That Old Feeling: We Need Harry Warren

If one purpose of the fundamentalist saboteurs who attacked the World Trade Center was to strike at the supposed decadence of American pop culture, they can consider their mission accomplished. Hollywood execs have shelved raucous action movies; the big networks are scrambling for gentler fare; MTV has gone as soft, fuzzy and ruminative as the pop stars and other celebs who on the "Heroes" telethon wore their solemn faces to raise $187 million for the victims’ families. At least for now, the entertainment industry has gone kinder and gentler into this bad night.

For some, kinder and stupider. Clear Channel, the radio behemoth that owns 1200 stations, sent its programmers a proscriptive list of 162 recordings (plus "all songs by Rage Against the Machine") with "questionable" lyrics. On the black list were such mellow, and possible helpful, tunes as "Blowin’ in the Wind," "Peace Train," "Daniel," "Get Together," "Spirit in the Sky," "He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother," Sam Cooke’s "Wonderful World" and Louis Armstrong’s "What a Wonderful World," "New York, New York" and Neil Diamond’s "America." Fortunately, Clear Channel did not produce the pop telethon, since two of its no-no numbers were sung on it: "Bridge Over Troubled Water" and "Imagine."

What songs are left? The old, old ones, with an innocent lift made poignant by the dewy ache of nostalgia. A highlight of the Yankee Stadium prayer service last week was a rendition by the Boys Choir and Girls Choir of Harlem of "We Shall Overcome," a Negro hymn adopted by civil rights marchers in the 60s; the words "some day" were touchingly modified to "today."

A current Visa commercial shows images of actors preparing for a show, to a ballad version of George M. Cohan’s 1905 "Give My Regards to Broadway"; the tagline is "The curtain will never go down on New York City." The most popular song in the country today — certainly the most sung song — is one that Irving Berlin wrote in 1918 for a World War I army revue, discarded from that show as too sappy, locked in his trunk for two decades, then finally dug out for Kate Smith to introduce on radio in 1938: "God Bless America."

And what’s David Letterman been playing lately? Late night’s hippest host hasn’t gone much for rowdy alternative music. Instead, Thursday a week ago, he paid tribute to a genre he usually ignores, except to make mock of it ("Where the hell are the singin’ cats?") — the Broadway musical — introducing a production number from "42nd Street."

Broadway needs Letterman. People around the country will watch a TV show from New York — no mortal danger in that — but they won’t come to the Big Blasted Apple to see a show on Broadway. Attendance was down 50% at some Broadway attractions after the attack; the acting and craft unions agreed to a pay cut just to keep five long-running musicals going. So, good for Dave, offering valuable exposure to a medium on life-support. He might have been heeding Mayor Giuliani’s plea, on the Monday after the attacks, that Americans who want to help New York should "come here and spend money. Go to a restaurant, a play. You might actually have a better chance of getting tickets to ‘The Producers’ now."

For all the Mayor’s newfound statesmanship and salesmanship, he’s taken on a big task, persuading out-of-towners to get on a plane and spend time and money in the war zone called New York. But these days there are few sights more buoyant to a dark spirit than the first moments of "42nd Street" (for which tickets are, yes, available). The curtain rises just a few feet to reveal 72 clattering shoes, 72 giddily churning legs, 36 gainfully employed dancers tapping and terping to a brassy Broadway melody whose clarion call — "Come and meet/ Those dancing feet/ It’s the avenue I’m takin’ you to/ Forty-second Street" — ought to make the antsiest outlander Manhattan-bound. Lyric by Al Dubin; music by Harry Warren.

Did he write that?
The situation’s always been the same;
But ev’ry hour of ev’ry day,
These songs of his just play and play,
No matter that they never knew his name.
We know all his music,
Ev’ry note of his music,
And that’s Harry Warren’s claim to fame!

— "Did He Write That?", music by Harry Warren, lyric by Tony Thomas, 1978

In the title song of the 1934 Warner Bros. musical "Dames," Dick Powell sings an Al Dubin lyric to a Harry Warren tune: "Who writes the words and music for all the girly shows?/ No one cares, and no one knows."

That certainly applies to Warren. His Warner songs are cherished for their dizzy choreography and thus ID’d as "Busby Berkeley numbers." Warren wrote #1 songs recorded by Bing Crosby ("You’re Getting to Be a Habit With Me," "Shadow Waltz," "Remember Me?", "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby") and Glenn Miller ("Chattanooga Choo Choo," "I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo") without gaining a smidge of renown.

