songwriter of the month Archives | The Year of Tony Bennett

August 31, 2016 By Suzanne Leave a Comment

Songwriter of the Month: George Gershwin

The songwriter of the month for September, 2016 is George Gershwin.

George Gershwin, born as Jacob Gershwin, was born on September 26, 1898 in Brooklyn, New York. His parents emigrated from Russia and married in New York in 1895. Their first son, Israel (Ira) was born in 1896. The parents bought a piano and paid for lessons for Ira, but it was George who fell in love with the piano and took up the lessons. A prodigious talent, he studied classical piano by day and fell in love with popular music by night.

Like many young budding songwriters, George got his first job early, aged 15, at Tin Pan Alley as a song plugger. He published his first song at the age of 17 and earned fifty cents for his effort.

In the next 22 years, he was the great composer of the Jazz Age, writing songs for Broadway musicals, films (with his brother Ira writing lyrics) and the opera Porgy and Bess. He also wrote concert pieces, including An American in Paris, Rhapsody in Blue and Piano Concerto in F.

George Gershwin died from a brain tumor in Las Angeles on July 11, 1937. He was 39 years old.

The Gershwin Estate has a very fine website about George and Ira Gershwin. I call your attention to the timeline on this website.

May 30, 2016 By Suzanne Leave a Comment

Songwriter of the Month: Cole Porter

The Year of Tony Bennett is proud to honor Cole Porter as the songwriter of the month for June 2016.

Cole Porter was born on June 9, 1891 to a wealthy family from Peru, Indiana. His mother encouraged him musically, and as a child he studied both piano and violin. While he was quite good with both instruments, he disliked the sound of the violin and concentrated on music. He studied hard and was a proficient pianist in his teens.

Cole Porter - 1913 at Yale — Cole Porter – 1913 at Yale

His grandfather wanted Cole to follow in the family business and wanted the young man to become a lawyer. With the in mind, he sent him to prep school in Massachusetts; Porter brought an upright piano with him. He did well in school, though, and was the class valedictorian. He entered Yale in 1909, majoring in English, minoring in music and also studying French. While at Yale, he wrote several student songs, some of which are still sung today. He wrote scores to several student musicals while at Yale as well. He did enroll in the law school at Harvard, but was encouraged by the dean of the law school to switch to the music school, where he continued his studies in classical music.

By 1916, he had two productions that had made it to Broadway, though they were flops and only ran for a short time. Porter moved to Paris at the beginning of World War I and, some say, volunteered with relief organizations and possibly joined the French Foreign Legion. That said, he lived in Paris, quite lavishly on his share of the family fortune, and was well-known for his scandalous parties. Though Porter’s homosexuality had become more open while a student at Yale, he was completely out as gay during this period. In 1918, he met Linda Lee Thomas, a wealthy divorcee from Louisville, Kentucky and they were married in 1919 and stayed married until Linda’s death in 1954.

In the early 1920s, Cole began to take his music more seriously, mainly due to Linda’s belief in his talent, and began to write.

In 1928, he returned to Broadway with the musical Paris, which was a big hit for him, which contained two of his more famous songs: “Let’s Do It” and “Let’s Misbehave.” In the late 1920s and 1930s, he was continually on Broadway, including Gay Divorce in 1932, Fred Astaire’s last stage show before Hollywood called. One of his early great hits was Anything Goes, starring Ethel Merman.

In 1937, Porter had a terrible riding accident, where his horse rolled over on his and crushed his legs. While the doctors wanted to amputate his right leg, Linda fought adamantly to save it, afraid that he’d never return to writing music again. As soon as possible, he returned to work, but the rest of his life was a series of crippling pain and several dozen surgeries.

In the 1940s, he began writing for Hollywood, which paid well but wasn’t a cultural success. But he returned to Broadway in full force, with a string of hits: Kiss Me Kate, Can-Can and Silk Stockings.

After losing both his mother and Linda over a two-year period, he began to slow down. By 1958, the right leg finally had to amputated; he never wrote another song after that. Porter died in 1964 while in California, due in large part to the doctors not properly understanding the seriousness of his addiction to alcohol.

The songs he wrote remain popular and are sung today by popular, jazz and cabaret artists. Ella Fitzgerald’s Cole Porter Songbook is a masterpiece, of course. Other major Porter recordings include Frank Sinatra Sings the Select Cole Porter, Anything Goes: Stephane Grappelli and Yo-Yo Ma, and Red Hot + Blue.

For more information about Cole Porter and his body of work, please visit Cole Wide Web.

May 1, 2016 By Suzanne Leave a Comment

Songwriter of the Month: Irving Berlin

The Year of Tony Bennett is happy to honor Irving Berlin as the Songwriter of the Month for May 2016.

