Jerome Kern

Jerome David Kern, born in New York City on January 27, 1885, was an American composer whose work for musical theatre and popular music made him one of the most consequential figures in the history of the Broadway stage. He died on November 11, 1945. A native of Manhattan's Sutton Place neighborhood, then part of the city's brewery district, Kern grew up on East 56th Street and attended public schools there. His mother, Fannie Kern née Kakeles, was a professional pianist and teacher of Bohemian Jewish parentage who gave him his earliest instruction on piano and organ. His father, Henry Kern, a Jewish German immigrant, initially ran a livery stable before establishing himself as a merchant.

In 1897 the family relocated to Newark, New Jersey, where Kern enrolled at Newark High School, later renamed Barringer High School. He contributed songs to the school's first musical, a minstrel show, in 1901, and to an amateur adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin staged at the Newark Yacht Club in January 1902. He left school before graduating in the spring of 1902. His father pressed him to enter the family business, but Kern's aptitude for commerce proved limited — tasked with purchasing two pianos for the store, he ordered two hundred. His father relented, and later that year Kern enrolled at the New York College of Music, where he studied piano under Alexander Lambert and Paolo Gallico and harmony under Austin Pierce. His first published composition, a piano piece titled At the Casino, appeared in 1902. Between 1903 and 1905 he pursued further musical training under private tutors in Heidelberg, Germany, traveling back to New York by way of London.

Kern's early professional work in New York included stints as a rehearsal pianist in Broadway theatres and as a song-plugger for Tin Pan Alley publishers. During his time in London he secured a contract from American impresario Charles Frohman to supply songs for interpolation into Broadway productions of London shows, beginning in 1904 with An English Daisy and Mr. Wix of Wickham, for which he wrote the majority of the songs. In 1905 he contributed the song "How'd You Like to Spoon with Me?" to Ivan Caryll's The Earl and the Girl when that production transferred to Chicago and New York. He also contributed to New York productions including The Catch of the Season in 1905, The Little Cherub in 1906, and The Orchid in 1907. His extended stays in London brought him into contact with figures including George Grossmith Jr. and Seymour Hicks, who were among the first to bring his songs to West End audiences. He also collaborated with lyricist P. G. Wodehouse on The Beauty of Bath in 1906.

During one of his visits to England in 1909, Kern met Eva Leale, the daughter of an innkeeper at the Swan in Walton-on-Thames, while on a boat trip along the River Thames. The two married at St. Mary's Anglican Church in Walton on October 25, 1910, and the couple resided at the Swan during Kern's periods in England. Kern is believed to have composed music for silent films as early as 1912. The earliest documented film score he is known to have written was for the twenty-part serial Gloria's Romance in 1916, one of the first starring vehicles for Billie Burke, for whom he had previously written the song "Mind the Paint" with lyrics by A. W. Pinero. A second silent film score, Jubilo, followed in 1919. Kern was also among the founding members of ASCAP.

His first complete Broadway score was The Red Petticoat in 1912, with a libretto by Rida Johnson Young, recognized as one of the first musical-comedy Westerns. By the time of World War I, more than a hundred of his songs had appeared in approximately thirty productions, the majority of them Broadway adaptations of West End and European shows. Among the most widely noted songs from this period was "They Didn't Believe Me," written for the New York production of The Girl from Utah in 1914, for which Kern contributed five songs in total. The song's four-beat-per-bar structure departed from the waltz rhythms prevalent in European-influenced theatre music and aligned with the American appetite for dances such as the fox-trot. In May 1915, Kern had been scheduled to sail to London aboard the RMS Lusitania with Charles Frohman, but missed the voyage after staying up late playing poker and oversleeping. Frohman perished when the ship was sunk.

Between 1915 and 1920, Kern composed sixteen Broadway scores and contributed songs to additional productions including the London show Theodore and Co. in 1916 and revues such as the Ziegfeld Follies. The most significant of these were a series of productions created for the Princess Theatre, a 299-seat house built by Ray Comstock. Theatrical agent Elisabeth Marbury commissioned Kern and librettist Guy Bolton to develop a series of intimate, low-budget musicals for the venue. These Princess Theatre shows distinguished themselves from the large-scale operettas and star-driven revues of the era through their coherent plots, integrated scores, and naturalistic performance style. Kern and Bolton drew on the models of Gilbert and Sullivan and French opéra bouffe in weaving song and narrative together, a practice that stood in contrast to the common convention of inserting songs into shows with little connection to the story.

Kern's Broadway credits span a wide range of productions, among them the musical Dear Sir, The Bunch and Judy, the play Cousin Lucy, the musical The City, and 110 in the Shade, as well as contributions to numerous other stage works. Over the course of a career lasting more than four decades, he wrote more than 700 songs used in over 100 stage works. His collaborators included some of the leading librettists and lyricists of his era: Guy Bolton, P. G. Wodehouse, George Grossmith Jr., Otto Harbach, Oscar Hammerstein II, Dorothy Fields, Johnny Mercer, Ira Gershwin, and Yip Harburg. Among the songs produced through these collaborations are "Ol' Man River," "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man," "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," "All the Things You Are," "The Way You Look Tonight," "A Fine Romance," "The Song Is You," and "Long Ago (and Far Away)." His musical innovations, including the use of 4/4 dance rhythms, syncopation, and jazz progressions, built upon rather than discarded earlier theatrical tradition. Of his many Broadway musicals and Hollywood films, Show Boat remains the work most regularly revived, though songs from his other productions continue to be performed and have been widely adapted as jazz standards.