Harry Warren
A major example of a typical Hollywood songwriter was the prolific Harry Warren, who was always defined as "a Hollywood movie songwriter." Warren lived from 1893 to 1981, and thus he was born right alongside movies and died about the time the musical genre lost steam. Although he did work on Broadway and Tin Pan Alley, the majority of his composting was done in Hollywood. The job of a Hollywood studio composer involved musical collaboration. Warren worked with more lyricists than any other songwriter: Al Dubin, Johnny Mercer, Mack Gordon, Dorothy Fields, Ira Gershwin, Gus Kahn, Arthur Freed, Ralph Blane, and Leo Robin among them. Warren's career solidified into a steady run of lifetime employment after he teamed with Dubin in 1933 for 42nd Street. Dubin was already an established lyricist, having written such hits as "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" and Painting the Clouds with Sunshine" (both with composer Joe Burke.) (He had also written one of my favorite lyrics for a Sammy Fain song: "Nobody Knows What a Red-Headed Mama Can Do.") Warren and Dubin were well suited to each other, and they were responsible for four hits from 42nd Street: "You're Getting to Be a Habit with Me," "Young and Healthy," "Shuffle Off to Buffalo," and the title song. After 42nd Street, Warren and Dubin were a Warner Bros. team, and Warren took up permanent residence in California despite his dislike of Hollywood. ("It looked like a small town in South Dakota.")
Harry Warren's work defines what movie songs could and should do. In his formative years, he had played drums in a traveling carnival show, where he learned how to write a rat-a-tat rhythm with a staccato sound that worked well for tap-dancing numbers. His music was a film editor's dream because his rhythms could be matched by cutting on the beat, songs like "Chattanooga Choo Choo" or "I Got a Gal in Kalamazoo" (both with lyrics by Mack Gordon). His music didn't sound like the Ruritanian world of crinolines and cavaliers; it evoked images of modern America, with its zing and sass and slang, perfect for movies. Although his music is often described with words such as "melodious" and "harmonious," what he really put forth was a forward-moving line, much like the narrative of a good movie story. Warren's tunes could be set to lyrics that sounded like dialogue coming out of the mouths of real people, and audiences responded to the immediacy generated by his songs. From 1932 to 1957 - over two and half decades - Warren wrote Hollywood musicals, moving from studio to studio: Warners in the 1930s, Fox in the 1940s, MGM in the fifties, and Paramount in his last five years of active work. He wrote over 250 songs in his lifetime, and fifty of them became standards. The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) lists Harry Warren as the seventh-highest ranking originator of American songs in the earnings category. The famous radio show "Your Hit Parade" (which ran from 1935 to 1953 on radio) ranked forty-two of Warren's songs in its top-ten list - Irving Berlin had just thirty-three. And yet Harry Warren is not a well-known name like Berlin, Cole Porter or George Gershwin (He once said, "Even my best friends don't know who I am"). Because he was mostly a studio employee, his music was an assignment. (He was featured in a 1933 Vitaphone short under the grand title Harry Warren, America Foremost Composer. In a brief nine minutes, he was seen performing some of his own compositions, among them "Forty-Second Street" and "You're My Everything." ) His job might need him to write for someone who was not a great singer ... or someone who couldn't sing at all but would need to look believable when lip-syncing in close-up who would be acting the song as part of the plot and characterization at that moment in the film ... or who was a famous star with a persona that had to be served. Movie composing was in service of a system. One of Warner's most successful songs, "You'll Never Know," was specially written for Alice Faye's style and voice, but since it was a World War II release, also for the mood of the audience. However, the film in which it would appear, "Hello, Frisco, Hello", was set in 1908, so Warren had to write music that could be modern, with a wartime sense of loss and yearning, and still seem appropriate to 1908. He had to juggle narrative meaning, star power, time period, and the need to sell sheet music to the audience.
When Warren arrived at Fox, he was assigned the task of writing for Carmen Miranda, who sang in Portuguese. His understanding of rhythm was perfect for Miranda because the construction of her music required a different beat, one from a Brazilian/Portuguese musical tradition. Miranda was fussy about her music and knew what she could do and what would work for her. She had her own backup group (her Bando da Luz, musicians who had accompanied her from Brazil). Warren cooperated with her, accepting her ideas and loving her band. "It was a joy to listen to them," he said. "They had such humor and gusto. They played with such vitality." Warren understood that Miranda, her music, and her band were about having fun; they were visually exciting, energetic, and empathic. His job was not to interfere with that but to accept it - a decision a Hollywood composer had to make to succeed.
Interview with harry at
Jeanine Basinger "The Movie Musical" (2019)
