A Fine Romance: I Hear My Father Singing ― Harold Arlen
December 31, 2020
A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, 1910-1965
Featuring text from "A Fine Romance" traveling exhibit curated by David Lehman, and
developed by Nextbook Inc. and the American Library Association Public Programs Office
Alec Wilder, songwriter and historian
Meet Harold Arlen
Harold Arlen (1905-1986) broke through when Hollywood songwriter Harry Warren (“Chattanooga Choo-Choo”) heard him improvise on the piano and advised him to turn a certain riff into a song. Warren said he knew just the right wordsmith: Ted Koehler. Warren was right. The song was “Get Happy,” the year was 1929, and Arlen and Koehler were a natural team. They succeeded Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields at the Cotton Club, where they turned out two shows a year from 1930 to 1934. Arlen and Koehler wrote “I’ve Got the World on a String” and “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” and soaked up more than just the ambiance of the legendary club where Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway performed.
"Music doesn't argue, discuss, or quarrel.
It just breathes the air of freedom."
Harold Arlen
Arlen was jazz crazy. Ethel Waters, a blues singer who performed Arlen’s songs when both worked at the Cotton Club, remarked on how perfectly the White musician fit within the musical environment pioneered by Black Americans.
He composed the signature songs of Lena Horne and Judy Garland. "The Wizard of Oz," which he wrote with the lyricist Yip Harburg, was his greatest popular triumph. With Harburg, he also wrote “It’s Only a Paper Moon” and a ballad Sinatra turned into pure gold: “Last Night When We Were Young.” Arlen’s masterly collaborations with Johnny Mercer, starting with “Blues in the Night” in 1941, made him the natural heir to Gershwin as a composer of jazz songs.
Irwin Kostal and Harold Arlen, backstage at Basin Street East nightclub, April 1961. Irwin Kostal Collection, Songbook Library & Archives, 077.001.090.001.
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Arlen’s love of jazz was matched by his debt to the Jewish liturgy. For Arlen, a Louis Armstrong “hot lick” on the cornet was the nearest thing to his father’s chanting in Temple Adath Yeshurun in Syracuse, New York. “I don’t know how the hell to explain it,” he said, “but I hear in jazz and in gospel my father singing.” Unlike Al Jolson’s cantor father in the 1927 talkie "The Jazz Singer," Arlen’s papa liked his son’s secular songs so much he sometime sang the Sabbath prayers to the tune of “Over the Rainbow” or “Come Rain or Come Shine.”
“Pop had a perfect genius for finding new melodic twists. I know damned well now that his glorious improvisations had an effect on me and my own style.”
Harold Arlen
EXPLORE: Harold Arlen at the Piano Songbook Library & Archives Collections Highlight
Learn more about Harold Arlen
About A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songbook, 1910-1965
Recognizing that music and the arts have a unique power to build bridges and heal the human spirit, there is no better time to celebrate the contributions that immigrants from so many lands and cultures have made to American life. The Great American Songbook Foundation is proud to present this exhibition, A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, 1910-1965, curated by David Lehman and developed by Nextbook Inc. and the American Library Association Public Programs Office.