The 1980 original Broadway musical "42nd Street," with 16 of his classic tunes, ran for more than eight years, but it was known for its producer, David Merrick, and for the melancholy fact that its director, Gower Champion, died on opening night. Over the years, Warren got so used to being anonymous that, he joked, even his best friends hadn’t heard of him.

In an American Heritage piece on underrated songwriters of the 20th century, Wilfrid Sheed wrote, "By silent consensus, the king of this army of unknown soldiers, the Hollywood incognitos, was Harry Warren, who had more songs on the Hit Parade than Berlin himself and who would win the contest hands down if enough people have heard of him." Sheed figured that Warren (who was born, as Salvatore Guaragna, in Brooklyn on Christmas Eve 1893, and who died 20 years ago, on September 22, 1981) might have had a shot at celebrity "if he had only sung his own songs, like Hoagy Carmichael, or blown his own horn, like Irving Berlin, or simply stayed in New York, as he pined to do." Instead, "Warren’s ghost lives in constant danger of becoming famous for being unknown."

How to rescue Warren from obscurity? First, go to The Harry Warren Website (www.harrywarren.org), an amazing resource that includes lists of every song Warren wrote and every movie and show his songs appeared, plus the dialogue and audible music for 702 of the songs. (What’s more incredible is that David Jenkins, the webmaster who compiled the lists and recorded all the music, is a 20-year-old from rural North Carolina.) Then take the offensive, and declare that — for 20 years, amid some pretty steep competition — Harry Warren was America’s most successful songwriter. He may have been unsung, but his songs weren’t.

In the 20s Warren had a bunch of Tin Pan Alley hits ("I Love My Baby," "I Found a Million Dollar Baby," "Nagasaki," "Would You Like to Take a Walk"). Then he was the premier song composer in Hollywood, where he worked at three studios just as they hit their stride in musical films: Warners in the 30s, Fox in the early 40s, MGM in the later 40s. He earned more Oscars (three, for "Lullaby of Broadway," "You’ll Never Know" and "On the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe") and more Oscar nominations (11) than Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter or Richard Rodgers. Warren had more hit records, too: 42 songs on "Your Hit Parade" (the authoritative listing of the time), compared to Berlin’s 33, Rodgers’ 19, Gershwin’s 16 and Porter’s 16.

From 1931 to 1945, 21 of his songs went to #1, and spent a total of 78 weeks, a full year and a half — in the slot of slots. Dubin was the lyricist on 11 of these; Warren also hit the top with Johnny Mercer ("Beautiful Baby," "Jeepers Creepers," "Atchison, Topeka") and Mack Gordon ("Kalamazoo," "I Had the Craziest Dream," "My Heart Tells Me" and "You’ll Never Know," which stayed on the charts for 22 weeks). The Warren-Gordon "Chattanooga Choo Choo," which held the #1 slot for nine weeks in 1941, was the first certified gold record.

In the 50s Warren had big crooner hits for Dean Martin ("Innamorata," "That’s Amore") and Vic Damone ("An Affair to Remember"). He also wrote themes for TV Westerns. Sing along, young buckaroos: "Wy-att Earp/ Wy-att Earp/ Brave, courageous and bold/ Long live his fame/ And long live his glory/ And long may his story be told."

Several performers might release competing versions of Warren songs, and all would be hits: in 1931 "I Found a Million Dollar Baby" was a #1 song for Fred Waring, #2 for Crosby and #2 for the Boswell Sisters. The jazz-tinged ballad "At Last" had top-10 versions in three consecutive decades: for Glenn Miller in 1942, Ray Anthony in 1952 and Etta James on the R&B charts in 1961. "Lullaby of Broadway," which had five top-20 versions on its initial appearance in 1935, was a British hit 40 years later in the original movie rendition by Wini Shaw. Warren’s standard of standards, "I Only Have Eyes for You," was a pop and R&B hit for the Flamingoes in 1959, a top-20 seller for Jerry Butler in 1972, and #18 in the U.S. (and #1 in the U.K.) for Art Garfunkel in 1975. It even charted in a 1994 version by that "Born in the Ghetto" quartet, The Funky Poets.

