EY Harburg

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EY Harburg , also Edgar "Yip" Harburg (born April 8, 1896 in New York City as Isidore Hochberg , † March 4, 1981 in Los Angeles ) was an American songwriter . He worked with Harold Arlen , Vernon Duke , Ira Gershwin and Jerome Kern and wrote the lyrics of several classics from the Great American Songbook such as " April in Paris " , "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?" And "Over the Rainbow " .

Live and act

The early years in New York

Isidore Hochberg came from a Jewish immigrant family on the Lower East Side of New York City. His nickname was "Yipsel", which was often shortened to "Yip". After taking the name Edgar Harburg, he eventually became known as Edgar "Yip" Harburg.

He attended Townsend Harris High School , where he met his future long-time partner and friend, Ira Gershwin, and wrote his first song lyrics for the school newspaper. After graduating from university, Harburg went to Uruguay for three years to avoid being drafted into military service; as a socialist he was against the participation of the USA in the First World War . After the war he returned to New York, married, had two children and worked as a verse writer for local newspapers. After the flop with the founding of their own company, which went down in the stock market crash in 1929, Ira Gershwin and Yip Harburg began as songwriters. Gershwin led Harburg at Jay Gorney one who for the Broadway - Revue Earl Carroll's Sketchbook worked. The show was successful and Harburg was hired as a songwriter for a number of revues such as B. Americana writing (1932), from his first success "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" Comes; a nursery rhyme Gorney learned in his childhood in Russia. The song became one of the most famous songs during the Great Depression .

An example of his poetry is "Riddle Me This?" (With the music of Lewis Gensler ), a song that was sung in the casino review Ballyhoo of 32 : 

“Love a little, sin a little;
play the game and win a little;
only to lose.
 
Listen to the money jingle;
isn’t it a funny jingle;
ending with blues.”

“Walk a Little Faster” (1932) and the later jazz standard “April in Paris” also belonged to his big hits from the Revue period . By Vernon Duke Harburg 1943 worked for the Broadway revue Ziegfeld Follies , from the classic "What Is There to Say?" Comes from. For the revue Life begins at 8:40 he wrote songs with Ira Gershwin; He wrote the hits "Let's Take a Walk Around the Block" , "You're a Builder Upper" and " Fun to Be Fooled " with Harold Arlen .

Hollywood

After their New York successes, Harburg and Gorney were offered a contract with the Paramount film company in Hollywood ; Harburg worked there with the great composers of the Great American Songbook , such as Harold Arlen ( Last Night When We Were Young ) , Walter Donaldson , Vernon Duke , Johnny Green , Jerome Kern, Jule Styne and Burton Lane .

Another example of Harburg's lyric art is the 1937 song " Down with Love " , which he wrote for the show Hooray for What? wrote: 

“Down with love, flowers and rice and shoes.
Down with love, the root of all midnight blues.
Down with things that give you that well-known pain.
Take that moon and wrap it in cellophane!
 
Down with love, let’s liquidate all its friends:
Moon and June and roses and rainbow’s ends.
Down with songs that moan about night and day.
Down with love, just take it away, away.
 
Away.
Take it away.
Give it back to the birds and bees and the Viennese!
 
Down with eyes, romantic and stupid,
Down with sighs, down with cupid.
Brother, let’s stuff that dove! Down with love!”

In 1939 Arlen and Harburg wrote the songs for the Marx Brothers film The Marx Brothers in the Circus , including "Lydia the Tattooed Lady" , famous for its funny and unusual rhymes, such as: B. 

She has eyes that folks adore so,
And a torso even more so.
 
When her muscles start relaxin',
up the hill comes Andrew Jackson.
 
For two bits she will do a mazurka in jazz,
with a view of Niagara that nobody has.
And on a clear day you can see Alcatraz.

The verse "When she stands her lap gets lit'ler, when she sits, she sits on Hitler" was not used for the recording because it seemed too political for the studio.

The song "Over the Rainbow" from the film The Wizard of Oz (1939), with which the young Judy Garland became world famous, was also created together with Arlen . Harburg also took part in the dialogues in the film. In 1943 the team wrote the songs " Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe " and "Ain't It de Truth" for the film Cabin in the Sky , with which Lena Horne started her career.

Despite his activities in Hollywood, Harburg did not stop writing for Broadway; in the 1940s he worked for a number of musicals such as Bloomer Girl (1944) about the suffragette Amelia Bloomer . It was then that one of his most famous Broadway shows, Finian's Rainbow (1947), with music from Burton Lane, came about . The musical also produced the song "Old Devil Moon" , which Miles Davis and others later made into a jazz standard, as well as "Look to the Rainbow" and "When I'm Not Near the Girl I Love" .

