More of the Great American Songbook Quiz

Answer: Night and Day

Cole Porter composed "Night and Day" in 1932 as part of the Broadway Show "The Gay Divorce". Fred Astaire performed the song on stage and later, with the able support of Leo Reisman's Orchestra, converted it into a massive Number One hit for ten weeks in late 1932, early 1933. When the play was adapted to the Silver Screen in 1934 as "The Gay Divorcee", the first pairing of Astaire and Ginger Rogers as the principal stars, he was able to reprise his rendering of the song. Over the next dozen years, it would periodically make charting appearances for the likes of Eddie Duchin, Charlie Barnet, Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. Although it was often an album track for many pop singers during the "rock era", only Sergio Mendes charted with it as a single in 1967 when it plateaued at a disappointing Number 82.

Porter was born in Indiana in 1891 and was the grandson of J.O. Cole, reputed to be the wealthiest man in the state. His mother introduced him to the world of music and he was something of a prodigy becoming a competent violinist and piano player by the age of ten and writing his first compositions around the same time.

J.O. wanted Porter to pursue a law degree at Harvard and ultimately, that's where he wound up. However, he completed his pre-law studies at Yale and became totally immersed in the music scene there where he wrote several musical productions for the school itself or for fraternities and other clubs he associated with. When he transferred to Harvard, he eventually abandoned his law studies turning to the Harvard music faculty instead. J.O. was quite adamant that no grandson of his would pursue a career in the arts and was unaware of these developments, his mother keeping her father in the dark. Upon graduation in 1917, he went to Paris in the waning days of WWI and as a wealthy ex-pat, hobnobbed with the jet set and was known to host the wildest parties in town. That, apparently, was his only preoccupation. When J.O. passed on in 1923, the extravagant partying didn't cease but Porter could now openly begin to work at his craft with no fear of losing his inheritance. By the middle of the decade he had written several productions for the Paris stage that were reasonably successful.

He returned to the U.S. in 1928 and through the connections of his vast network of friends he cultivated at Yale, began creating hit Broadway musicals. His most productive period was between 1928 and 1936 when he composed such standards as "Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love)","Anything Goes", "Don't Fence Me In", "I Get a Kick Out of You", "Miss Otis Regrets", Begin the Beguine", "I've Got You Under My Skin", "It's De-lovely" and, of course, "Night and Day".

In 1937, he suffered a terrible horse jumping accident when his mount fell on him and broke both his legs. He never fully recovered requiring over 30 operations to save his limbs from amputation. In constant pain and unable to live the high life as he once did, he managed to create a number of popular and immensely successful Broadway musicals throughout the 1940s but there would be no more "signature" songs added to the Great American Songbook. He retired from music when his right leg was finally amputated in 1958 and lived in virtual seclusion until his death in 1964.

Answer: I Only Have Eyes For You

Harry Warren and Al Dubin were, with Rodgers & Hart, Rodgers & Hammerstein and the Gershwins, among the most enduring and prolific writing teams during the first half of the 20th Century. While those others listed specialised in writing for Broadway productions, Warren and Dubin only dabbled in that medium... they were the "go to" guys for movie scores from 1932 to 1938.

Al Dubin was born in Switzerland in 1891, was of Russian-Jewish heritage and came to America with his family in 1893. Enamored with the musicals of the day, he started writing his own songs at the age of fourteen. He also considered a career in medicine but that dream was dashed when he was expelled from Medical school due to his carousing. After serving in WWI, he seriously devoted his time to the writing of lyrics and struck pay dirt with a couple of hits in the 1920s, most notably "Tiptoe Through the Tulips". Moving to California, he came under contract to Warner Brothers where he was paired with Warren.

Harry Warren (nee Salvatore Guaragna) was born in 1893 in Brooklyn, his father anglicizing the family name to Warren early in Harry's life. He was self-taught as a musician and began playing in a band by 1907. In 1915, he started working for Vitaphone Pictures in various capacities then began writing Broadway scores in the 1920s with a modicum of success before engaging with Warner Brothers and heading west.

Together, their best work was featured in these Warner Brothers movies from that era: "42nd Street", "Footlight Parade", "Dames" and the various iterations of "The Gold Digger" series of movies. Their most enduring songs other than "I Only Have Eyes For You" were "You're Getting to Be a Habit with Me", "We're In the Money", "The Boulevard of Broken Dreams", "Lullaby of Broadway" and "Lulu's Back in Town".

