Sammy Fain

Sammy Fain, born Samuel E. Feinberg on June 17, 1902, in New York City, was an American composer of popular music and a significant contributor to Broadway theatre. He died on December 6, 1989, from a heart attack in Los Angeles, California, and was interred at Cedar Park Cemetery in Emerson, New Jersey.

Fain grew up in a family with deep ties to show business; his uncle Willie Howard was a Vaudeville performer. Despite being largely unable to read music, Fain taught himself piano and demonstrated a natural facility for melody. He composed his first piece, "Nobody Knows What a Red-headed Mama Can Do," in 1925. Through the late 1920s and into the 1930s, he contributed numerous songs that became part of The Great American Songbook, many of them created in partnership with lyricist Irving Kahal, a collaboration that continued until 1942. Together, Fain and Kahal wrote "Wedding Bells are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine" and "Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella," among other works. Their contributions to the 1938 musical Right This Way included "I Can Dream, Can't I?" and "I'll Be Seeing You," the latter becoming widely embraced during World War II.

Fain composed music for more than 30 films across the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, earning ten Academy Award nominations for Best Original Song. Two of those nominations resulted in wins: "Secret Love" from Calamity Jane, co-written with lyricist Paul Francis Webster, won in 1953, and "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing," also co-written with Webster, won in 1955. Fain additionally contributed to the song scores for the Walt Disney animated films Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and The Rescuers, the last of which brought him another Oscar nomination. In 1972, he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

His Broadway career spanned more than five decades and encompassed musicals, revues, and featured songwriting contributions. He served as composer for the musicals Everybody's Welcome (1931), Toplitzky of Notre Dame (1946), Flahooley (1951), Ankles Aweigh (1955), Christine (1960), and Something More! (1964), as well as for the revues George White's Scandals of 1939 (1939) and Boys and Girls Together (1940). He worked as co-composer and co-lyricist on the revues Hellzapoppin' (1938) and Sons o' Fun (1941), and as co-composer on the revue Alive and Kicking (1950) and Catch a Star (1955). Fain contributed as a featured songwriter to Right This Way (1938), Ziegfeld Follies of 1957, the revue Rock 'N Roll! The First 5,000 Years (1982), and the revue Swing! (1999). In 2018, a full staging of Calamity Jane in the New York City area credited Fain as composer.