Jerome Kern

One of the most important American theatre composers of the early 20th century, he wrote more than 700 songs, used in over 100 stage works, including such classics as "Ol' Man River", "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man", "A Fine Romance", "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", "The Song Is You", "All the Things You Are", "The Way You Look Tonight" and "Long Ago (and Far Away)".

He collaborated with many of the leading librettists and lyricists of his era, including George Grossmith Jr., Guy Bolton, P. G. Wodehouse, Otto Harbach, Oscar Hammerstein II, Dorothy Fields, Johnny Mercer, Ira Gershwin and Yip Harburg.

[4] His father relented, and later in 1902, Kern became a student at the New York College of Music, studying the piano under Alexander Lambert and Paolo Gallico, and harmony under Dr. Austin Pierce.

[3][5] For a time, Kern worked as a rehearsal pianist in Broadway theatres and as a song-plugger for Tin Pan Alley music publishers.

He began to provide these additions in 1904 to British scores for An English Daisy, by Seymour Hicks and Walter Slaughter, and Mr. Wix of Wickham, for which he wrote most of the songs.

By World War I, more than a hundred of Kern's songs had been used in about thirty productions, mostly Broadway adaptations of West End and European shows.

[3] Kern's song, with four beats to a bar, departed from the customary waltz-rhythms of European influence and fitted the new American passion for modern dances such as the fox-trot.

Theatrical agent Elisabeth Marbury asked Kern and librettist Guy Bolton to create a series of intimate and low-budget, yet smart, musicals.

[10] The "Princess Theatre shows" were unique on Broadway not only for their small size, but their clever, coherent plots, integrated scores and naturalistic acting, which presented "a sharp contrast to the large-scale Ruritanian operettas then in vogue"[3] or the star-studded revues and extravaganzas of producers like Florenz Ziegfeld.

[2] However, it did little to fulfill the new team's mission to innovate, except that Kern's song, "The Magic Melody", was the first Broadway showtune with a basic jazz progression.

[10] Kern and Bolton next created an original piece, Very Good Eddie, which was a surprise hit, running for 341 performances, with additional touring productions that went on into the 1918-19 season.

The rest of the show was composed by Louis Hirsch and ran for 189 performances: "Despite a respectable run, everyone realized there was little point in continuing the series without Kern.

It also had a long run in London in 1921, produced by George Grossmith Jr.[2] Kern's next shows were Good Morning, Dearie (1921, with Caldwell) which ran for 347 performances; followed in 1922 by a West End success, The Cabaret Girl in collaboration with Grossmith and Wodehouse;[23] another modest success by the same team, The Beauty Prize (1923); and a Broadway flop, The Bunch and Judy, remembered, if at all, as the first time Kern and Fred Astaire worked together.

[2] Stepping Stones (1923, with Caldwell) was a success, and in 1924 the Princess Theatre team of Bolton, Wodehouse and Kern reunited to write Sitting Pretty, but it did not recapture the popularity of the earlier collaborations.

"[1] When Sitting Pretty was produced, he forbade any broadcasting or recording of individual numbers from the show, which limited their chance to gain popularity.

[2] 1925 was a major turning point in Kern's career when he met Oscar Hammerstein II, with whom he would entertain a lifelong friendship and collaboration.

As a young man, Kern had been an easy companion with great charm and humor, but he became less outgoing in his middle years, sometimes difficult to work with: he once introduced himself to a producer by saying, "I hear you're a son of a bitch.

[30] In 1989, a stage version of the musical was presented on television for the first time, in a production from the Paper Mill Playhouse telecast by PBS on Great Performances.

[32] In January 1929, at the height of the Jazz Age, and with Show Boat still playing on Broadway, Kern made news on both sides of the Atlantic for reasons wholly unconnected with music.

The collection, rich in inscribed first editions and manuscript material of eighteenth and nineteenth century authors, sold for a total of $1,729,462.50 (equivalent to $30,687,895 in 2023) – a record for a single-owner sale that stood for over fifty years.

[2] He collaborated with Harbach on the Broadway musical The Cat and the Fiddle (1931), about a composer and an opera singer, featuring the songs "She Didn't Say Yes" and "The Night Was Made for Love".

[37] Roberta (1933) by Kern and Harbach included the songs "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", "Let's Begin" and "Yesterdays" and featured, among others, Bob Hope, Fred MacMurray, George Murphy and Sydney Greenstreet all in the early stages of their careers.

With Hammerstein, he wrote songs for the film versions of his recent Broadway shows Music in the Air (1934), which starred Gloria Swanson in a rare singing role, and Sweet Adeline (1935).

"[45] Also with Fields, he wrote two new songs, "I Won't Dance" and "Lovely to Look At", for the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film version of Roberta (1935), which was a hit.

In 1940, Hammerstein wrote the lyric "The Last Time I Saw Paris", in homage to the French capital, recently occupied by the Germans.

Some of it was too advanced for the film companies; Kern's biographer, Stephen Banfield, refers to "tonal experimentation ... outlandish enharmonics" that the studios insisted on cutting.

[55] In the film, Kern's songs are sung by Judy Garland, Kathryn Grayson, June Allyson, Lena Horne, Dinah Shore, Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury, among others, and Gower Champion and Cyd Charisse appear as dancers.

[57] In the fall of 1945, Kern returned to New York City to oversee auditions for a new revival of Show Boat, and began to work on the score for what would become the musical Annie Get Your Gun, to be produced by Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Hammerstein hummed or sang the song "I've Told Ev'ry Little Star" from Music in the Air (a personal favorite of the composer's) into Kern's ear.

[59] Rodgers and Hammerstein then assigned the task of writing the score for Annie Get Your Gun to the veteran Broadway composer Irving Berlin.