Mack Gordon

Mack Gordon (born June 21, 1904 in Warsaw , † March 1, 1959 in New York City , New York , USA; born Morris Gittler ) was an American composer and songwriter .

Live and act

Mack Gordon's family immigrated to the United States from Poland when Gordon was a child. At the beginning of his career in the late 1920s he appeared - like many of his colleagues - in vaudeville shows as an actor and singer; in the early 1930s he also started writing lyrics for the shows. During this time he worked with the British pianist Harry Revel .

His first big success was " Time on My Hands " for the show Smiles (1930), which was to become a popular jazz standard . He went to Hollywood with Revel in 1933 to work in the burgeoning film industry for musical films. Her first success in Hollywood was “ Did You Ever See a Dream Walking? ". Gordon worked for the Paramount Studios until 1936 , after which he wrote for 20th Century Fox , mostly for Shirley Temple films. In 1939 the collaboration between Gordon and Revel ended; the copywriter now found a new partner in Harry Warren . They worked together on a number of films, including the revue Sun Valley Serenade (1941) and the musicals Orchestra Wives (1942) and Sweet and Low-Down , in which the Glenn Miller Orchestra starred. The songs Chattanooga Choo Choo (1941), At Last (1941) and I Got a Gal in Kalamazoo (1942) and I'm Making Believe (1944) came from this. His last contribution to a film was in 1956 for Bundle of Joy (with Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds ), on which he worked with Josef Myrow .

The Internet Movie Database lists a total of over 100 films for which Mack Gordon's lyrics were used, for example he wrote for Frank Sinatra , Dean Martin , Etta James , Glen Miller , Barbra Streisand , Christina Aguilera , Mel Tormé , Nat King Cole and many others . He had a long friendship, especially with Sinatra and the Rat Pack . At the end of his life, Gordon was inducted into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame because he was arguably one of the most successful songwriters for the cinema.

Gordon was nominated a total of nine times for an Oscar in the category of best song . He finally won it once, for the song “You'll Never Know” (1943, with Harry Warren).

literature

• Ken Bloom: The American Songbook - The Singers, the Songwriters, and the Songs . Black Dog & Leventhal, New York 2005, ISBN 1-57912-448-8 .

Web links

• Mack Gordon in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Gordon's entry into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame
• Mack Gordon at the Internet Broadway Database