Music: Birth of a Song

• Share

Reporter Karl Kingsley Kitchen, who digs up many a good yarn for the New York Sun, last week told "The True Story of the Origin of a Famous Song."

Clanking along through Indiana in a daycoach in the early 1890's, the conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra removed his cuff and jotted down on it a tune. A young journalist, who was spending his vacation traveling with the conductor and his orchestra on tour, asked for a copy of the air. At a hotel that evening the musician scribbled the song on a piece of notepaper, gave it to his admirer. The journalist liked it, learned to play it, rendered it so often that his friends later called it his song.

In 1905 the journalist, now editor, had occasion to listen to the premiere of an operetta which his friend the composer had written. Surprised and delighted was he to discover that the melody written on the daycoach was the hit of the show, called "Kiss Me Again." It is still a good song. Its composer, Victor Herbert, is dead. But the lady who first introduced it, Fritzi Scheff (TIME, Oct. 21, 1929), still sings it. Last winter she took the production from which the song came—Mille. Modiste—on tour. And the journalist is still well and happy. He is General Manager Kent Cooper of the Associated Press.

Pressman Cooper, who has a good ear for music, did not keep the script which Composer Herbert gave him, being able to memorize tunes quickly. In some parts of Indiana, "Kiss Me Again" is still "Kent Cooper's Song."