Jerome Kern

• Born: January 27, 1885
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: November 11, 1945
• Place of death: New York, New York

Composer

Composer of more than a thousand songs, including scores for more than sixty Broadway and Hollywood productions, Kern created the melodic romantic ballad that dominated popular music until the mid-twentieth century. Show Boat (1927), written with Oscar Hammerstein II, transformed musical comedy into modern musical theater.

Areas of achievement: Music; theater; entertainment

Early Life

Jerome Kern (juh-ROHM kurn) was the son of German Jewish immigrant Henry Kern and Fannie Kakeles Kern, a talented pianist of Bohemian ancestry. When he was ten, the family moved from New York to Newark, New Jersey, where his father became a merchandising executive. His father wanted Kern to work in business, but on his tenth birthday Kern was fascinated by the first musical he saw. Leaving Newark High School, he studied music, probably privately in Germany and later at the New York College of Music. He was an able businessman, selling his rare book collection shortly before the 1929 stock market crash devalued such assets and in 1913 joining with Victor Herbert, Irving Berlin, and others to form the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) to protect composers’ royalties. He considered himself a Jewish composer, but, like his parents, he did not attend synagogue. In 1910, he married Englishwoman Eva Leale in an Anglican ceremony. Their only child, Elizabeth Jane (Betty), was born in 1918.

In 1904, Kern was a junior partner in the T. B. Harms music publishing house. For years, business took him back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean. He looked for opportunities to place his own songs in existing productions. At that time, English musicals, focusing on strong visual effects rather than on coherent plots and developed characters, were often revised for American performance. In both England and the United States, producers and stars could add any songs they chose, despite irrelevance to the plot or to the characters. Kern’s classical training and his love for musicals enabled him to write for these light comedies and for the operettas that followed the stunning success of Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow (1907). Kern’s music was used in many quickly forgotten shows, beginning with An English Daisy (1903) and Mr. Wix of Wickham (1904). His first popular success was “How’d You Like to Spoon with Me?” interpolated into The Earl and the Girl (1905). In The Girl from Utah (1914), he introduced his first lasting favorite, “They Didn’t Believe Me.”

Life’s Work

Kern’s most successful theatrical period began with his Princess Theater shows. Large New York theaters of the time needed stunning visual effects since they lacked good lighting and amplification, but the 299-seat Princess required small casts and orchestras, few chorus girls, and, to compensate, strong characters and plots. The most successful of these shows were Very Good Eddie (1915), Oh, Boy! (1917), Leave It to Jane (1917), and Oh, Lady! Lady!! (1918). Guy Bolton wrote the books. For the last three, comic novelist P. G. Wodehouse provided lyrics.

By then, Kern was collaborating with famed producer Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr., beginning with the tenth edition of the Ziegfeld Follies (1916). Still writing for many other shows, Kern provided music for Ziegfeld’s Sally (1920), with its hit song, “Look for the Silver Lining.” It featured Ziegfeld’s dancing superstar Marilyn Miller, who also starred in Sunny (1925), which produced the hit “Who?” For this, Kern collaborated with lyricists Otto Harbach and Oscar Hammerstein II. In 1927, Ziegfeld produced the show for which Kern is best known, Show Boat, with hit songs “Make Believe,” “Ol’ Man River,” and “Why Do I Love You?” Although the stock market crash of 1929 drastically cut audiences and funds for Broadway productions, Kern’s shows thrived: The Cat and the Fiddle (1931); Music in the Air (1932); Roberta (1933), with the enduring “Yesterdays” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”; and Very Warm for May (1939), with the hit “All the Things You Are.”

In the early 1930’s, Kern moved to Hollywood. Some stage shows were filmed: Show Boat (1929, 1936, 1951); Sally (1929); Sunny (1930); The Cat and the Fiddle (1933); Music in the Air (1934); and Roberta (1935), with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, refilmed as Lovely to Look At (1952). Kern’s original film scores included Swing Time (1936), with Astaire and Rogers and lyrics by Dorothy Fields for “The Way You Look Tonight” and “A Fine Romance”; You Were Never Lovelier (1942), with Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth and songs “Dearly Beloved” and “I’m Old Fashioned”; and Cover Girl (1944), with Hayworth and Gene Kelly and the Ira Gershwin collaboration “Long Ago and Far Away.” “The Way You Look Tonight” and “The Last Time I Saw Paris” won Academy Awards in 1936 and in 1941. The latter is Kern’s only song not composed for a stage show or a film score. Written with Hammerstein after the Nazi occupation of Paris in World War II, it was interpolated into Lady Be Good (1941). In 1946, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) produced Till the Clouds Roll By, a supposedly biographic film. Robert Walker played Kern; Kern’s songs were sung by such stars as Judy Garland, Lena Horne, and Frank Sinatra. In 1949, Kern’s songs were used in Look for the Silver Lining, a biographic film about Marilyn Miller, starring June Haver.

Kern suffered a stroke in 1937 but continued working. On November 2, 1945, he went to New York, planning to work on a proposed musical about western sharpshooter Annie Oakley (finally written by Irving Berlin as Annie Get Your Gun in 1946). On November 4, he visited his parents’ graves, as he always did when he was in New York. The next day he collapsed on a Manhattan street, dying six days later.

Significance

Kern significantly influenced the development of popular music and musical theater. George Gershwin (who, as a young man, served as Kern’s rehearsal pianist), Rodgers, and Cole Porter are among important popular composers who acknowledged Kern’s influence. Gershwin and Rodgers claimed he inspired their careers. Rodgers’s later work with Hammerstein shows the powerful effect of Show Boat in such musicals as South Pacific (1949) and Carousel (1945), where Rodgers and Hammerstein deal with racial prejudice and marital abuse and major characters die. Most early pre-Show Boat musicals are dated, and few have been successfully revived, but Show Boat has been frequently revised and revived. While Kern produced hundreds of forgettable tunes, many of his major songs survived even the rock-and-roll revolution, to be recorded by later singers as jazz standards.

Bibliography

Flinn, Denny Martin. Musical! A Grand Tour. New York: Schirmer Books,1997. Includes chapters on Princess musicals and Show Boat. Much material about Kern throughout.

Green, Stanley. The World of Musical Comedy. 1980. 4th ed. New York: Da Capo Press, 1984. Contains chapter on Kern. Appendix lists Kern’s Broadway shows, with casts and principal songs.

Keyser, Herbert H. Geniuses of the American Musical Theatre: The Composers and Lyricists. New York: Applause, 2009. Includes chapters on Kern and on Rodgers’ collaborations with Hammerstein.

Kreuger, Miles. Show Boat: The Story of a Classic American Musical. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Individual chapters give detailed descriptions of the Edna Ferber novel, the 1927 Ziegfeld production, the 1932 revival, the 1946 revival, and the three film versions.

Lehman, David. A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs. New York: Schocken/Nextbook, 2009. Knowledgeable, informal discussion of Jewish elements in American popular music, with considerable attention to Kern.

Mordden, Ethan. Sing for Your Supper: The Broadway Musical in the 1930’s. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2005. Extensive discussion of Kern’s later musicals.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Ziegfeld: The Man Who Invented Show Business. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008. Includes much information about Kern and about Kern and Ziegfeld collaborations. Last chapter includes information about Show Boat recordings and late twentieth century revivals.