Well into the Age of Rock, Warren’s songs found chart favor: the Platters’ silky "You’ll Never Know" (1959); Dinah Washington’s R&B hit of "September in the Rain" (1961); Bobby Darin’s "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby" (1961); Chris Montez’ soft-rock renditions of "The More I See You" and "There Will Never Be Another You" (both 1966).

His songs have been in more movies than any other composer, both as original tunes (in 109 films) and as revivals (in another 450 or so, including "Moonstruck" and "The English Patient," "Goodfellas" and "American Pie," "Eyes Wide Shut" and "The Others," and in many films directed by Woody Allen and Clint Eastwood). Andrew Sarris once wrote that "George Cukor’s filmography is his best defense." The same can be claimed for Warren’s discography. List a couple dozen of his songs — or, better, quote a few bars of them to anyone who loves old musicals — and, chances are, you’ve won your case.

And now, a word from our skeptics: Granted, Harry Warren wrote a lot of hit songs. So did Diane Warren (no relation); she was the first composer to have seven songs, all by different artists, on the Billboard Top 100 singles chart. Ah, but in 1942 Harry had four songs one week on the Top Ten. And when it comes to the long view — the long rear-view — we’ll have to wait 50 years and more to see if the melodies of Diane’s "Rhythm of the Night" or "I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing" or "Unbreak My Heart" are still playing on people’s mental jukeboxes, the way a couple of dozen Harry Warren tunes do now.

I’ve got to sing a torch song,
For that’s the way I feel;
When I feel a thing,
Then I can sing.
It must be real.

— "I’ve Got to Sing a Torch Song," music by Harry Warren, lyric by Al Dubin, 1933

Why do the songs of the unknown Warren continue to resonate? Because they elegantly obey the laws of melody and mathematics: each succeeding phrase is both surprising and inevitable. They sound so simple, you wonder that no tunesmith had come up with the exact combination before. Yet in his provocative, definitive "American Popular Song: The Great Innovators 1900-1950," songwriter-musicologist Alec Wilder places Warren among the Great Craftsmen and writes admiringly of his subtle twisting of musical cliche into compositional elegance. This son of Italy was the pop Puccini.

Herbert Spencer, who orchestrated many of Warren songs when they both worked at Fox, gives a closer view of the composer’s creativity in Tony Thomas’ valuable book "Harry Warren and the American Musical" (which also contains the sheet music for 25 Warren songs). "There are some things that sheer labor won’t produce," Spencer notes, "and one of them is inspired melody. As an orchestrator you acquire a sixth sense about how a composer arrived at his product. The strain is sometimes very apparent — the music comes to you almost smelling of perspiration. It was never this way with Harry’s melodies. I’m sure he had to dig to get them, but they were so logical in their lines and development they sounded as if they had written themselves. There’s no explanation for this. It smacks of the divine, and I have often wondered if Harry himself realized it."

Berkeley must have realized it: he worked with Warren on 18 films. While at Warners he often demanded that Warren and Dubin write songs even for Berkeley projects they weren’t originally assigned to, because he loved turning their 24-bar ditties into eight- and 10-min. production numbers. That was a boon for the writing team, since it meant that the chorus would be repeated dozens of times, thus guaranteeing the audience would remember the song. (It may help explain why the songs are remembered today.) In the "42nd Street" production number, the chorus is heard 24 times; in "Shanghai Lil," 27 times; in "Pettin’ in the Park" and "Honeymoon Hotel," 28 times; in "Lullaby of Broadway," 32 times. The challenge was to make the melody charming and inventive. Any less attractive hook would devolve into a mantra, either driving listeners mad or numbing them to Berkeley’s kaleidoscopic choreography.

Virtually every Berkeley extravaganza was a miniature film in itself. Some told melodramatic stories within the film’s story: the "42nd Street" and "Lullaby of Broadway" numbers end with women falling to a violent death. "Remember My Forgotten Man" portrays World War I veterans as Depression breadline boys, their girlfriends forced into prostitution. And some were just jaw-droppingly tasteless — like the Al Jolson "Goin’ to Heaven on a Mule," a segregated-heaven fantasy that manages to fit egregious stereotypes of African-Americans (black-faced whites, and some blacks, eatin’ po’k chops and rollin’ dice amid giant swaying slices of watermelon), homosexuals (an effeminate tailor) and even Jews (Jolson reading a Hebrew-language newspaper in a Baptist empyrean).