Irving Berlin was born in Russia as Israel Isidor Baline on May 11, 1888. Some say his family was from Siberia; other say he was born in what is now Belarus. His father, a cantor, relocated his family to New York City in 1893. The Baline’s story was similar to those of many other Russian Jewish families; their house was burned to the ground by Cossacks and the Baline family had to sneak themselves out of Russia to America.

The family, whose last name had become Berlin by the 1900 census, settled in a cold-water flat in the Yiddish Theater District on the Lower East Side. Irving’s father found work in a kosher meat market and gave Hebrew lessons to support his family. Young Irving helped out by selling the evening paper while his mother became a midwife. His siblings worked in various jobs, including his brother who worked in a clothing sweatshop.

Young Irving found that he could sell more newspapers if he sang while selling and helped him discover his first job ambition: that of a singing waiter. He had little formal education and his only real skill was his singing. He taught himself to play the piano, though for remainder of his career, he could only play in a single key. He was a song plugger during the day and a singing water at night; in the meantime, he began to write songs. His first published song was “Marie From Sunny Italy,” for which he earned 37 cents.

Gradually, his work began to be noticed and his work as a song plugger introduced him to other young songwriters. His big break came in 1911 when he published “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” a song that is well=known to this day. George Gershwin called “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” the ‘first real American work.’ He continued to write songs of great popularity, including “I Love a Piano.”

He was drafted into service during World War I. His songwriting supported the war theme, including the score to Yip Yip Yaphank, an all-soldier musical. From this came one of my favorite of his songs, “Oh How I Hate To Get Up In The Morning.”

After he returned from the war, his career began to boom as he wrote for revues and the two editions of the Ziegfeld Follies. The string of hits during the 20s and 30s was astounding: “Puttin’ On the Ritz,” “Say It Isn’t So,” “I’ve Got My Love To Keep Me Warm” and “God Bless America.”

In the 1940s, Berlin turned to Broadway, with his 1946 score for Annie Get Your Gun. For Hollywood, he wrote for films such Easter Parade and Holiday Inn.

Berlin died on September 22, 1989 at the age of 101. He left behind a body of work that is the foundation of the American Songbook.

About That Piano

Irving Berlin never had any formal training on playing the piano. Completely self-taught, he could only play in one key, F#, and only used the black keys. He used what is known as a “transposing piano,” which used levers to play in the correct key. This video has Mr. Berlin explaining his piano on the Dinah Shore television show.

March 1, 2016 By Suzanne Leave a Comment

Songwriter of the Month: Jimmy Van Heusen

The songwriter of the month for March 2016 is Jimmy Van Heusen.

He was born Edward Chester Babcock on January 29, 1913 in Syracuse, New York. He began playing piano at an early age, which he much preferred to traditional schooling. In fact, he was expelled from high school in 1928 for a prank he played during a school assembly; a year later he was expelled from a seminary for being a degenerate, having been caught hanging around poolrooms.

His musical career began at the age of 15, when he landed a job as a part-time disc jockey for a radio station. The station manager insisted that he change his name. He looked out the window and saw an advertisement for Van Heusen men’s shirts, and the first name of James or Jimmy came soon after. In spite of using that name professionally for the rest of his life, he never had it changed and was officially known as Edward Chester Babcock. His stint as a disc jockey gave him a real understanding of the construction of popular songs, and he began composing at that early age.

He did attend Syracuse University for two years in the early 1930s, where he studied piano and composition. During that time, he formed a friendship with Harold Arlen’s brother, Jerry Arlen. Arlen was happy to recommend Jerry and Van Heusen for jobs both on the east coast and in Hollywood, a wonderful assist for his burgeoning career. He moved to New York, got a job as a waiter and worked on getting recognized as a composer. Like many young composers of his time period, he worked as a staff pianist for various music publishers, which served to draw attention to his skills. By 1938, he met Jimmy Dorsey and together they composed a song, “It’s The Dreamer In Me,” that was recorded by Dorsey’s orchestra. That same year, he began to parter with lyricist Eddie De Lange, with whom he worked for several years. Van Heusen and De Lange got their big break in 1940 to compose the score for Swingin’ The Dream, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which featured Louis Armstrong as Bottom. The song “Darn That Dream” was a hit for Benny Goodman and was widely recorded, including a very fine version by Billie Holiday.

In 1940, Van Heusen teamed up with Johnny Burke, a relationship that lasted many years. They were asked to composed for the first of the Bing Crosby-Bob Hope “road” movies: The Road to Singapore, released in 1941. Bing Crosby’s recordings of their songs in this 1940s brought great attention to the pair; the songs from that period include “Birds of a Feather, “It’s Always You” and one of my personal favorites “Swinging on a Star.”

