Paul Francis Webster
Paul Francis Webster (born December 20, 1907 in New York , † March 18, 1984 in Beverly Hills , California ) was an American songwriter .
After breaking off his studies in New York, Webster worked on various ships in Asia in the late 1920s. He finally had his first hit success in 1932 with the song Masquerade , which he wrote with John Jacob Loeb . In 1941 he worked for the musical Jump for Joy , in which the Duke Ellington Orchestra also participated. One of the hits was I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good . In 1942 he wrote The Lamplighter's Serenade with Hoagy Carmichael ; They continued their collaboration in 1945 with Baltimore Oriole , Billy-A-Dik , Doctor Lawyer and Indian Chief and with Memphis in June . In 1945 , Webster and Harry Revel were nominated for an Oscar in the category "Best Song (Music Film)" for the song Remember Me to Carolina from the film Minstrel Man .
In the 1950s, Webster wrote the hit Black Coffee with Sonny Burke for Peggy Lee and the Doris Day hit Secret Love (1953) with Sammy Fain for the western comedy Heavy Colts in Tender Hand . In the late 1950s, Webster wrote a number of theme songs for Hollywood films, including songs like Love Is a Many Splendored Thing (1955), April Love (1957), The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (with Sammy Fain, 1957), and Song of Green Mansions with Bronislau Kaper in 1959.
He also wrote for the John Wayne movie Alamo (1960) The Green Leaves of Summer , for the film Tender Is the Night ( Tender Is the Night 1962) the song Tender Is the Night , for Doctor Zhivago movie song Somewhere My Love (1966) with Maurice Jarre and the last great success was the theme song for Spider Man (1967) with Bob Harris .
With a total of sixteen Oscar nominations, he was one of the most successful songwriters in Hollywood . He received the Academy Award for Best Song , as the award is officially called, three times , namely for Secret Love (1953) and Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1956), songs he wrote with Sammy Fain, and for the song The Shadow of Your Smile (1965), the text of which he wrote on Johnny Mandel's Love Theme from The Sandpiper . The latter song also won the Grammy Award for Best Song of 1965. Many of the pieces that Webster wrote are now part of the canon of the Great American Songbook , and many are considered jazz standards . Webster also wrote lyrics for some jazz composers in the narrower sense, the best known of whom was Duke Ellington , whose I Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good) was successful in 1941 with Webster's interpreted text by Ivie Anderson .
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 | Webster, Paul Francis |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American songwriter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | December 20, 1907 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | New York , United States |
| DATE OF DEATH | March 18, 1984 |
| Place of death | Beverly Hills , California , United States |