Perhaps Berkeley’s, and Jack Warner’s, strangest lapse of taste was the repeated casting of Ruby Keeler in the lead ingenue roles; she was a graceless actress (she seemed frightened of the camera) and a cloggish dancer; she’s so heavy in her tap routines that she seems to have tar stuck to her shoes. One wishes she had a bit of the pep and precocious savoir-faire shown by the 20-year-old Ginger Rogers, who played supporting roles in "42nd Street" and "Gold Diggers of 1933," which she opens in high style with a pig-Latin rendition of "We’re in the Money." And one wonders why Warner didn’t cast Rogers in leads. Perhaps Fate whispered in Hollywood’s ear: Ginger had to be set free to pair with Fred Astaire for their glorious musicals of the mid-30s.

Every Berkeley affront or excess derived from his inexhaustible of energy, his love of the gargantuan. He was a size freak, filling Warner Brothers’ biggest sound stages with huge Deco sets, putting 90, 100 dancers to work on a single number, sitting 60 girls at pianos and hiring another 60 hunchbacks in dark overalls to push the instruments around, more or less invisibly, from underneath. His capering, ogling camera was constantly undressing his dames, or gliding on the floor through the open legs of four dozen chorines. Visually, he truckled to political as well as erotic rhetoric (the "Shanghai Lil" number climaxes in flash cards forming images of F.D.R., in office less than a year, and the NRA eagle). At his best, as in "Lullaby of Broadway," Berkeley infected viewers with a vertiginous euphoria. But if his visions danced in their heads, the melodies that lodged there were usually Warren’s.

Warren’s uptempo songs are as memorable as Berkeley’s choreography, as for the same reason: they capture, in a few snazzy notes, the vigorous frivolity of the Jazz Age. To hear these perky tunes today lifts the spirits — lifts them back to an earlier day. The 1928 "Nagasaki" is something like the definitive gotta-get-up-and-do-the-Charleston song, with Warren’s effervescent syncopation dragging the folks onto the dance floor and Mort Dixon’s lyric goading them into a singalong: "Hot ginger and dynamite/ There’s nothing but that at night/ Back in Nagasaki where the fellas chew tobaccy/ And the women wicky-wacky-woo."

"Nagasaki" had enough primal appeal to be a 1928 hit for the Ipana Troubadours, and enough sophistication to be covered in dozens of jazz recordings: by Fletcher Henderson (with Red Allen and Ornette Coleman), Fats Waller, Cab Calloway, Red Norvo, Django Reinhardt and, most famously, in two Benny Goodman versions — by the Quartet (Goodman, Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton and Gene Krupa) in 1936, and the Sextet (including Norvo and Louis Bellson) in 1947.

But it’s just one Warren song that jazzmen fell in love with; the long lines and irresistible hooks of his melodies proved perfect fodder for their improvs. Check out the CD "Jazz Giants Play Harry Warren: Lullaby of Broadway," with renditions from the Harry Hall of Fame by Count Basie, Sonny Rollins, Art Tatum, Art Pepper, Zoot Sims, Chet Baker, Lester Young, Leroy Vinegar and others. (Missing from this collection: the Thelonious Monk version of "Lulu’s Back in Town.")

Another uptempo Warren tune, "Keep Young and Beautiful," was chosen by Annie Lennox as the last song on "Diva," her first solo album of otherwise original material. First performed (in blackface) by Eddie Cantor in the 1933 "Roman Scandals," this is a silly ditty of gender condescension; the second line of Dubin’s lyric, "It’s your duty to be beautiful," not only establishes the mock-stern tone of the piece but also contains a nifty triple internal rhyme. It happens that "Nagasaki" came out the year before the stock market crash, while "Keep Young and Beautiful" appeared in the slough of the Depression. The first song can thus be seen as an exponent of a happy time, the other as an exhortation to America to forget it’s troubles, c’mon, get silly.

Gone are my blues,
And gone are my tears.
I’ve got good news
To shout in your ears...
We’re in the money, we’re in the money,
We’ve got a lot of what it takes to get along!
We’re in the money, the skies are sunny,
Old man Depression, you are through, you done us wrong!
We never see a headline ’bout a bread line today;
And when we see the landlord,
We can look that guy right in the eye.
We’re in the money, come on, my honey,
Let’s spend it, lend it, send it rolling along!

