Jean Schwartz
He is best known for his work writing the scores for more than 30 Broadway musicals, and for his creation of more than 1,000 popular songs with the lyricist William Jerome.
With Jerome, Schwartz created a large body of work for both Broadway and Tin Pan Alley, with the majority of their songs written between the years 1901 and 1910.
Schwartz formed a prolific partnership with the lyricist and playwright Harold Atteridge with whom he created more than a dozen Broadway musicals.
In 1930, he intentionally ended his career as a New York City based songwriter with the aptly named "Au Revoir Pleasant Dreams", a work which became the theme song for Ben Bernie and his orchestra.
His final song of significance, the 1937 popular standard "Trust in Me", was written in collaboration with Milton Ager and Ned Wever.
[1] The family lived on the East Side,[4] and he studied the piano under his older sister, Rosa, who had trained as a pianist under Franz Liszt.
[5] After working for a time as an office boy at a cigar factory and as an attendant at a Turkish bath house, Schwartz obtained employment in the sheet music department of the Siegel-Cooper Company, where his job was to play songs on the piano for customers in order to sell the sheet music.
[6] Other music jobs he held in his early years included working as a pianist with an orchestra at Coney Island and as a song-plugger for the Shapiro-Bernstein Publishing House of Tin Pan Alley.
[8] In the midst of Hoity Toity's run, the two men wrote their first song together, "Mr. Shakespeare Comes to Town", and the tune was added into that production under the pseudonym John Black.
[4][2] The pair then began to expand their repertoire into writing ballads, with an important early success being the song "Bedalia" written for Blanche Ring in Reginald De Koven and George V. Hobart's The Jersey Lily (1903).
[4] The song "Radium Dance" from this show was inspired by scientist Marie Curie, and the musical was a big hit for its stars, Eddie Foy and Alice Fischer.
[12] They scored another popular hit with the musical The Ham Tree, which was created for the vaudeville stars James McIntyre and Thomas Heath.
[15] McNally penned the books to several other Schwartz and Jerome Broadway musicals, including Fritz in Tammany Hall (1905),[16] Lola from Berlin (1907),[17] and In Hayti (1909).
Their 1901 comedic song "Rip Van Winkle Was a Lucky Man" was a hit for both African-American singer Sherman H. Dudley,[23] and Jerome's wife, Maude Nugent.
[24] Their comedic song "I'm a Member of the Midnight Crew" (1909) became a hit for several performers of the era; including Carter DeHaven and Eddie Morton.
[25] Some of their other hit songs included "Since Sister Nell heard Paderewski Play" (1901), "I'm Unlucky" (1902) "Hamlet Was a Melancholy Dane" (1902), "Cordelia Malone" (1904), and "The Hat My Father Wore on St. Patrick's Day" (1909), among many others.
[28] However, songs the pair had written earlier in their career continued to be interpolated into musicals, and performed by recording artists after their partnership had ended.
[27] Schwartz and Jerome were also active as performers on the vaudeville stage together, and they sometimes worked in collaboration with Maude Nugent and the Dolly Sisters.
[42] Schwartz's final Broadway musical, Sunny Days (1928), was made with writers Clifford Grey and William Carey Duncan.
