Irving Gordon

Irving Gordon, born Israel Goldener on February 14, 1915, in Brooklyn, New York City, was an American songwriter and Broadway performer who died on December 1, 1996, in Malibu, California, of multiple myeloma. Raised on Coney Island in a Jewish family, he studied violin as a child and attended public schools in New York City before beginning his professional life. He later changed his birth name to Irving Gordon.

Gordon's early working years included time in the Catskill Mountains resort hotels, where he began writing parody lyrics to popular songs. That habit of wordplay led him toward a career in music publishing, and he eventually took a position with the firm run by talent agent Irving Mills, initially contributing only lyrics before expanding into composing music as well. His Broadway career began in 1934, when he appeared in the play Stevedore.

His introduction to Duke Ellington in 1937 opened a significant chapter in his career. Ellington periodically invited Gordon to supply lyrics to his compositions, a task Gordon found particularly demanding because most Ellington pieces were conceived as instrumentals, their lyrical possibilities only becoming apparent after soloists in the orchestra had performed and recorded them. From that collaboration came the lyrics to "Prelude to a Kiss," credited to Gordon and Irving Mills with music by Ellington. For much of his career Gordon worked out of the Brill Building in Manhattan.

Among his most celebrated compositions is "Unforgettable," which became a major hit for Nat King Cole. When Natalie Cole re-recorded the song as a duet with her late father's original recording, Gordon received the Grammy Award for Song of the Year in 1992. He wrote both the lyrics and the music for the song. Another widely recorded work, "Allentown Jail," told the story of a man who stole a diamond for his girlfriend and was imprisoned in Allentown unable to make bail; the French singer Edith Piaf was among those who recorded it.

Gordon also wrote "Mister and Mississippi," and the wordplay on state names in that song prompted him to write "Delaware," which became a hit for Perry Como. His 1956 composition "Mama from the Train" was recorded by Patti Page and was written to evoke a mother born in the old country. Although the lyrics describe her as Pennsylvania Dutch, the melody's movement in and out of a minor key gave it an Eastern European character, and many listeners understood it as a tribute to a Yiddish-speaking mother. Additional notable songs include "Me, Myself and I," a hit for Billie Holiday co-written with Allen Roberts and Alvin S. Kaufman; "What Will I Tell My Heart," recorded by Bing Crosby; "The Kentuckian Song," sung by Eddy Arnold for the 1955 Burt Lancaster film The Kentuckian; and "Two Brothers," widely understood as a song about the American Civil War.

Gordon told the Los Angeles Times that by 1960 the market for rhymed, melodic songwriting had diminished, leading him to work for a time as a tennis professional. In the years before his death he was writing a musical about Sigmund Freud. His obituary included a claim that he had written the Abbott and Costello baseball comedy routine "Who's on First?," though Gordon himself never made that claim during his lifetime, and the authorship of the routine has been disputed by others. Gordon was survived by two sons.