For some reason, Warner Brothers cut back on musical motion pictures in the late 1930s and it seems that the Dubin-Warren team were relieved of their duties although my research as to why was inconclusive. Nevertheless, Warren would continue to write musical scores for a number of different movie studios with several different lyricists until the mid-1950s. Changing tastes and a proliferation of new talents in a new era more or less ended his composing career. Dubin, meanwhile, was never productive again after separating from Warren. He had always lived life in the fast lane and those many years of excess contributed to his demise in 1945 at the age of 53.

Answer: I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm

Irving Berlin wrote "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm" for the 1937 movie "On the Avenue" as sung by Alice Faye and Dick Powell. It was an instant hit then with four competing versions gracing the Billboard charts. Ray Noble led the pack at Number Three, Billie Holiday at Number Four, Red Norvo at Number 11 and Glen Gray at Number 18 and those were just the charting versions! Personally, I have Alice Faye's rendition as well as Django Reinhart's, both being recorded that year as well. Who knows how many others were bouncing around at the time.

For some reason it enjoyed a revival in 1949 with Les Brown garnering a Number One recording of the song. Three other artists also made charting versions that year: The Mills Brothers - Number Nine, Art Lund - Number 22, and The Starlighters - Number 26. Clearly, it had already become a standard within 12 years. When Les Brown's disc topped the charts, it was just one of 25 Berlin compositions that achieved Number One status on the charts of the day. Surely no one has more. As a comparison, Paul McCartney is credited with 32 Number One compositions but virtually every one of them was co-written with either John Lennon or others. All of Berlin's were solo efforts!

Answer: They Can't Take That Away From Me

Ah yes... Astaire pitching woo to Rogers on the ferry dock. Some things are magical and virtually everything they did together in the movies met that criterion. It was interesting to me in reviewing the YouTube clip from "Shall We Dance", where "They Can't Take That Away From Me" first appears, that it might have been one the few occasions in the Astaire/Rogers oeuvre where they actually DON'T have a dance routine as part of or following a song. How ironic given the movie's title! This was rectified when the song was reprised in the movie "The Barkleys of Broadway" twelve years later in 1949. Same song with them tripping the light fantastic together. Better late than never one supposes.

"Shall We Dance" premiered in the USA on May 7th, 1937 and George Gershwin died nine weeks later, July 11th, of a brain tumor. He had been feeling ill for some time but by the time the illness was diagnosed, it was far too late for an effective medical intervention. Who knows if he had lived today if the outcome would have been different. He was only 38 years old.

The song was nominated for an Academy Award that year but lost to Bing Crosby's "Sweet Leilani" from "Waikiki Wedding". One doesn't hear that song much these days but to be fair, it was enormously popular in 1937. It was Number One on the charts for ten weeks but not consecutively. In the middle of its run, "They Can't Take That Away From Me" replaced it at the top of the charts for one solitary week.

Answer: Smile

The lyrics to Chaplin's melody were provided by two veteran lyricists from England, John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons. Turner, whose real name was James Phillips, was the manager of the Peter Maurice Music Co. which specialized in taking foreign language songs and translating the lyrics into an English version. Parsons was the fellow who did most of the work and when he was done, Turner would review it, make slight alterations and so on until they could agree on a final product. They would then share the lyric credits. Their most famous pieces were "Auf Wiederseh'n Sweetheart" in 1952, a Number One hit for Vera Lynn and "Oh, My Papa", a Number One smash for Eddie Fisher in 1953. It may very well be that this was the only lyric that they wrote from scratch and that was not a translation.

"Smile" became one of Michael Jackson's favorite songs and he recorded it himself as the final song on his 1995 "HIStory" album. Following Michael's death in 2009, the song was acknowledged as among his favorites and a moving version was sung at his memorial service by his brother Jermaine. Other than Nat "King" Cole's recording, no one else has managed to achieve significant charting success with the song but Dean Martin, Tony Bennett, Diana Ross, Barbra Streisand and apparently at least 56 other recording artists have used it as fillers for their albums since 1955. I should hasten to add that Natalie Cole, of course, included it in her memorial collection of her father's hits in her 1991 CD.