Broadway 1951-1968

During the McCarthy era from 1951 to 1962, Yip Harburg fell victim to the Hollywood blacklist when the film studio bosses banned artists suspected of sympathy for the American Communist Party . Nevertheless, Harburg continued to work for musicals on Broadway, such as Jamaica , again for Lena Horne , from which the songs "I Don't Think I'll End It All Today" , "Push the Button" and "Napoleon" come.

For the Broadway show The Happiest Girl in the World (1961) Harburg took on the motifs of the Lysistra legend by Aristophanes ; the music came from works by Jacques Offenbach . In 1963, after the Hollywood ban was lifted, Arlen and Harburg worked together again for the animated film Gay Purr-ee ; in the same year they wrote - again for Judy Garland - the song "I Could Go on Singing" . Harburg's last Broadway work was Darling of the Day (1968); the music was written by Jule Styne . Thirteen years later, Harburg died in a car accident.

Awards

In 1940, Harburg and Arlen won the Oscar in the Best Original Song category for "Over the Rainbow" from the film The Wizard of Oz . He received further nominations in 1944 together with Arlen for "Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe" from Cabin in the Sky and in 1946 for "More and More" from Can't Help Singing , together with Jerome Kern . Harburg was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972 . In 2005, the US Post issued a commemorative stamp in his honor.

Songs

Broadway revues

  • 1929: Earl Carroll's Sketchbook of 1929 - with Jay Gorney
  • 1930: Garrick Gaieties - co-copywriter
  • 1930: Earl Carroll's Vanities of 1930 - co-copywriter
  • 1930: The Vanderbilt Revue - co-copywriter
  • 1931: Ziegfeld Follies of 1931 - co-copywriter
  • 1931: Shoot the Works - co-composer and lyricist
  • 1932: Ballyhoo of 1932 - Copywriter
  • 1932: Americana copywriter
  • 1932: Walk a Little Faster - Copywriter
  • 1934: Ziegfeld Follies of 1934 - co-copywriter
  • 1934: Life Begins at 8:40 am - co-writer with Ira Gershwin
  • 1936: The Show is On - Texter
  • 1945: Blue Holiday - co-composer and lyricist
  • 1953: At Home With Ethel Waters - Copywriter

Broadway musicals

  • 1937: Hooray For What! - Copywriter
  • 1940: Hold on to Your Hats - Copywriter
  • 1944: Bloomer Girl - lyricist and musical director
  • 1947: Finian's Rainbow - Copywriter
  • 1951: Flahooley - copywriter and script writer
  • 1957: Jamaica - copywriter and script writer
  • 1961: The Happiest Girl in the World
  • 1968: Darling of the Day - Copywriter

Filmography (selection)

  • 1933: Moonlight and Pretzels
  • 1936: The Singing Kid
  • 1936: Golddiggers of 1937
  • 1939: The Wizard of Oz
  • 1939: At the Circus
  • 1939: Music is our world (Babes in Arms)
  • 1941: Babes on Broadway
  • 1942: Ship Ahoy
  • 1943: Cabin in the Sky
  • 1944: The Song of the Golden West (Can't Help Singing)
  • 1944: Broadway Melody 1950 (Ziegfeld Follies)
  • 1962: Gay Purr-ee
  • 1968: The Golden Rainbow (Finian's Rainbow)

Books by Yip Harburg

  • 1965: Rhymes for the Irreverent
  • 1976: At This Point in Rhyme

Web links / sources

literature

  • Ken Bloom: The American Songbook. The Singers, the Songwriters, and the Songs. Foreword by Michael Feinstein . Black Dog & Leventhal, New York City NY 2005, ISBN 1-57912-448-8 .
  • Ernie Harburg: Who Put the Rainbow in the Wizard of Oz? Yip Harburg lyricist. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor MI 1993, ISBN 0-472-10482-9 .

Remarks

  1. ↑ Harburg and Gorney were roaming New York's Central Park when they were approached by a beggar: Buddy, can you spare a dime? ; Harburg exchanged “Buddy” for “Brother” and had the beginning of the song, cf. Bloom, p. 240
  2. ↑ Harburg had never visited Paris and drew his inspiration solely from a brochure from the tourist office
  3. ↑ The music comes from Harold Arlen
  4. ↑ http://www.reelclassics.com/Movies/Philstory/philstory-lydia.htm
personal data
SURNAME Harburg, EY
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Harburg, Edgar Yip; Hochberg, Isidore (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American lyricist
DATE OF BIRTH April 8, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH March 4th 1981
Place of death los Angeles