— "The Gold Diggers’ Song (We’re in the Money)," music by Harry Warren, lyric by Al Dubin, 1933

Warren and Dubin were a smash team from the moment they were paired at Warners in 1932. In just the first three years of their collaboration, they wrote "You’re Getting to Be a Habit With Me," "Shuffle Off to Buffalo," "42nd Street," "Shadow Waltz," "We’re in the Money," "Pettin’ in the Park," "Remember My Forgotten Man," "I’ve Got to Sing a Torch Song," "Build a Little Home," "Keep Young and Beautiful," "Honeymoon Hotel," "Shanghai Lil," "The Boulevard of Broken Dreams," "I’ll String Along With You," "Dames," "I Only Have Eyes for You," "Lullaby of Broadway," "Go into Your Dance," "About a Quarter to Nine," "She’s a Latin from Manhattan," "Lulu’s Back in Town" and "September in the Rain." Depending on your age, the preceding list should have you either drowsing ("Don’t know any of them") or drooling ("What wonderful songs — and Warren wrote all of them?").

Together these songs could fill a time capsule to bursting with melodies that come as close as any man’s to summing up an era’s deprivation and furtive joys. The Warner-Warren musicals are remembered as escapist, but they weren’t about escaping the Depression; they were about emerging triumphant from it. The Warren musicals, most of them set in a real or remembered New York, paint hope and despair not so much in the lavish sets of Berkeley’s production numbers as in the plaintive or bouncy strains of Warren’s melodies.

In these bustling shows — as in the current revival of "42nd Street" — the casts of hundreds give hope all by themselves; they are Hollywood’s and Broadway’s own WPA. They said to Depression America, as they do to New York after September 11th, that you’ve got to get to work, keep working and protect the jobs of those working with you.

That is the point of Warner Baxter’s fevered speech to Ruby Keeler in "42nd Street," just before she goes on stage to replace the crippled star: "Sawyer, you listen to me and you listen hard. Two hundred people, 200 jobs, 200 thousand dollars, five weeks of grind and blood and sweat depend upon you. It’s the lives of all these people who’ve worked with you. You’ve got to go on and you’ve got to give and give and give... You can’t fall down, you can’t. Because your future’s in it, my future, and everything all of us have is staked on you... Sawyer, you’re going out a youngster, but you’ve got to come back a star." The message is not "the show must go on" but a simpler, starker one: "People have to eat."

And people have to be reminded of those who can’t get enough to eat. In "Gold Diggers of 1933," when producer Ned Sparks hears that Dick Powell has a song about a "forgotten man," he has a showbiz epiphany: "That’s it! That’s what this show’s about — the Depression! Men marching, marching in the rain! Doughnuts and krullers! Men marching, marching! And in the background, Carol (Joan Blondell), the Spirit of the Depression... this gorgeous woman singing this song that’ll tear their hearts out! The Big Parade! The Big Parade of Tears!"

That was the cue for Warren to write a bluesy, minor-key march that Berkeley could expand into a gigantic military dirge, three arched tiers filled with the army of the dispossessed. And what did audiences take home with them? Not that the 25% of unemployed men were forgotten, but that someone, far away in Hollywood, remembered them.

Beyond the enduring melodic verve or rapture, the Warren song catalog had a salutary social effect. It yanked audiences out of the Depression — and, more important, their depression. It gave them something to laugh at, mull over, sing about. A decade later, Warren songs provided the underscoring for America’s biggest war. His love songs nursed lonely soldiers, and the girls they left back home, through their greatest challenges. (Warren also deserves a medal for some of his lesser-known songwriting: the U.S. Naval Academy adopted his "Don’t Give Up the Ship" as its official song; the U.S. Marine Corps chose his "Song of the Marines" as its anthem.) If men on the dole or soldiers abroad found a song to lift their heavy hearts, it might well have been Warren’s.

Today we hear so many oldies as the tattoo, or the balm, for our anxieties and aspirations. That may be because the current crop of songwriters has dwelled too long in accusation, rant, self-pity. It’s sad that we don’t have a young Harry Warren to sum up, in bounteous melody, some of our complex or contradictory feelings. The happy news is, we still have the old one.

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