Jerome Kern

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Jerome David Kern (January 27, 1885 – November 11, 1945) was an American composer of popular music. He wrote around 700 songs and more than 100 complete scores for shows and films in a career lasting from 1902 until his death.

Jerome Kern was born in New York City. His parents, Fanny and Henry Kern, were both German Jews. They named him Jerome because they lived near Jerome Park, a favorite place of theirs. (Jerome Park was named after Leonard Jerome, who was the father of Jennie Jerome, mother of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.) Fanny encouraged her son to take piano lessons. Henry was a merchandiser and sold pianos among other items. Although Henry wanted his son to go into business with him, Jerome insisted on staying with music.

Kern grew up on East 56th Street in Midtown Manhattan, where he attended public schools. He studied at the New York College of Music and then in Heidelberg, Germany. Kern spent a lot of time in London during the turn of the century and he married in Walton-on-Thames in 1910. When he came back to New York, he started working as a rehearsal pianist, but it didn't take long for him to become a prominent and renowned composer. By 1915, he was represented in many Broadway shows. In that year, he was meant to accompany Charles Frohman to London on board the Lusitania, but overslept after being kept up late playing requests at a party. Frohman lost his life. In 1920, he wrote "Look for the Silver Lining" for the musical Sally.

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. Their first show (written together with Otto Harbach) was Sunny, which featured the song Who (Stole My Heart Away)?. Kern and Hammerstein next wrote the famous Show Boat in 1927, which includes the well-known songs "Ol' Man River" and "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man." Based on the book of the same name by Edna Ferber, "Show Boat" was the first musical comedy to integrate plot and music into a cohesive story deviating from the usual musical revue of that era. (A 1946 revival would also try to integrate choreography into the show, in the manner of Rodgers and Hammerstein, as would the 1993 Harold Prince revival.) Several of the songs from "Show Boat" were arranged by Charles Miller into the orchestral work Scenario for Orchestra: Themes from Show Boat in 1941. This was premiered and first recorded by the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Artur Rodziński, the first instance that such an honor had been paid to music from a Broadway show. The musical Roberta (1933) gave us Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and starred Bob Hope.

In 1930, Jerome Kern was placed under contract by Warner Bros. to produce a series of musicals. Jerome Kern worked on Men of the Sky which was released in (1931). Unfortunately, in 1931 the public was apathetic towards musicals and the film was virtually ignored. Consequently, the Warner Bros. bought out his contract and he returned to the stage. In 1935, when musical films had become popular once again, Kern moved to Hollywood and started working on music for films but continued working on Broadway productions, too. His last Broadway show was the rather unsuccessful Very Warm for May in 1939; the score included another Kern–Hammerstein classic, "All The Things You Are". In 1985, the centenary of his birth, the recording of the original production which had been discovered received a Grammy Nomination as Best Cast Show Album. It was his last Broadway show; Kern suffered a heart attack in 1939 and was told by his doctors to concentrate on film scores - a less stressful task since Hollywood songwriters were not as involved with the production of films as Broadway songwriters were with the production of stage musicals.

Kern's Hollywood career was successful indeed. For Swing Time (starring Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire), he wrote "The Way You Look Tonight" (with lyrics by Dorothy Fields), which won the Academy Award in 1936 for the best song. Some other songs in the film include "A Fine Romance", "Pick Yourself Up", and "Never Gonna Dance". In 1941, he and Hammerstein wrote "The Last Time I Saw Paris", a homage to the French city just recently occupied by the Germans. The song was used in the movie Lady Be Good and won another Oscar for Best Song - the only time a song not written for the film it appears in won the Oscar. In 1944, Kern teamed up with Ira Gershwin to write the songs for one of his best-remembered film musicals, Cover Girl, starring Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly. It featured the classic song Long Ago and Far Away.

Although Kern generally wrote for musical theatre, the harmonic richness of his compositions lend themselves well to the jazz idiom, which typically emphasizes improvisation based on a harmonic structure; many have been adopted by jazz musicians and have become standard tunes.

Jerome Kern died of a stroke in 1945, at the age of 60 in New York. He had been overseeing auditions for a new revival of Show Boat, and was due to compose the score for the musical Annie Get Your Gun but following his death, the task was passed to Irving Berlin. At the time of Kern's death, MGM was filming a fictionalized version of his life, Till the Clouds Roll By.

[edit] Complete Work for Broadway

Note: All shows are musical comedies for which Kern was the sole composer unless otherwise specified.

During his first phase of work for Broadway theater (1904-11), Kern wrote songs that were featured in revues or other collaborative musicals and occasionally co-wrote comic musicals with one or two other composers. In some cases, the show had opened in London, and Kern contributed additional music for songs interpolated into the New York production.

