S. Office of Alien Property. Its big royalties now go to the U.S. Government. That would make little difference to its German composers: Tunesmith Hans Otten was dead; Lyricist Gerhard Ebeler had dropped from sight...
After he finishes his next one, a baseball boogie, Tunesmith Ryochi Hattori intends to go on to higher things, like the kind of music Gershwin wrote...
...Tunesmith Jimmy McHugh was celebrating his silver anniversary as a Tin Pan Alley success-and all of Tin Pan Alley seemed to be joining in the celebration. Disc jockeys, bandleaders and crooners were steadily plugging the tunes the nation once knew by heart: I'm in the Mood for Love, South American Way, On the Sunny Side of the Street. But, as usual, no one was plugging them harder than rolypoly Jimmy McHugh himself...
...record versions of this jangling jingle had been turned out, and Civilization was creeping up bestseller lists. It was one of those flash, expendable tunes bound to be a public craze, and then a public nuisance. Hilliard and Sigman have already written another song. Theme: the Thousand Islands. Explained Tunesmith Sigman: "We may not be good songwriters, but we're fast...