He had "lucked into" living in the same building as "the great lyricist Yip Harburg" and became his "devoted friend and fan." Sheed manages to capture the nature of these songwriters' world when he describes how "Yip invariably lingered in the lobby or in the open elevator doorway, pulling bits of paper out of his pockets, on which he jotted some verses about the day's news, and reading from them with glee, or else telling me how his friend Harold Arlen was coping with his recent depressive breakdown." He was also able to meet one of Harburg's writing partners, Burton Lane, who loved to talk, like Harburg, about politics or about songs, as long as Sheed wanted to, "especially if the topic was Judy Garland, whom he discovered, or the Gershwins, who discovered him." And it was in Harburg's apartment that Sheed met Arlen, then recovered, as well as Arthur Schwartz who told him how his co-writer Howard Dietz was inclined to comment on any of life's difficulties by asking the question, "What is life but dancing in the dark?" ( Sheed, pp. As late as the last half of the 1960s, Wilfred Sheed tells us in his book The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty, that he himself was able to run into some of them in New York. And they not only partnered up with one another to work, but they played together: open houses at Lorenz Hart's parents' apartment, parties at the Gershwins', (both in uptown Manhattan), tennis and golf in southern California. After all, they worked together in the same industry that had a very limited number of focal points: Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, Harlem, Hollywood. pictured).Ī great number of the songwriters of The Great American Songbook knew each other, were even friends. Reminiscing In Tempo: A Portrait of Duke EllingtonĪlec Wilder, American Popular Song The Great Innovators, 1900-1950, New York: Oxford University Press, 1972 (paper-bound Ed.
A Fine Romance Jewish Songwriters, American Songs. Max Wilk, They're Playing Our Song: Conversations with America's Classic Songwriters (originally published 1973 as They're Playing Our Song: From Jerome Kern to Stephen Sondheim-The Stories behind the Words and Music of Two Generations), New York and Stratford, CT: Easton Studio Press, 2008.ĭavid Lehman. New York: Random House, 2007 (paper-bound Ed., 2008 shown)
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