Answer: A Kiss to Build a Dream On

I must admit to being totally puzzled by the lack of charting success of this old standard. According to the AllMusic website, close to 3,000 artists have recorded versions of this song and nary a one has charted on Billboard's Hot 100 and only the recordings of Armstrong and Hugo Winterhalter were hits in 1952, the latter actually charting at Number Ten to eclipse Armstrong's Number 16 disc. That baffles me even more! Whereas Winterhalter's rendition was as bland and vanilla as something the Ray Conniff singers might have recorded a decade later, Satchmo's rendering was positively brilliant. His vocal phrasing was a revelation and his trumpet solo powerfully dynamic. To me, this recording was his best work since his heyday in the 1920s with his Hot Five and Hot Seven combos. Yes, to me, better than "Hello Dolly" and "What a Wonderful World"! Of course, perhaps that is just a matter of personal taste.

Regarding the composers, Harry Ruby and Bert Kalmar met in the late 1910s through the vaudeville circuit and decided early to team up in their composing efforts. They are most famous for writing the musical scores for several of the early Marx Brothers movies and for five songs which became enduring hits: "Who's Sorry Now" a hit for numerous artists in 1923 and later Connie Francis' initial breakthrough hit in 1958; "I Wanna Be Loved By You", Helen Kane's signature song in 1928 (she was the original boop-boop-a-doop girl and the inspiration for Betty Boop) and made even more famous due to Marilyn Monroe's breathy rendition in the movie "Some Like It Hot"; "Three Little Words", a Number One hit for Duke Ellington in 1930; "Nevertheless", again a hit for several artists in 1931 and reworked many times by others in the years thereafter; and, of course, "A Kiss to Build a Dream On". My efforts to ascertain how Oscar Hammerstein II hooked up with these two fellows in the song's creation was fruitless. Needless to say, it's hard to fathom how or why one of Broadway's premier librettists would engage with two old vaudevillians. It'll remain a mystery from my perspective.

Answer: The Very Thought of You

Ray Noble was born in England in 1903 and was the leader of Britain's premier dance band in the early 1930s. In 1933, one of his compositions and recordings, "Love Is the Sweetest Thing", topped the American music charts and it was followed in short order with three other Number Ones - "The Old Spinning Wheel" and "The Very Thought of You" in 1934 and "Isle of Capri" in January of 1935. These, I believe, were the first hits recorded in a country other than the U.S. to top the charts since 1920 when big band dance music came into its own.

Emboldened with these successes, Noble decided to move to the U.S. in 1935 but to relocate his entire orchestra abroad was unrealistic. Instead, he only enticed his percussionist Bill Harty and popular vocalist Al Bowlly to join him and asked a young trombonist working with the Dorsey Brothers to assemble an orchestra for him. Glenn Miller did a good job recruiting such stalwarts as Claude Thornhill, Charlie Spivak, Will Bradley and Pee Wee Erwin. This orchestra became the house band for a new dance venue which had just opened its doors in New York City, The Rainbow Room. Miller would leave to form his own band in 1937 and Bowlly returned to Britain in 1938 only to be killed in an air raid in 1941. Noble would relocate to California and remained there leading a new orchestra until the late 1940s, scoring his last Number One hit in 1947 with "Linda". However, by then music was on the backburner. He had landed roles on radio as a bumbling, upper class, British twit on the "Burns and Allen" and the "Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy" radio shows. Eventually, in retirement, he too would return to Britain in the late 1960s, passing away in 1978 of cancer.

Answer: I'll Be Seeing You

In researching this song and its links to Broadway, the movies and the Billboard chart, this is what I could ascertain.

It was utilized in the Broadway production of "Right This Way", the music being credited to the team of Brad Greene and Fabian Storey. A Google search of those names comes up totally empty. The play was a flop, opening on Jan. 5, 1938 and closing after only 15 performances. Given that timeline, one must presume Fain and Kahal probably wrote the song in 1937, perhaps even earlier.

When the U.S. entered WWII in December 1941 and many young men, husbands and beaux, went off to fight, a cabaret singer named Hildegarde started singing it and dedicating it to the men and women separated by this exigency. Finally, in 1944, recorded versions hit the Billboard charts to become top 10 hits. Bing Crosby's topped the charts for four weeks while a competing version by Tommy Dorsey with Sinatra handling the vocals peaked at Number Four. Strangely, that version was actually recorded in 1940 but only became a hit in response to Crosby's.

