Written by lyricist Yip Harburg and composer Jay Gorney, it was part of the 1932 musical revue Americana; the melody is based on a Russian-Jewish lullaby.

The song tells the story of the universal everyman, whose honest work towards achieving the American dream has been foiled by the economic collapse.

[3] The melody derives from a Jewish lullaby that the composer Jay Gorney, who emigrated to the United States in 1906, heard in his native Russia.

"[5] Harburg recalled that he was working on a song for the musical Americana: "We had to have a title... Not to say, my wife is sick, I've got six children, the Crash put me out of business, hand me a dime.

"[1] Harburg's worksheets show that he went through several drafts of the lyrics, which included a satirical version attacking John D. Rockefeller and other tycoons.

He is the universal everyman who holds various professions, being a farmer and a construction worker as well as a veteran of World War I: it is intended to embrace all listeners.

The bridge deals with the singer's experiences as a veteran of the Great War, falling from patriotism "looked swell" to the discordant harmonies of "slogging through hell".

[11] The song was first performed by the vaudeville singer Rex Weber as part of the musical Americana,[3][5] which ran from October to December 1932 and was not a success.

[14] During the 1970s stagflation and in light of the Watergate scandal, Harburg wrote a parody version for The New York Times:[15][16] Once we had a Roosevelt Praise the Lord!

was "plaintive and thundering" and "the first song of the year that can be sung ... Mr. Gorney has expressed the spirit of these times with more heart-breaking anguish than any of the prose bards of the day.

[17] Theater Arts Monthly's review stated that the song "deflates the rolling bombast of our political nightmare with greater effect than all the rest of Mr. McEvoy's satirical skits put together"; Variety said that "Brother" was the only part of the show worth praising.

[2][12] William Zinsser writes that "[t]he song so lacerated the national conscience that radio stations banned it" for being "sympathetic to the unemployed".

[20] Few thematic Depression songs were popular, because Americans did not want music which reminded them of the economic situation, but "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?"

[3] Unlike other popular songs of the same era which tended to be upbeat, with titles such as "Happy Days Are Here Again" (1929), "On the Sunny Side of the Street" (1930), and "Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries" (1931), "Brother" "put words and music to what many Americans were feeling—fear, grief, even anger".

[12] In 2011, Zinsser wrote that "Brother" "still hovers in the national memory; I can hear its ghostly echo in the chants of the Occupy Wall Street marchers".

They write that the latter achieved this by gradually building intimacy with the listener, starting in third person and moving into first, second, and then both first and second combined ("I'm your pal").

"[1] Pianist Rob Kapilow remarked that the title is "the entire history of the Depression in a single phrase" and the listener ends up "feeling the time-immemorial complaint that the working man doesn't get the rewards".