Sammy Cahn

Songwriter

• Born: June 18, 1913
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: January 15, 1993
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

During his fifty years as a lyricist, Cahn wrote songs that were used in 137 motion pictures and earned 26 Academy Award nominations, winning four. He had a special relationship with Frank Sinatra, who memorably recorded many of Cahn’s songs.

Early Life

Sammy Cahn (kahn) was born to Abraham and Elka Riss Cohen, Jewish immigrants from Galicia, Poland, and he was the only son in a family with four daughters. Cahn’s father ran a restaurant. Growing up, Cahn was a notably poor student who often skipped school, preferring pool rooms, motion-picture shows, and vaudeville performances over the classroom. He compensated for his lack of interest in academics with his love for music. He took violin lessons, but it was not until he was thirteen that he realized music could be something more than a hobby. When he saw his mother pay the hired band at his Bar Mitzvah, he discovered that he could earn money for playing the violin. About a year later, he joined the Pals of Harmony, and with the band, he wrote his first song, “Shake Your Head from Side to Side” and formed a songwriting partnership with the band’s pianist, Saul Chaplin.

In the beginning, Cahn and Chaplin had moderate success writing songs for vaudeville, but they had difficulties getting their songs published. When word reached them that bandleader Jimmie Lunceford, who was playing at the Apollo Theater, needed a song, they wrote and recorded “Rhythm Is Our Business,” which became a modest hit. The song that brought them to fame and riches was “Bei mir bist du schoen.” Cahn had heard the Yiddish version performed at the Apollo Theater and translated an English version, which was recorded by the Andrews Sisters and topped the hit parade in January, 1938.

Life’s Work

In the late 1930’s, Cahn and Chaplin were working under contract with Viaphone Studios in New York, a subsidiary of Warner Bros. When Viaphone closed, the two spent a short time at the Warner Bros. studio in Hollywood and then got jobs at Republic Pictures. However, without work in 1941, the partners decided to go their separate ways. It was at this time that Cahn formed a new partnership, this time with Jule Styne. Cahn won his first Academy Award in 1954 for a song he wrote with Styne called “Three Coins in the Fountain.” Working under contract with Columbia Pictures, Cahn and Styne went on to write many more hits, including “I’ve Heard That Song Before,” “I’ll Walk Alone,” “As Long as There’s Music,” “Saturday Night Is the Loneliest Night of the Week,” and “Time After Time.” These songs and more appeared in the films Anchors Away (1945), Tonight and Every Night (1945), Wonder Man (1945), The Kid from Brooklyn (1946), Romance on the High Seas (1948), and The West Point Story (1950).

Cahn also wrote songs for singers, and many of the ones he wrote for Frank Sinatra helped propel both men to fame. When Sinatra was signed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) to appear in the film Anchors Away, he refused to sing unless Cahn wrote the material; Cahn and Styne’s “Three Coins in the Fountain” was also written for Sinatra to sing in the film Three Coins in the Fountain (1954).

It was through Sinatra that Cahn met his first wife, Gloria Delson; the pair met at a party at Sinatra’s home, married in 1945, and had two children before divorcing. His second marriage, in 1970, was to Virginia “Tita” Basile.

While writing for Sinatra, Cahn paired with another composer, this time Jimmy Van Heusen, and the two won three Academy Awards. The first was for the song “All the Way” from the film The Joker Is Wild (1957); the second was for the song “High Hopes,” from the film A Hole in the Head (1959); and the third was for the song “Call Me Irresponsible” from the film Papa’s Delicate Condition (1963). The pair also wrote “Love and Marriage” and “Come Fly with Me.” Cahn later collaborated with Nicholas Brodszky to produce the songs “Be My Love” and “Because You’re Mine.”

His songwriting was not limited to motion pictures; he also wrote for the stage, and in 1974 he performed in his own Broadway show, Words and Music. The show was a hit, loved by audiences and critics alike, and ran on Broadway for nine months. Then the show went on tour for nearly twenty years. The tour ended because of Cahn’s declining health, and he died of congestive heart failure in Los Angeles in 1993.

Significance

Although he reportedly could produce a song on demand, Cahn is noted for his timeless lyrics. In 1993, he founded the High Hopes Fund at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston to provide hope and inspiration to children while funding diabetes research. With twenty-six Academy Award nominations and five Golden Globe nominations, Cahn’s optimistic and romantic songs became classics.

Bibliography

Cahn, Sammy. I Should Care: The Sammy Cahn Story. New York: Arbor House, 1974. In his autobiography, Cahn shares stories of encounters with the stars and reveals background information on many of his songs.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Sammy Cahn’s Rhyming Dictionary. Secaucus, N.J.: Warner Bros., 1983. Primarily interested in the sound of words and not their spellings, Cahn arranged more than fifty thousand words phonetically rather than alphabetically. The dictionary also includes an introduction by Cahn, in which he shares the stories behind songs and other anecdotes from his career.

Cramer, Alfred W., ed. Musicians and Composers of the Twentieth Century. Vol. 1. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2009. A biographical sketch of Cahn and details on his best-known songs.

Holden, Stephen. “Sammy Cahn, Word Weaver of Tin Pan Alley, Dies at Seventy-Nine.” The New York Times, January 16, 1993. Obituary gives a good overview of Cahn’s career and works.

Lahr, John. Show and Tell: New Yorker Profiles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Lahr, prolific writer of celebrity articles for The New Yorker, includes in this book a profile of Sinatra and interesting stories about when he worked closely with Cahn.