Jerome Kern
BORN: 1885
DIED: 1945
Jerome Kern (1885-1945) is arguably the father modern American musical theater.
Born in New York of German heritage, he attended the New York College of Music
and began to break into Broadway theater during the first decade of the century
by having songs of his interpolated into shows. An Anglophile and friend
of P.G. Wodehouse, Kern scored his first success with songs inserted into
The Girl from Utah, a British import, in 1914, including the ballad "They
Didn't Believe Me." Breaking away from the European model of waltz music,
Kern proved adept at adapting contempoarary dance music into his songs as
well as producing subtle, inventive ballads. He collaborated with Guy Bolton
and, later, Wodehouse on a series of shows presented at the Princess Theater
in the middle of the decade, notably Very Good Eddie, and continued to score
successes into the '20s.
But Kern really entered the history books with Show Boat (1927), the first
truly modern American musical, with an integrated story and such memorable
songs as "Ol' Man River" and "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man." Like many of his
contemporaries, Kern divided his time between Broadway and Hollywood in the
'30s, after sound came into the movies, and his movie hits included the Fred
Astaire-Ginger Rogers film Swing Time, with such songs as "A Fine Romance"
and "The Way You Look Tonight" (with lyrics by Dorothy Fields). Kern worked
steadily -- he wrote or contributed to 37 shows during his career -- and was
beginning work on Annie Get Your Gun when he died suddenly in 1945. He left
behind one of the richest catalogs of show music in history. ~ William Ruhlmann,
All Music Guide
American composer Jerome Kern was trained at home by his mother, then went
on for formal study at the New York College of Music and at Heidelberg University.
Gravitating to the lucrative fields of operetta and popular music, Kern wrote
his first hit song in 1905, and seven years later composed his first Broadway
score for the now-forgotten The Red Petticoat. Public recognition of Kern's
skills accelerated after he contributed several new songs to the pre-packaged
British musical The Girl From Utah (1914). With his close friends Guy Bolton
and P.G. Wodehouse, Kern became a leading light of New York's Princess Theatre,
which eschewed the pomp and spectacle of the European operettas in favor of
small casts, "intimate" stories, and well-integrated songs. Kern's biggest
Broadway success of the 1920's was Show Boat, though when it was first filmed
in 1929 the producers threw out most of Kern's songs because they were already
"too familiar" to the audience (subsequent filmizations of Show Boat in 1936
and 1951 not only restored the Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein score, but also
-- in the case of the 1936 version -- added two new tunes to the manifest).
In addition to the film adaptations of Kern's stage shows, including Sunny
(1941) and Roberta (1935), the composer has written several scores expressly
for the screen, beginning with his orchestra accompaniment for the silent
1916 serial Gloria's Romance. He wrote the songs for the 1936 Astaire-Rogers
musical Swing Time, including the Oscar-winning "The Way You Look Tonight,"
and also labored on the solo Astaire vehicle You Were Never Lovelier. Kern's
movie assignments ranged from the celebrated (Cover Girl (1944), Centennial
Summer ) to the disappointing (High Wide and Handsome, One Night in the Tropics).
In 1941, he won his second Oscar for "The Last Time I Saw Paris," which was
the highlight of the otherwise negligible Lady Be Good (1941). Though well
known for being helpful and solicitous to up-and-coming composers like George
Gershwin, Kern had his darker side -- especially when insisting that radio
orchestras play his songs exactly as written or face legal action. Kern had
just inherited Annie Get Your Gun from the too-busy Rodgers and Hammerstein,
and was busy fashioning songs to suit the style of star Ethel Merman, when
he died suddenly at the age of 60 (he was succeeded on Annie Get Your Gun
by Irving Berlin). Jerome Kern was portrayed on screen by a grey-templed Robert
Walker in the 1946 biopic Till the Clouds Roll By. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie
Guide