Jerome Kern

JEROME KERN was George Gershwin’s favorite songwriter. Both Gershwin and Richard Rodgers, as young men breaking into musical theater in the Twenties, memorized some of Kern’s popular melodies, and I think you can hear his wholehearted approach—the way his tunes can sound as though they’re bursting at the emotional seams, and the tremulous whispers of sorrow that adorn them—in some of Gershwin’s early songs, like “Drifting Along with the Tide” and “Somebody Loves Me,” and in some of the music Rodgers initially set to his first collaborator Lorenz Hart’s darker lyrics, like “This Funny World.” Kern was one generation older than these men: his first shows were four and five years into the new century, and for a while he merely contributed numbers to fill out rosters dominated by other, established composers, working on three or four musicals a season. His first solo score was for The Red Petticoat in 1910, and his first important song, “They Didn’t Believe Me” (lyric by Herbert Reynolds), whose thunderstruck singer waxes rhapsodic over the improbability of love, came four years later, in a musical called The Girl from Utah. By 1915 Kern, collaborating with the English lyricist and book writer Guy Bolton and shortly thereafter with Bolton’s compatriot P.G. Wodehouse (who had just begun to write his celebrated Jeeves stories), turned out a handful of musicals, known as the Princess Theatre shows, which invented what we think of as the American musical theater. And in 1927, working with Oscar Hammerstein II, Kern revolutionized it again, this time with Show Boat.

To understand what a pioneer Kern was, you have to picture what the landscape of the American musical looked like in the years before Kern’s first Princess Theatre production, . Most of the early native musical shows, beginning in the 1890s, were elaborate,, the first edition of which came out in 1907, was, of course, the best known, and featured the most extravagant numbers and the most luminous stars. Ziegfeld borrowed his idea from Europe, too—from the in Paris. Only George M. Cohan’s musicals (the first, , opened in 1901) were distinctly Yankee products, but their librettos were spare, and Cohan’s music, though breezy and infectious, was fairly basic; he never came up with a single song as sophisticated as “They Didn’t Believe Me.”