Ron Drew's Music Page - Activities
Singing - South Shields Amateur Operatic Society
Chapter 5.7 - Snippets of Chorus Lines
From Issue No. 7 - (December 1997)
In 1926 Jerome Kern was working with Oscar Hammerstein on the musical "SHOWBOAT". They needed a song for the character 'Julie' to sing in the scene where she auditions for a Chicago night-club. The song did not need to relate to the plot or the character, so Kern picked a song, the melody of which he had set down in the year 1906. Inserted into "SHOWBOAT" as 'Bill' the song was a hit and became a classic popular love song.
The lyrics, although slightly changed, were written in 1917 - but not by Oscar Hammerstein. Surprisingly the original lyrics for 'Bill', a classic American song, were written by an Englishman!
The heartland of musical comedy in the early 1900's was London. American musical theatre was dominated by Viennese imports transported from London or shows in the vaudeville tradition exemplified by George M. Cohan. Jerome Kern came to London in 1906 having been asked to write the music for a show called "THE BEAUTY OF BATH" which was staged at the Aldwych. it was then that Kern met the lyricist of the show. A young Englishman who by 1906 was an established journalist, the author of five novels and a contributor of lyrics for West End shows.
This lyricist was so English it is difficult to comprehend him writing the words. Nevertheless it was P. G. Wodehouse who wrote the original lyrics of 'Bill'.
It was 1916 before Kern and Wodehouse worked together again by which time Kern had passed a watershed in his career. In 1914 he had written "He didn't Believe Me" - a song which signalled the emergence of a whole new school of Americal songwriting.
For several years Kern and Wodehouse worked together on musical staged at the Princess Theatre, New York. Although these shows are now forgotten they formed the starting point for the emergence of the truly American Musical.
When Kern, Gershwin and Berlin were beginning to create a genuine American songform, it was P. G. Wodehouse, an Englishman, who turned up with the flair for writing the lyric counterpoint.
In 1937 George and Ira Gershwin wrote the music and lyrics for a movie called "A DAMSEL IN DISTRESS" in which there was a song called 'Stiff Upper - Stout Fellow'. Ira Gershwin intended this as a tribute to Wodehouse.
Wodehouse continued his involvement in the American musical theatre into the 1930's, contributing all or part lyrics and libretti for thirty-three musicals.
He wrote more libretti than W. S. Gilbert!
This considerable contribution to the musical theatre is now hardly recognised in this country. But that is not all that Wodehouse produced. He also wrote eighteen plays and one hundred volumes of prose in which he created several memorable characters including the very English Englishmen - Jeeves and Bertie Wooster.
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