Jerome Kern(1885-1945)
- Music Department
- Composer
- Writer
Jerome David Kern was born in 1885. He began his stage career grafting
American songs (for which he wrote the music) into imported European
operettas. His breakthrough came with the song "They Didn't Believe
Me", written (with lyrics by Edward Laska)
for a show called "The Girl from Utah". It established him as a major
American composer in 1914. Married to a Englishwoman, Kern became an
Anglophile, and teamed up with British writers
Guy Bolton and
P.G. Wodehouse to write the so-called
"Princess Theatre musicals"--shows like "Very Good, Eddie" and "Leave
It To Jane", which were unusual not so much for their silly storylines
but for the fact that the characters were everyday people rather than
the exotic characters of operetta, and also for the fact that these
shows had few sets and small casts. He later wrote shows like "Sally"
and "Sunny", both loaded with song hits, star casts and spectacular
sets but silly plots. Finally, looking for an entirely different type
of musical, Kern decided to adapt
Edna Ferber's novel "Show Boat" to the
musical stage. Although
Oscar Hammerstein II agreed to do
the adaptation and lyrics, nearly everyone (including Ferber) thought
Kern and Hammerstein had lost their minds. "Show Boat"'s storyline
featured interracial marriage, wife desertion, alcoholism and gambling,
and the most realistic characters ever seen in a musical up to then,
not to mention the song "Ol' Man River" and an opening chorus of black
dockworkers singing about their work. Most of the songs were integrated
so well into the story that they could not possibly have been sung in
another show or taken out of "Show Boat" without damaging the plot. And
"Show Boat" featured a song, "Mis'ry's Comin' Round", which was so
utterly tragic that
Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. ordered it
cut--and it remained cut, existing only as background music, until the
1994 revival. In spite of all this, "Show Boat" became a huge hit and
has remained one of the musical theater's greatest classics and most
often revived shows--the only musical pre-1943 to be revived over and
over. Kern, however, did not experiment any further--his other hit
shows, "Music In The Air", "Roberta" and "The Cat and the Fiddle",
contain classic songs that are still sung, but the shows are almost
never revived. After a heart attack in 1939, Kern wrote songs
exclusively for movie musicals. Two of his movie musicals,
Swing Time (1936) with
Fred Astaire and
Ginger Rogers, and
Cover Girl (1944) with
Rita Hayworth and
Gene Kelly, have become famous for
their songs and dances. Kern died of a stroke at the age of 60, in
1945.