Harold Arlen

Harold Arlen, born Hyman Arluck on February 15, 1905, in Buffalo, New York, was an American composer whose Broadway credits include Hooray for What!, Bloomer Girl, George White's Music Hall Varieties, Life Begins at 8:40, and Jamaica, among other productions. The son of a Jewish cantor, Arlen began studying piano as a child and by age 15 had formed a band called Hyman Arluck's Snappy Trio. He left home at 16, and within two years was performing on the Crystal Beach lake boat "Canadiana" with a group called The Southbound Shufflers. In 1924, he performed at the Lake Shore Manor and co-wrote his first song, "My Gal, My Pal," with Hyman Cheiffetz, copyrighted as "My Gal, Won't You Please Come Back to Me?" After establishing himself as a pianist and singer in the Buffalo area, he relocated to New York City in his early twenties, where he worked as a vaudeville accompanist and adopted the name Harold Arlen.

During the late 1920s and into the mid-1930s, Arlen appeared as a band vocalist on recordings by The Buffalodians, Red Nichols, Joe Venuti, Leo Reisman, and Eddie Duchin, typically singing his own compositions, and also played piano with The Buffalodians. His first published song, "Minor Gaff (Blues Fantasy)," was written with Dick George in 1926. In 1929, he composed "Get Happy," with lyrics by Ted Koehler, and signed a yearlong songwriting contract with the George and Arthur Piantadosi firm. That same year he took a singing and acting role as Cokey Joe in the musical The Great Day. Throughout the early and mid-1930s, Arlen and Koehler wrote shows for the Cotton Club in Harlem, in addition to contributing to Broadway productions and Hollywood films. Their collaboration produced standards including "Let's Fall in Love" and "Stormy Weather." For the 1934 Cotton Club Parade, they wrote "Ill Wind (You're Blowin' Me No Good)," sung by Adelaide Hall.

By the mid-1930s, Arlen was spending increasing time in California writing for film musicals, and it was during this period that he began working with lyricist E. Y. "Yip" Harburg. He signed with Samuel Goldwyn in 1935 to write songs for the film Strike Me Pink. In 1938, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer hired Arlen and Harburg to compose songs for The Wizard of Oz, including "Over the Rainbow," which won the Academy Award for Best Music, Original Song. The RIAA and the NEA later voted "Over the Rainbow" the top song of the twentieth century. Arlen received eight additional Oscar nominations as a composer over the course of his career. He and Harburg also wrote "Down with Love," featured in the 1937 Broadway production Hooray for What!, as well as "Lydia the Tattooed Lady" for Groucho Marx in the 1939 film At the Circus, and "Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe" for Ethel Waters in the 1943 film Cabin in the Sky. Arlen was a longtime friend and one-time roommate of Ray Bolger, who starred in The Wizard of Oz.

In the 1940s, Arlen partnered with lyricist Johnny Mercer and produced a series of well-known songs, among them "Blues in the Night," "That Old Black Magic," "Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive," "Come Rain or Come Shine," "Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home," and "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)." In 1949, he collaborated with Ralph Blane on the score for My Blue Heaven, and the following year he and Mercer contributed the song "Fancy Free" to the film The Petty Girl. He worked with Dorothy Fields on the 1952 film The Farmer Takes a Wife. Arlen composed "The Man That Got Away" for the 1954 film A Star Is Born, a song that became one of the defining pieces of Judy Garland's career. At Garland's celebrated 1961 Carnegie Hall concert, she acknowledged Arlen in the audience and invited him to receive an ovation after she performed a set of his songs.

Arlen's Broadway work spanned several decades and encompassed both musicals and revues. His contributions to the revue George White's Music Hall Varieties date to 1932, and he composed the score for the revue Life Begins at 8:40 in 1934. His musical Hooray for What! opened in 1937, followed by Bloomer Girl in 1944. Additional Broadway credits include St. Louis Woman (1946), House of Flowers (1954), for which he served as both composer and co-lyricist, and Saratoga (1959). His musical Jamaica, which opened in 1957, earned him a Tony Award nomination for Best Musical in 1958. In 1962, he composed the score for the animated musical Gay Purr-ee, again with lyrics by Harburg.

On January 6, 1937, Arlen married Anya Taranda over the objections of both families. In 1951, Anya was institutionalized, and she was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1969, which proved fatal in 1970. Arlen never remarried. Shortly before his death, he adopted his nephew Samuel, the adult son of his brother Julius "Jerry" Arluck, in order to provide his estate with an heir and extend his copyright. Samuel Arlen became a saxophonist and music publisher and controls the company that holds the rights to the Arlen catalog. Arlen was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1979 and recorded his debut vocal album, Harold Sings Arlen (With Friend), in 1966, with Barbra Streisand accompanying him on two tracks. He died of cancer on April 23, 1986, at his Manhattan apartment at the age of eighty-one and was buried at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York, beside his wife. Over the course of his career, Arlen composed more than 500 songs, and he is recognized as a contributor to the Great American Songbook.