Sammy Fain

American singer, songwriter, lyricist, and film-score composer

• Born: June 17, 1902
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: December 6, 1989
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

In a polished Tin Pan Alley style, Fain wrote sentimental, funny, and whimsical songs that enchanted listeners and influenced composers and songwriters for the stage and the screen.

The Life

Samuel Feinberg, who took the professional name Sammy Fain (fayn), grew up in the Catskill Mountains of New York surrounded by music: His father was a cantor, and his brother was a violinist. His cousins Willie and Eugene Howard became a famous musical-comedy team, working in vaudeville. Fain believed this musical environment contributed to his writing style, which he described as a process of “writing with a tear.” Fain taught himself to play piano and to write music. By the time he went to high school, he had written two songs, “When the Boys Come Marching Home” and “Bound for the Bronx.” These songs did not catch the attention of the Tin Pan Alley publishers, but by the time Fain finished high school, he was working in the stockroom at an esteemed New York publishing company, Shapiro-Bernstein. When the boss, Louis Bernstein, heard Fain play piano, he immediately moved Fain to work in the music department. Fain’s job was to present new songs to the artists and the vaudeville musicians. During this time Fain meet Artie Dunn, with whom he formed a singing duo that became popular in vaudeville and on radio.

In 1925 Fain left the duo to devote himself completely to composing. Two years later he started a partnership with lyricist Irving Kahal, which lasted for seventeen years, until Kahal’s death. After the success Fain and Kahal had with the song “By a Waterfall” (for the 1933 film Footlight Parade), Warner Bros. immediately signed them to a contract, and they continued writing for Hollywood motion pictures until 1938. When the film studios stopped making musical extravaganzas, Fain went back to New York City, and from 1938 through 1941 he wrote six Broadway musicals. Two major hits—“I’ll Be Seeing You” and “I Can Dream Can’t I?”—were featured in Right This Way (1938). The musical was unsuccessful, but “I’ll Be Seeing You” became a theme for a film with the same title in 1943. At the invitation of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Fain went back to Hollywood, and from that point on his music was featured in films released by almost every motion-picture studio.

Fain was elected to the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972. In 1989 he was honored by the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) on its seventy-fifth anniversary; he had been a member since 1926. Fain died of a heart attack in Los Angeles at the end of 1989.

The Music

Fain’s first hit was a tune called “Nobody Knows What a Red Head Mama Can Do,” with lyrics by Irving Mills and Al Dubin. Once Fain started working with Kahal, they almost immediately had a hit with a song “Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella.” Introduced by Maurice Chevalier in The Big Pond (1930), a romantic comedy by Paramount Pictures, Fain’s next big hit was “You Brought Me a New Kind of Love.” While he worked in Hollywood, Fain wrote “That Old Feeling” (for the film Vogues of 1938). The song was written in collaboration with Lew Brown, and it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Song.

For “Secret Love” (from the film Calamity Jane, 1953), Fain received a second nomination for Best Song, and this time he and Paul Francis Webster took home the Oscar. They received another Academy Award for “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing.” “April Love” was nominated in 1957, and in 1958 there were nominations for “A Very Precious Love” (from the film Marjorie Morningstar) and the title song from A Certain Smile. The nominations continued for “Tender Is the Night,” “Strange Are the Ways of Love,” “A World That Never Was,” and “Someone’s Waiting for You.” Between these films Fain wrote another show with lyricist Harold Adamson, Around the World in Eighty Days, which debuted in St. Louis in 1962, and it was performed at Jones Beach in 1964 during the World’s Fair.

Hellzapoppin’.Hellzapoppin’ was a show by Fain and lyricist Charlie Tobias, a Broadway vaudeville extravaganza that ran for 1,404 performances. Despite the negative reviews from critics, it was the longest-running show at that time.

“Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella.” This typical Tin Pan Alley song—joyful, with an uplifting text—is composed of a simple melody accompanied by the main harmonies, tonic, subdominant, and dominant. The melody is built from a broken arpeggio, and the verse is divided in two eight-measure phrases. The form of the chorus is a (sixteen bars), b (eight bars), a’ (eight bars). The a section opens on a tonic harmony, and the melody revolves around the tonic chord, ending the phrase on a dominant. The next eight measures are a sequence and lead into the middle section, b, which is based on dominant chords (D7 and G7) and presents a rhythmic variation of the a section. The last section, a’, repeats the first eight measures with a small melodic variation at the end.

