Word: tunesmithing
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...urged Stephen Collins Foster to write symphonies. But the forty-niners sang Oh! Susanna all the way to California, and Union soldiers harmonized My Old Kentucky Home around their campfires while Confederates sang Old Folks at Home. The songs became America's folk music. Yet the Pittsburgh tunesmith who wrote them is often remembered, in confused popular legends, as a penniless drunk who died in a Bowery flophouse...
...very personal answer. Broadway and Hollywood's Harry Ruby, hysterical baseball fan and composer of dozens of song hits from Oh, What a Pal Was Mary to Three Little Words, published a collection of his avocational efforts called Songs My Mother Never Sang (Random House, $2.50). This tunesmith's holiday provides musical America with a richly burlesque little sheaf of songs, including numbers entitled Indelible You and Get Off the Pot, and a fine satire on Gilbert & Sullivan, complete with antiphonal chorus effects, entitled He's Not an Aristocrat. The composer's program notes, to boot...
Paris Green. Come Down, My Evenin' Star was the work of a tunesmith named John ("Honey") Stromberg, who wrote for the revues at the old Weber & Fields Music Hall when David Warfield, Fay Templeton, DeWolf Hopper and Willie Collier were among its stars. When Lillian made her debut there in 1899 in a travesty on The Girl from Maxim's, Honey Stromberg was her musical director. For four years he wrote his finest tunes for her. One day in 1902 Honey, an acute sufferer from chronic rheumatism, was reported seriously ill at his home in Freeport, Long Island...
Lili Marleen was composed in 1938 by a black-haired Nazi tunesmith named Norbert Schultze. Its lyricist was Hans Leip, minor poet who had a small reputation during the Weimar Republic. Rejected by some 30 music publishers, Lili Marleen finally caught on in August 1941, when Nazi broadcasters, taking over the Belgrade radio, found they had only three records to play. One was Lili Marleen. By last January they had played it twice nightly for 500 nights, and fan mail, which came from as far away as German submarines off the U.S. Atlantic coast, had run into millions of letters...
Product of Broadway Tunesmith Sunny Skylar (real name Selig Shaftel), vocalist with Vincent Lopez' band, Move It Over at first did not impress Boss Lopez. When Skylar prevailed upon him to play it once as an experiment at Manhattan's Taft Grill, the audience seemed to agree with the bandleader. But later he dug it out again for a program at Camp Upton, L.I., and the doughboys...