Word: broadway
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...syncopated hits. (Berlin's response, noted in Lawrence Bergreen's excellent biography "As Thousands Cheer": "Do you realize how many little nigger boys I'd have to have?") The simple fact is that he wrote fast. In 1946, when he accepted the job of doing the music for the Broadway show "Annie Get Your Gun," Berlin went off for a weekend and returned with five songs - "Anything You Can Do," "The Girl That I Marry," "My Defenses Are Down," "Doin' What Comes Naturally" and "I Got the Sun in the Morning" - all instant standards...
...wasn't stuck long. Another 1930 movie tune, "Puttin' On the Ritz," went to #1, and within two years Berlin was hot on Broadway, with hit shows ("Face the Music" and "As Thousands Cheer") that birthed "Heat Wave," "Easter Parade" and that perk-me-up Depression cheer, "Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee." Ethan Mordden's analysis of the song, in his book "Broadway Babies," gets to the heart of Berlin's staying power: "Part of being essential to pop culture is staying adaptable. In days of rag, the jazz age, and now in hard times, Berlin not only...
...Annie Get Your Gun"; he took over from Kern, who had died suddenly. (Twenty years earlier, Rodgers was not so pleased when, at the request of the star Belle Baker, Berlin had written a song for her to interpolate into an otherwise all-Rodgers-and-Hart score for the Broadway musical "Betsy." The song, "Blue Skies," was the show's biggest hit.) George Gershwin's death inspired a thoughtful poem from the bereft Berlin...
...Most important, they wrote music people thought was important. Kern and Hammerstein made the Broadway musical respectable with "Show Boat." George and Ira Gershwin were the first songwriters to win a Pulitzer Prize for a musical ("Of Thee I Sing"). Berlin did some work for Broadway in this period, but mainly he ground out one-off songs. You could say that he made nothing but hits and money. He talked grandly about writing a "folk opera" (Gershwin finally did); Puccini supposedly wanted to collaborate with him on an opera. But Berlin was compelled to keep writing in a form that...
...Heat Wave" (1933), by Ethel Merman, on "Irving Berlin in Hollywood." Another song introduced by Waters in the Broadway show "As Thousands Cheer." The original lyric - "She started a heat wave/ By letting her seat wave" - was bowdlerized to "...By letting her feet wave" in this Merman version (from the 1938 film "Alexander's Ragtime Band"), but the clarion voice makes the song, if not the seat, swing. Merman makes it about star quality, not sex. For true cupidity, listen to Monroe's take, in "There's No Business Like Show Business"; it restores the seat, and the heat...