Then, a movie entitled "I'll Be Seeing You" starring Ginger Rogers and Joseph Cotten opens in the U.S. during the last week of 1944. The song was featured in the movie, sung off screen by a gal named Louanne Hogan. Her voice was heard singing in a couple of other movies during the mid-1940s and in 1951, she was a member of the famed vocal group The Pied Pipers before fading from the entertainment industry. Whether the title for the movie was inspired by the song is not clear. Just guessing but I'm assuming it was!

Once its pedigree as a classic was established during that era, it's been a perennial favorite of vocalists ever since. However, despite renderings by such vocal heavyweights as Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Ray Charles, Jo Stafford, Neil Sedaka, Sarah Vaughan, Dean Martin, Brenda Lee, Engelbert Humperdinck and Linda Ronstadt, none have ever cracked the top 40 of Billboard Hot Hits. The best ranked of the post 1955 recordings was that of Tommy Sands in 1959 which stalled at Number 51. Personally, my favorite reading belongs to Judy Collins, a track from her 1975 album "Judith". On a final note, it became Liberace's theme song in the 1950s.

Answer: Where or When

Rodgers and Hart met for the first time in 1919 and started collaborating the following year, Rodgers doing the musical scores and Hart handling the lyrics. Over the next quarter century, they would compose the scores for 28 Broadway plays and another six movies, their most famous projects being "A Connecticut Yankee", "Jumbo", "Babes in Arms" and "Pal Joey". Naturally, many of the individual songs presented in these plays became standards and "Babes in Arms" had more than its share. Besides "Where or When", the production also included "My Funny Valentine" and "The Lady Is a Tramp". Lorenz Hart suffered from depression and alcoholism and in 1943 he was particularly devastated when his mother passed away. The team had just completed a revised version of "A Connecticut Yankee" and after opening night, Hart went on a bender for two days, caught pneumonia and died a couple of days later at the young age of 48. Rodgers then went on to form another productive union with Oscar Hammerstein which lasted for 16 years.

"Where or When" lyrically alludes to a phenomenon that most of us have experienced - deja vu. Read the lines from my lyrical clue again and you'll get it.

"Some things that happen for the first time
Seem to be happening again
And so it seems that we have met before
And laughed before, and loved before
But who knows where or when."

Like so many of the other songs highlighted in this quiz, it has been recorded by the who's who of vocalists over the years, a list far too long to enumerate. Suffice to say that besides Rod Stewart, contemporary artists who have given it a whirl include Harry Connick Jr. and Diana Krall.

Answer: As Time Goes By

In the question I mention "Tin Pan Alley" and its song writing denizens. Although Hupfield may have strayed there during his career at some point, he rarely left his Plainfield, N.J. residence for most of his life. He became something of a specialist, composing songs, both lyrics and score, mostly for Broadway productions when a particular song was required but the primary composers for the musical couldn't come up with something appropriate. Hence, he'd wait for the plea for help in Plainfield, whip something up then send it off when the task was done. His writing credits included a number of songs that I had never heard of before but one title certainly captured my interest, a Number Two hit in 1931 for Rudy Vallee - "When Yuba Played the Rumba on the Tuba". Find it on YouTube... it's a hoot!

Digressions aside, Hupfield was commissioned to write "As Time Goes By" for the Broadway musical "Everyone's Welcome", a modest 139 performances hit in 1931-2. Sammy Fain wrote all the other songs included in the play. At the time, two recordings, one by Jacques Renard, the leader of the house band at Boston's famous Cocoanut Grove dance hall and the second by Rudy Vallee, made Billboard chart appearances, the former at Number 13, the latter at Number 15. Then in 1940, playwrights Murray Bennett and Joan Allison wrote an unproduced play named "Everybody Comes to Ricks" which became the basis for "Casablanca". Bennett thought the song was ideal for a bar scene and retained it in his play and then it was fortuitously included in the movie two years later.

When the movie became such a hit, everyone clamoured for recordings of the song as sung by Dooley Wilson. Sadly for Wilson, a musician's strike had just begun and the union's resolve was so strong that no studio recordings were cut for over two years. He was shut out! Instead, the old master recordings of Renard and Vallee from 1931 were dusted off and re-released. This time, Vallee's version peaked at Number One for four weeks in June 1943 while Renard's stalled at Number Three. Now, it's simply a classic and one of the most memorable movie songs of all time. The AFI ranks it Number Two right behind "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" from "The Wizard of Oz".