“I’ll Be Seeing You.” This song was introduced in the show Right This Way (1938), which closed after fourteen performances. In the second measure of the verse there is a harmonic shift from E-flat major (the key of the piece) to E major, which provides instability. In the refrain melody (abac; each section has eight measures) the third and fourth measures are repeated and the downbeat of the phrase switches. Fain used syncopation and dotted rhythms throughout the song, giving it a complex texture. During World War II this song became a nostalgic favorite, and it remains one of the most emotionally moving songs ever written.

Musical Legacy

Jule Styne described Fain as one of the great popular songwriters, one who helped Tin Pan Alley flourish at its highest level. Fain’s music shows a development from a simple tune to a picturesque song complex enough to be labeled a short character piece. Every song provides different contours and shapes in the melody and in the advanced harmonies. Through this writing style, which went beyond the simplicity of Tin Pan Alley, Fain influenced the generations of songwriters and film composers that followed.

Principal Works

film scores:Roadhouse Nights, 1930; Young Man of Manhattan, 1930; Moonlight and Pretzels, 1933; The Road Is Open Again, 1933; Harold Teen, 1934; Goin’ to Town, 1935; Tarnished Angel, 1938; Hellzapoppin’, 1941; Three Sailors and a Girl, 1953; April Love, 1957; A Certain Smile, 1958; Calamity Jane, 1963; Half a House, 1979; Halloween Treat, 1982.

musical theater (music and lyrics unless listed otherwise): Everybody’s Welcome, 1931 (lyrics by Irving Kahal; libretto by Lambert Carroll); Hellzapoppin, 1938 (with Charles Tobias; libretto by Chic Johnson and John Olsen); George White’s Scandals, 1939 (lyrics by Jack Yellen; libretto by Matt Brooks, Eddie Davis, and George White); Boys and Girls Together, 1940 (lyrics by Yellen and Kahal; libretto by Ed Wynn and Pat C. Flick); Sons o’ Fun, 1941 (with Yellen; libretto by Johnson, Olsen, and Hal Block); Toplitzky of Notre Dame, 1946 (lyrics and libretto by George Marion, Jr.); Flahooley, 1951 (lyrics by E. Y. Harburg; libretto by Harburg and Fred Saidy); Ankles Aweigh, 1955 (lyrics by Dan Shapiro; libretto by Guy Bolton and Davis); Catch a Star, 1955 (with Philip Charig; lyrics by Paul Francis Webster and Ray Golden; libretto by Danny Simon and Neil Simon); Christine, 1960 (lyrics by Webster; libretto by Pearl S. Buck and Charles K. Peck, Jr.; based on the novel My Indian Family by Hilda Wernher); Around the World in Eighty Days, 1962 (lyrics by Harold Adamson); Something More!, 1964 (lyrics by Marilyn Bergman and Alan Bergman; libretto by Nate Monaster; based on the novel Portofino P.T.A. by Gerald Green).

Principal Recordings

singles: “Nobody Knows What a Red Head Mama Can Do,” 1924; “Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella,” 1927; “You Brought Me a New Kind of Love,” 1930; “When I Take My Sugar to Tea,” 1931; “By a Waterfall,” 1933; “That Old Feeling,” 1937; “I Can Dream, Can’t I?,” 1938; “I’ll Be Seeing You,” 1938; “I’m Late,” 1951; “Second Star to the Right,” 1953; “Secret Love,” 1953; “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing,” 1955; “April Love,” 1957; “Black Hills of Dakota,” 1958; “The Deadwood Stage,” 1958; “Mardi Gras,” 1958; “A Very Precious Love,” 1958; “Once Upon a Dream,” 1959; “Tender Is the Night,” 1961; “Strange Are the Ways of Love,” 1972; “A World That Never Was,” 1976; “Someone’s Waiting for You,” 1977.

Bibliography

Furia, Philip, and Michael Lasser. America’s Songs. The Stories Behind the Songs of Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley. New York: Routledge, 2006. Chronologically ordered and spanning the years 1910 to 1977, this book presents the songs and their stories, covering Fain’s major hits.

Green, Stanley. Broadway Musicals, Show by Show. Milwaukee, Wis.: Hal Leonard, 1985. Fain’s works are represented in this book, which gives a short performance history. The musicals are set chronologically, from 1866 to 1985.

Hischak, Thomas S. The Tin Pan Alley Song Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. The author discusses important songs from the pre-Civil War years to the end of the 1950’s, covering major songwriters (among them Fain), performers, musical styles, and time periods.

Jasen, David A. Tin Pan Alley. An Encyclopedia of the Golden Age of American Song. New York: Routledge, 2003. The author discusses the history of Tin Pan Alley, and he includes short biographies of the main composers of the style and their biggest successes, with an entry on Fain.