Kern, Jerome (David)

Kern, Jerome [David] (1885–1945), composer. Born in New York, the son of a German‐born immigrant who became a moderately successful merchandiser and an American‐born mother of Bohemian descent who had once contemplated a career as a professional pianist, he moved with his family to Newark when he was ten and started music lessons with his mother. While still in high school, Kern composed music for a class show as well as for a production by the Newark Yacht Club. His success prompted him to quit high school after his junior year and enroll instead at the New York College of Music, where his teachers included Paolo Gallico, Alexander Lambert, and Austin Pierce. He employed what was then the accepted method of breaking into Broadway: interpolating songs into other men's scores. Playgoers first heard Kern melodies when Lew Fields inserted two numbers into a 1903 importation, An English Daisy. A year later, when E. E. Rice allowed Kern to write half the score for another importation, Mr. Wix of Wickham, recognition began to come Kern's way. His first big hit, “How'd You Like to Spoon with Me?,” was interpolated into The Earl and the Girl (1905), then for the next decade the young composer shuttled back and forth between New York and London where he picked up an abiding love for Gaiety musical comedy and met his future wife, Eva Leale. Among the shows with inserted Kern melodies during these years were The Doll Girl, The Dairymaids, Fascinating Flora, Fluffy Ruffles, and The Girl from Montmartre. He soon developed a unique musical idiom, a distinct amalgam of his German and Bohemian heritage, turn‐of‐the‐century English musical theatre styles, and identifiable American mannerisms. An especially important influence was “the dancing craze,” a rage for ballroom dancing that exploded across America shortly before World War I. It was in answer to this demand for new dance songs that Kern finally found his first real style and achieved lasting recognition. In 1914 Charles Frohman brought the London hit The Girl from Utah to New York and added some Kern songs, most memorably “They Didn't Believe Me,” which changed the course of American musical comedy writing. This great, enduring composition established the ballad as the most basic style of popular song in place of the heretofore‐reigning waltz. Within a year Kern had joined forces with Guy Bolton and the pair began to write intimate musical comedies for the tiny Princess Theatre. The first, Nobody Home (1915), was a modest hit, but Very Good Eddie (1915) was a huge success. When P. G. Wodehouse joined the team, adding his incomparable lyrics, the shows hit full stride with Oh, Boy! (1917), Oh, Lady! Lady!! (1918), Have a Heart! (1917) and Leave It to Jane (1917). These musical comedies, with their sensible books about believable people, their literate and witty lyrics and their enchanting melodies (songs that were well integrated into the story) became exemplars of their kind. In the next decade most of Kern's scores were far more blatantly commercial enterprises: the Marilyn Miller vehicles Sally (1920) and Sunny (1925), the Fred Stone vehicles Stepping Stones (1923) and Criss Cross (1926), and the ambitious but short‐lived Dear Sir (1924). Three years later he and librettist‐lyricist Oscar Hammerstein created the first successful, totally American operetta, Show Boat. Its masterful score, engaging epic story, and ability to tie the two together made for what most consider the first “musical play.” The success of the pair's next work, Sweet Adeline (1929), was dampened by the onset of the Great Depression. In the early 1930s Kern attempted still another style of operetta writing, interweaving Middle‐European and American mannerisms. The Cat and the Fiddle (1931), written with Otto Harbach, and Music in the Air (1932), written with Hammerstein, both enjoyed long runs. A weak Harbach libretto nearly scuttled Roberta (1933), but Kern's luminous score, in particular “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” saved the day. For the rest of the decade he worked in Hollywood, returning only in 1939 for the unsuccessful Very Warm for May, which left behind the enduring Kern‐Hammerstein classic “All the Things You Are.” Kern was preparing to write the score for the musical that became Annie Get Your Gun when he died in 1945.

Kern's remarkable melodic gifts and his crucial pioneering—popularizing the ballad, modernizing musical comedy, and creating the modern American operetta or musical play—have won him general recognition as the father of the American musical theatre as we know it today. Harold Arlen, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Arthur Schwartz, and Vincent Youmans all at one time or another acknowledged that he had served as their idol and model. For all his experimentation, however, Kern could be a difficult, obstinate associate. He almost never would write a melody to a lyric, and once he did create a melody he refused to change a note of it. As a result, even when his lyricist was a master such as Wodehouse or Hammerstein, there were occasional clashes of words and music. Witness, for example, the verse to “Make Believe.” Kern's full scores, other than those already mentioned, were The Red Petticoat (1912), Oh, I Say! (1913), Miss Information (1915), Love o' Mike (1917), Toot‐Toot! (1918), Head Over Heels (1918), Rock‐a‐Bye Baby (1919), She's a Good Fellow (1919), The Night Boat (1920), Hitchy‐Koo (1920), Good Morning Dearie (1921), Sitting Pretty (1924), The City Chap (1925), Lucky (1927), and Gentleman Unafraid (1938), done in St. Louis but never brought to New York. Biography: Jerome Kern: His Life and Music, Gerald Bordman, 1980.