Music: Melodies in a Safe

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"Composing is like fishing," said the late Jerome Kern. "You get a nibble, but you don't know whether it's a minnow or a marlin until you reel it in." Writing quickly and easily. Kern landed enough songs in his lifetime to serve 92 stage and 25 screen productions, but few people outside the music trade knew that he also piled up a surplus that was never published. Since Kern's death in 1945 at 60, the musical overflow—some 75 waltzes, ballads, rhythm songs, tangos and beguines—has remained in a safe in the Manhattan offices of Chappell & Co., his publishers.

Last week the existence of the Kern subtreasury was made public. With the permission of the composer's family. Theatrical Producer Cheryl Crawford announced plans for a new Broadway play. No. 93 with music by Jerome Kern. The book will be adapted by Playwright Ketti Frings from her 1941 screenplay Hold Back the Dawn; the lyrics will be written by Dorothy (Annie Get Your Gun) Fields.

Why had Kern's estate waited so long to cash in on the contents of the safe? "Miss Crawford offers the auspices we have waited for,'' said Kern's daughter (wife of Hollywood Producer Jack Cummings). "After all, the songs are no good in a bureau drawer." It was possible, too, suggested his longtime collaborator, P. G. Wodehouse, that the melodies—until now heard only by a handful of people—would turn out to be something less than Golden Bantam Kern.

The composer could write a song in a few minutes, recalled Wodehouse; he would jump up from poker games to scribble music. He liked to eat a hard-shelled crab at 2 a.m.. then write music the rest of the night. Early in his career, he worked on as many as six shows at once. Although he threw many songs away, he must have kept a sizable school of minnows along with Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Ol' Man River.