Mr. Wix of Wickham (1904) - co-composer and co-lyricist
The Catch of the Season (1905) - contributing composer
The Earl and the Girl (1905) - featured songwriter
The Rich Mr. Hoggenheimer (1906) - featured songwriter
The Dairymaids (1907) - featured songwriter
The Girls of Gottenberg (1908) - featured songwriter for "I Can't Say That You're The Only One"
Fluffy Ruffles (1908) - co-composer (for eight out of ten songs, including "Fluffly Ruffles")
Kitty Grey (1909) - featured composer for "If The Girl Wants You (Never Mind the Color of Her Eyes)" and "Just Good Friends"
King of Cadonia (1910) - co-composer
La Belle Paree (1911) - revue - co-composer
Ziegfeld Follies of 1911 (1911) - revue - featured composer for "I'm a Crazy Daffy-Dill (Daffydil)"

Beginning in 1912, the more-experienced Kern began to work on dramatically-concerned shows, including music for plays, and for the first time in his young career, he wrote musicals as the sole composer. His regular lyricist collaborators during this period were Guy Bolton, P. G. Wodehouse, Harry B. Smith, Anne Caldwell, and Howard Dietz.

The Girl from Montmartre (1912) - play - co-incidental music composer
The "Mind-the-Paint" Girl (1912) - play - incidental music composer
The Red Petticoat (1912)
Oh, I Say! (1913)
When Claudia Smiles (1914) - featured co-lyricist for "Ssh! You'll Waken Mr. Doyle"
The Girl from Utah (1914) - Added five songs to the American production of this Paul Rubens musical, including the classic "They Didn't Believe Me"
90 in the Shade (1915)
Nobody Home (1915) - play - incidental music composer
Cousin Lucy (1915) - play - incidental music composer
Miss Information (1915) - play - incidental music composer
Very Good Eddie (1915)
- Revived in 1975
Ziegfeld Follies of 1916 (1916) - revue - featured composer for "When the Lights Are Low", "My Lady of the Nile", and "Ain't It Funny What a Difference Just a Few Drinks Make?"
Have a Heart (1917)
Love o' Mike (1917)
Oh, Boy! (1917)
Ziegfeld Follies of 1917 (1917) - featured composer for "Because You Are Just You (Just Because You're You)"
Leave It to Jane (1917)
Oh, Lady! Lady! (1918)
Toot-Toot! (1918)
Rock-a-Bye Baby (1918)
Head Over Heels (1918)
She's a Good Fellow (1919)
The Night Boat (1920)
Hitchy-Koo of 1920 (1920) - revue
Sally (1920)
- Revived in 1923, 1948
Good Morning Dearie (1921)
The Bunch and Judy (1922)
Stepping Stones (1923)
Sitting Pretty (1924)
Dear Sir (1924)

During the last phase of his life, Jerome Kern continued to work with his previous collaborators but also met Oscar Hammerstein II and Otto Harbach, with whom Kern wrote his most lasting, memorable, and well-known works.

Sunny (1925)
The City Chap (1925)
Criss Cross (1926)
Lucky (1927) - co-composer
Show Boat (1927) - (2 out of 19 songs were written by others; the music for the song Bill was by Kern, but the lyrics were co-written by P.G. Wodehouse)
- Revived in 1932, 1946, 1954, 1961, 1976, 1983, 1994
Sweet Adeline (1929)
The Cat and the Fiddle (1931) - co-composer, co-lyricist, co-bookwriter, and outliner of orchestrations which were done by Robert Russell Bennett)
Music in the Air (1932) - composer and co-director
- Revived in 1951
Roberta (1933)
Mamba's Daughters (1939) - play - featured songwriter
- Revived in 1940
Very Warm for May (1939)

In addition to revivals of his most popular shows, the music of Jerome Kern was posthumously featured in a variety of revues, musicals, and concerts on Broadway.

Jerome Kern Goes to Hollywood (1986) - revue consisting solely of songs composed by Kern and with lyrics by twelve different writers
Big Deal (1986) - dance revue - featured composer for "Pick Yourself Up"
Something Wonderful (1995) - concert celebrating Oscar Hammerstein II's 100th birthday - featured composer
Paul Robeson (1995) - one-man play - featured composer for "Ol' Man River"
Dream (1997) - revue - featured composer for "You Were Never Lovelier", "I'm Old Fashioned", and "Dearly Beloved"
Swing! (1999) - dance revue - featured songwriter for "I Won't Dance"
Elaine Stritch at Liberty (2002) - one-woman show - featured songwriter for "All In Fun"
Never Gonna Dance (2003) - musical consisting solely of songs composed by Kern and with lyrics by nine different writers

[edit] Trivia

Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead was named after Jerome Kern. The Original (1939) Broadway Cast Recording of Very Warm for May was released in 1985 and become the oldest Broadway Cast Recording; it was nominated for a Grammy in the category of Best Cast Show Album.