Jerome David Kern (
January 27, 1885 –
November 11, 1945) was an American
composer of popular music. He wrote around 700 songs, including such classics as
Ol' Man River,
A Fine Romance,
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, and
The Way You Look Tonight and more than 100 complete scores for shows and films, including
Show Boat, in a career lasting from 1902 until his death.
Jerome Kern was born in
New York City. His parents, Fanny and Henry Kern, were both
German Jews. They named him Jerome because they lived near Jerome Park, a favorite place of theirs. (Jerome Park was named after
Leonard Jerome, who was the father of
Jennie Jerome, mother of British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill.) Fanny encouraged her son to take piano lessons. Henry was a merchandiser and sold pianos among other items. Although Henry wanted his son to go into business with him, Jerome insisted on staying with music.
Kern grew up on East 56th Street in
Midtown Manhattan, where he attended public schools. He studied at the
New York College of Music and then briefly in 1904 in
Heidelberg, Germany. From 1905, Kern spent a lot of time in
London, and he married in
Walton-on-Thames in 1910. In New York, he started working as a rehearsal pianist, initially contributing numbers for interpolation into other composers' scores, and by 1915 he was represented in many
Broadway shows. On May 1 of that year, he was meant to accompany
Charles Frohman to London on board the
RMS Lusitania, but overslept after being kept up late playing requests at a party.
Kern's biggest hit at that time was the song "They Didn't Believe Me", with lyric by
Edward Laska. It was interpolated into the show
The Girl from Utah.
In 1920, he wrote the entire score for the musical
Sally.
Otto Harbach wrote the script and lyrics. From this popular show came the song "Look for the Silver Lining", performed by the rising Broadway star
Marilyn Miller.
1925 was a major turning point in Kern's career when he met
Oscar Hammerstein II with whom he would entertain a lifelong friendship and collaboration. Their first show (written together with Harbach) was
Sunny, which featured the song "Who (Stole My Heart Away)?". The by-now renowned
Marilyn Miller played the title role in
Sunny, as she had in
Sally. Kern and Hammerstein next wrote the famous
Show Boat in 1927, which includes the well-known songs "
Ol' Man River" and "
Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man." Based on the book of the same name by
Edna Ferber, "Show Boat" deviated from the usual musical revue of that era and featured an unusually dramatic plot highlighting racism and
miscegenation, a taboo subject in musicals then. (A 1946 revival would also try to integrate choreography into the show, in the manner of
Richard Rodgers and
Oscar Hammerstein II, as would the 1993
Harold Prince revival.) Several of the songs from "Show Boat" were arranged by Charles Miller into the orchestral work
Scenario for Orchestra: Themes from Show Boat in 1941. This was premiered and first recorded by the
Cleveland Orchestra conducted by
Artur Rodziński, the first instance that such an honor had been paid to music from a Broadway show.
Show Boat remains Kern's most often revived work. In his album notes for the 3-CD 1988 recording of the show, musical theatre historian
Miles Kreuger hailed
Show Boat as the greatest single step forward in American
musical theatre, enabling composers, lyricists and librettists to introduce more mature subject matter into their shows.
Music in the Air (1932) was another Kern-Hammerstein collaboration. This musical is remembered for "
The Song Is You". Another tune from the show, "In Egern on the Tegern See," is parodied by the song "In Izzenschnooken on the Lovely Essenzook Zee" in Rick Besoyan's satirical 1959 musical
Little Mary Sunshine.
The musical
Roberta (1933) by Kern and Harbach gave us "
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and featured, among others,
Bob Hope, Fred MacMurray, George Murphy, and
Sydney Greenstreet, all in the early stages of their careers.
In 1930, Jerome Kern was placed under contract by Warner Bros. to produce a series of musicals. Jerome Kern worked on
Men of the Sky which was released in 1931. Unfortunately, in 1931 the public was apathetic towards musicals and the film was virtually ignored. Consequently, the Warner Bros. bought out his contract and he returned to the stage. In 1935, when musical films had become popular once again, Kern moved to
Hollywood and started working on music for films but continued working on Broadway productions, too. His last Broadway show was the rather unsuccessful
Very Warm for May in 1939; the score included another Kern–Hammerstein classic, "
All The Things You Are". In 1985, the centenary of his birth, a rediscovered recording of a radio production featuring the original cast received a
Grammy Nomination as Best Cast Show Album. It was Kern's last Broadway show; he suffered a heart attack in 1939 and was told by his doctors to concentrate on film scores - a less stressful task since Hollywood songwriters were not as involved with the production of films as Broadway songwriters were with the production of stage musicals.
Kern's Hollywood career was successful indeed. For
Swing Time (starring
Ginger Rogers and
Fred Astaire), he wrote "
The Way You Look Tonight" (with lyrics by
Dorothy Fields), which won the
Academy Award in 1936 for the best song. Other songs in the film include "
A Fine Romance", "Pick Yourself Up", and "Never Gonna Dance". In 1941, he and Hammerstein wrote "
The Last Time I Saw Paris", in homage to the French city just recently occupied by the Germans. The song was used in the film
Lady Be Good and won another Oscar for Best Song - the only time a song not written for the film it appears in won the Oscar. In 1944, Kern teamed up with
Ira Gershwin to write the songs for one of his best-remembered film musicals,
Cover Girl, starring
Rita Hayworth and
Gene Kelly. It featured the classic song "
Long Ago and Far Away".
Although Kern generally wrote for
musical theatre, the harmonic richness of his
compositions lend themselves well to the
jazz idiom, which typically emphasizes
improvisation based on a harmonic structure; many have been adopted by
jazz musicians and have become
standard tunes.
Jerome Kern died of a
stroke in 1945, at the age of 60 in his birthplace
New York. He had been overseeing auditions for a new revival of
Show Boat, and was due to compose the score for the musical
Annie Get Your Gun (which task, following his death, was passed to
Irving Berlin). At the time of Kern's death,
MGM was filming a fictionalized version of his life,
Till the Clouds Roll By, which was released in 1946 starring
Robert Walker as Kern.
