Ned Washington

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Ned Washington (born August 15, 1901 in Scranton, Pennsylvania , † December 20, 1976 in Beverly Hills , California ) was an American songwriter . He wrote the lyrics for the jazz standards Stella by Starlight and On Green Dolphin Street . For When You Wish upon a Star for Pinocchio and High Noon (Do Not Forsake Me) , the theme song from High Noon (1952), he won each one Oscar .

Live and act

Ned Washington began his career - like many of his colleagues - in vaudeville , as a musical director, agent and finally as a songwriter. In the late 1920s he came to New York and brought a song ( My Arms Are Open ) in the Revue Earl Carroll's Varieties of 1928 , which he had written with his temporary collaborator Michael H. Cleary . From 1929 he produced a large number of songs for the then expanding film musicals industry ; in the early 1930s, when the boom was ebbing, it focused more on popular songs and Broadway scripts. In 1932 he had his first major success with I Don't Stand a Ghost of a Chance , which was to become a jazz standard in particular through Billie Holiday and on which Victor Young and Bing Crosby participated. The next hit was Got the South in my Soul in 1932 , where he worked alongside Young with Lee Wiley . 1933 followed by the team the song Any Time, Any Place, Anywhere . Then he wrote the classic I'm Getting Sentimental Over You with the composer George Bassman .

Washington went to Hollywood in 1935 and spent the remainder of the career in the film industry. In that year he wrote - together with Bronislau Kaper and Walter Jurmann - the song Cosi Cosa for the Marx Brothers film Scandal in the Opera . At the time, many viewers considered the satirical song to be a real Neapolitan folk song. In 1937, Hoagy Carmichael wrote the song The Nearness of You . In 1940 he wrote When You Wish Upon a Star for the Walt Disney animated film Pinocchio . For the Disney studios he also wrote songs for the animated films Dumbo (1941) and Three Caballeros in Samba Fever (1943). For the song Rio de Janeiro from the film Brazilian Serenade from 1944, Washington was nominated for an Oscar together with the composer Ary Barroso in the category “Best Song” .

To an often interpreted later Jazz Standard Washington and Victor Young's masterpiece was from 1944, Stella by Starlight , they for the movie The mysterious guest had written (The Uninvited). Another jazz classic was the widely played song On Green Dolphin Street , which he wrote with Kaper in 1947 and which Miles Davis later interpreted. He was with Dimitri Tiomkin for the title song of the western classic Twelve Noon ( High Noon , 1952) and the war film Jump up, march, march! ( Take the High Ground , 1953). Washington's last hit was 1965, the theme song for Stanley Kramer's film The Ship of Fools ( Ship of Fools , 1953), which he, together with Ernest Gold wrote.

Washington was nominated for a total of eleven Academy Awards between 1940 and 1962 . He won the Oscar for best movie song for When You Wish Upon a Star (in the cartoon Pinocchio (1940)) and for High Noon (Do Not Forsake Me) at twelve o'clock in 1952.

Ned Washington was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame . The Walt Disney Company posthumously named him a Disney Legend in 2001 .

More well-known songs

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

personal data
SURNAME Washington, Ned
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American and songwriter
DATE OF BIRTH August 15, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Scranton, Pennsylvania
DATE OF DEATH 20th December 1976
Place of death Beverly Hills , California