During this period of writing a long string of hit songs, Van Heusen also helped out in the war effort. He toured with Crosby to help sell war bonds and, using his given name, also worked at Lockheed as a test pilot for bombers being sent to the front. Apparently, Lockheed had no idea of Babcock’s other job, while Paramount Studios, had no idea that Van Heusen had another job! His shift at Lockheed started around 4:00 am and he was done by noon, when he would report to Paramount.

After the war, Van Heusen and Burke continued to write for both Hollywood and Broadway, in spite of Burke’s failing health, which did not allow Burke to work in 1954 and 1955. Due to contractual issues, Van Heusen was only able to publish his songs under a pseudonym. After the contract was finally terminated, Van Heusen teamed up with Sammy Cahn and began the second stage of his career where he partnered frequently with Frank Sinatra, both professionally and as a friend. Van Heusen and Cahn began to collect awards, including Oscars for The Tender Trap and The Joker’s Wild, which starred Sinatra, as well as an Emmy for their score of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. The partnership with Cahn included Broadway musicals, songs for singers including Sinatra, Paul Anka, Lena Horne, Nat “King” Cole, and Sammy Davis, Jr.

Van Heusen, who was quoted as saying “I dig chicks, booze, music and Sinatra — in that order,” remained a bachelor until 1966. He retired in 1970 and visited his homes in California and New York. He died in 1990, from complications of a stroke. He left us with an amazing collections of songs that are still popular today.

For more information about Jimmy Van Heusen, please visit his official website at jimmyvanheusen.com.

February 1, 2016 By Suzanne Leave a Comment

Songwriter of the Month: Harold Arlen

The Songwriter of the Month for February 2016 is Harold Arlen.

He was born on February 15, 1905 in Buffalo, New York to Samuel and Celia Arluck. His mother gave birth to twins, but only Harold survived. He was given the name Hyman. His father was a noted cantor in Buffalo and was the resident choir director at the Pine Street synagogue. It was at the synagogue that young Hyman was able to explore his musical talents. He began piano lessons at age 9 and composed his first song at the age of 12. Though he was taught classical piano, he loved jazz and began to collect jazz records.

At 15, Hyman formed his first band, The Snappy Trio, which played in the Buffalo area and even in its red light district. They were quite successful, to the point that young Hyman, at the age of 16, was able to buy his own Model T automobile. To his parent’s dismay, he dropped out of high school. The Snappy Trio expanded into a five-piece group called The Southbound Shufflers in 1923. It was around then that he was known as Harold Arluck. His success and fame as a pianist and composer continued to grow and bring offers of employment. He also met a male dancer from Boston named Ray Bolger, who became a lifelong friend. Throughout the rest of the 1920s, he grew as a performer (both piano and singing) as well as composing and arranging. Composer Harry Warren heard him play and connected Harold with the lyricist Ted Koehler.

The first song that Arlen and Koehler wrote was “Get Happy,” which was a great harbinger of the talent of that team. (Judy Garland fans may remember her performance of “Get Happy” in the 1950 film Summer Stock; that performance amazes me each time I watch it.)

In 1930, Arlen and Koehler began to write music for the Cotton Club. Some of the songs they wrote in those years include “I’ve Got The World On A String,” “Stormy Weather,” “Let’s Fall In Love” and “I’ve Got a Right To Sing The Blues.”

In the mid-1930s, Hollywood called and Arlen signed a contract with Samuel Goldwyn to write songs for Strike Me Pink. After that film, he signed with Warner Brothers and began his partnership with Yip Harburg, with whom he wrote many great songs including “Last Night When We Were Young.” They stayed busy writing for film.

In 1938, MGM signed Arlen and Harburg to write the score for The Wizard Of Oz, which resulted in their writing one of the greatest film songs of all time: “Over The Rainbow” for Judy Garland.

Arlen continued to work in Hollywood and found another lyrics partner in Johnny Mercer, with whom he wrote many of his greatest songs: “Blues in the Night” and “One For My Baby (And One More For The Road).” The team also wrote for Broadway productions of Bloomer Girl (1944) and St. Louis Woman (1946).

1952 marked another of Arlen’s great successes: A Star Is Born, which starred Judy Garland. With lyricist Ira Gershwin, he wrote one of his greatest songs: “The Man That Got Away.” He returned to New York to work with Truman Capote on the dramatization of the Capote story House of Flowers. Arlen began to have some health problems in the late 1950s; he was also greatly affected by the death of his mother.

Though Arlen continued to write during the rest of his life, he was not a happy man. His wife, Anya, died of a brain tumor in 1970. Around that time he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease and became a recluse.

Harold Arlen died of cancer on April 23, 1986 at the age of 81. He was one the greatest songwriters this country has ever had and his songs are sung by jazz, popular and cabaret singers in great numbers.

For more information about the life and music of Harold Arlen, please visit The Official Harold Arlen Website, maintained by his son Sam Arlen.