Hy Zaret

Hy Zaret (August 21, 1907 – July 2, 2007) ^[1] was an American Tin Pan Alley^[2] lyricist and composer best known as the co-author of the 1955 hit "Unchained Melody", one of the most recorded songs of the 20th century.^[3]

Early life

Zaret was born Hyman Harry Zaritsky in New York City and attended West Virginia University and Brooklyn Law School, where he received an LLB.

Career

He scored his first major success in 1937, when he teamed up with Saul Chaplin and Sammy Cahn to co-write the pop standard "Dedicated to You." The early 1940s brought some collaborations with Alex C. Kramer and Joan Whitney, including 1941's "It All Comes Back to Me Now" and the socially conscious, WWII-themed "My Sister and I."

Zaret wrote the lyrics for an English translation of the French Resistance song "La Complainte du Partisan" ("The Song of the French Partisan"). The song had initially been written in Russian by Anna Marly in 1943, and then translated into French. The song became popular after it was recorded by Leonard Cohen and others as "The Partisan". In 1944 he and Lou Singer wrote the popular hit novelty song "One Meatball", based on a song popular among Harvard undergraduates.^[2]

Unchained Melody

Zaret's biggest success, though, was "Unchained Melody," a song he co-wrote with film composer Alex North for the 1955 prison film Unchained (hence the title), which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. No fewer than three versions of the song—by Les Baxter, Al Hibbler, and Roy Hamilton—hit the U.S. Top Ten that year, with Hibbler's version ranking as the best-known for the next ten years. The song was also recorded successfully by Jimmy Young and Liberace, and covered by countless others, but the Righteous Brothers' 1965 version—given a supremely romantic production by Phil Spector—became the definitive take, reaching the U.S. pop Top Five. That recording was revived in 1990 thanks to its inclusion in the film, Ghost, and nearly reached the U.S. Top Ten all over again, whilst it reached No.1 in the U.K on this release. Elvis Presley, Sam Cooke, Cliff Richard, Roy Orbison & Donny Osmond also recorded versions of the song. This song is unique in that it has made No.1 on the U.K. singles charts in four different guises by four different artists over a period of nearly fifty years: Jimmy Young (1955), The Righteous Brothers (1990), Robson & Jerome (1995) and Gareth Gates (2002). The latter three versions have all recorded certified sales in excess of one million copies in the U.K. alone.

Children's music

Zaret turned his attention to educational children's music in the late 1950s, collaborating with Lou Singer on a six-album series called "Ballads for the Age of Science"; different volumes covered space, energy and motion, experiments, weather, and nature. The records were quite successful, and the songs "Why Does the Sun Shine"^[4] (aka "The Sun Is a Mass of Incandescent Gas") and A Shooting Star Is Not a Star were even covered by alternative rock band They Might Be Giants in 1994 and 2011, respectively. (source: Steve Huey, Allmusic)

See also

• William Stirrat — whose discredited claim to have written "Unchained Melody" under the pen name Hy Zaret has been widely circulated.
• Michael Feinstein Great American Songbook Initiative - where Hy Zaret's papers are housed. A collection guide can be found here

References

External links

• ASCAP Foundation Living Video Archive interview Hy Zaret
• Zaret Bio at MPL Communications at the Wayback Machine (archived February 10, 2006)
• Story of Unchained Melody at MPL Communications at the Wayback Machine (archived February 26, 2006)
• Michael Feinstein Foundation
• Argosy Music Corp.
  • History of Little Songs
• Publishing administrator for "Unchained Melody"
• Hy Zaret discography at MusicBrainz