Jerome Kern is arguably the Father of the modern musical. How did he achieve this recognition?

Ol’ Man River”, “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man”, “A Fine Romance”, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”, “All the Things You Are” and “The Way You Look Tonight”, these are few of the many scores that Jerome Kern had enthralled the world with. His compositions were unique in their style and were immensely popular with the masses. The songs he created were simple but powerful and appealed to the populace as they spoke about the everyday life of ordinary people. He had to his credit around 700 songs, most of which became the tunes that America had on its lips. He brought alive the Broadway musicals to the audiences and also lend his compositions for many Hollywood films and to the jazz idiom. Kern was amazingly skilled at mixing his music with the essence of the dramatic situations and the lyrics for which he composed. Kern’s melodies highlighted musicals that were moderately simple and ordinary compared with the lavishness of the extravaganzas that were being staged by the larger theatres
Jerome Kern was born on January 27, 1885 in New York to Fanny and Henry Kern, both first generation German Jews. Jerome exhibited a fondness for music from a very early age and hence Fanny Kern encouraged her son to pursue this interest. She made him take piano lessons despite the oppositions from his father. Henry Kern was a merchandiser and wanted the 16 years old Jerome to assist him in his works rather than go into a profession he considered disreputable. The goods he dealt with also included pianos among other items. Jerome’s disinterest showed in the way the tasks undertaken by him suffered. Hence his father had to oblige into letting him follow his passion and study at the New York College of Music. Kern also studied at Heidelberg, Germany at around 1904 for a brief period of time.
Kern was first heard by the music world in 1903 when Lew Fields incorporated two of his numbers into an importation, “An English Daisy”. Kern worked as a song-plugger and an in-house composer for Lyceum Music Publishing Company, a New York publisher, for a salary of meagre $7 a week before London changed the course of his life completely. It was in England that he met Eva Leale whom he married in Walton-on-Thames in 1910.
His first musical comedy in England was “Mr. Wix of Wickham”. Then there was no looking back. At the end of 1915, Kern got together with the producer George Kleine for a movie serial, “Gloria’s Romance”. He provided music for the change of characters and the twists in the plot. The tune that scholars often mention as the pillar that supported the basic character of modern American musical-theatre songs is “They Didn’t Believe Me,” with music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by H. Reynolds. Kern made it big in his early days of career with this song that was interposed into the production “The Girl from Utah” by Charles Frohman, changing the way American musical comedies were written. It had special relevance in the music arena as ballad replaced waltz as the inspiration for popular songs. Kern became the recognized master of a new and innovative kind of theatre music. It was a classy, American-flavoured style copied by almost all the Broadway composers that followed him.
By now Jerome Kern had become a big name with musical theatres. He had composed over sixteen Broadway between and did scores for over nineteen productions from 1915 to 1920. Jerome Kern had attached itself to a small theatre called Princess Theatre where, along with an Englishman Guy Bolton, Kern swept the Broadway theatre audience in a new wave. The shows were applauded for their comprehensiveness, innovations in plots and integrated scores. The initial success graph for Kern was marked with shows like “Nobody Home” (1915) and “Very Good Eddie”. Then a successful collaboration with the British lyricist-librettist P G Woodhouse resulted in immensely popular shows like Oh, Boy! (1917), Leave It To Jane (1917), Oh, Lady! Lady! (1918), and Oh, My Dear! (1918). These shows captivated the audiences with their true to life plots and also gave a realistic portrayal of the American life which was a shift from the otherwise prevalent European writings about the kings and the Gods. Kern had developed a distinctive musical expression, an amalgamation of his German heritage, new English musical theatre styles, and peculiar American characteristics. An especially important influence was “the dancing craze,” a rage for ballroom dancing that exploded across America shortly before World War I. In an interview that Kern gave after the success of “Oh, Boy!” to the Dramatic Mirror, he expressed the view that “musical numbers should carry on the action of the play and should be representative of the personalities of the characters who sing them” and that “song must be suited to the action and mood of the play.” ( http://books.google.co.in/books?id=O7S9d_olrmkC&dq=jerome+kern&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=Z4WhwkffZO&sig=X5QCkyfkNG9ZQmLwclCabR2LaNM&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=3&ct=result#PPP16,M1)
In 1920, Kern soared to new heights with the success of the musical “Sally” which was product of Otto Harbach and his labour. It had to its credit the rising star of the Broadway Marilyn Miller and the hit tune “Look for the Silver Lining.” Oscar Hammerstein played a pivotal role in Kern’s career. They met in 1925 and stayed as friends and collaborators till the last breath of Kern. Along with Otto Harbach they created a heart stealer “Sunny” featuring the song “Who stole my heart away?” The show starred the renowned Marilyn Miller in the title role as she had done for the earlier work of Kern, “Sally.”
Like many studies of American musical theatre, Mark N. Grant’s book, “The Rise and Fall of The Broadway Musical” (2004) argues that the genre found its apotheosis in the mid-twentieth century and that it was all downhill from there. From Kern and Hammerstein’s Show Boat (1927) until the late 1950s, the artists of the form — composers, lyricists, directors, choreographers, designers, and performers — collaborated to create a total artwork that spoke to audiences in musical theatre’s unique conjunction of romance and realism.
Kern and Hammerstein together wrote Show Boat in 1927 which was a novel by Edna Ferber. Musical theatre historian Miles Kreuger has hailed it as, “the greatest single step forward in American musical theatre, enabling composers, lyricists and librettists to introduce more mature subject matter into their shows.”
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_Kern) The show also brought in limelight the late Jules Bledsoe, Negro baritone, for lending his voice to Kern’s masterpiece “Ol’ Man River.” The show became an instant hit because of it’s bizarrely thought provoking plot highlighting the contradictions of racism and miscegenation or the mixing of races. The plot involved a woman who is forbidden from performing on the show boat because she is bi-racial and wife to a white man. It portrayed boldly a sensitive issue at a time when white men refused to acknowledge their own cruelties. The score included few of Kern’s career greats and the well known songs of the time like “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man”, “Make Believe”, “You Are Love”, “Life Upon the Wicked Stage”, “Why Do I Love You”, “Bill”, apart from “Ol’ Man River”. Kern wrote the song “The Last Time I Saw Paris”, which was the first song he had written deliberately outside of a show or screenplay. He called himself a “musical clothier–nothing more or less,” and said: “I write music to both the situations and the lyrics in plays.” (http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0127.html)
Though most musicals produced by Kern have gone under the dust because of lack of proper appreciation, the songs have remained evergreen. Also, “Show Boat”, somehow, continued to be well-remembered and frequently watched. It was a regular with stock productions due to its popularity and had been revived numerous times on Broadway and in London. It came back to its fans in 1932 with Paul Robeson after captivating the London crowd. Mr. Robeson also starred in it in 1936, when it was produced in Hollywood. A 1946 revival incorporated dance compositions into the show, as per the style of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, and so did the 1993 Harold Prince resuscitation. In 1941, Charles Miller integrated quite a number of songs from “Show Boat” into his orchestral work “Scenario for Orchestra: Themes from Show Boat”. In 1951, the musical was again filmed in Technicolor and was a huge box office success.
In the early 1930s Kern had experimented with another style of operetta writing, interlacing Middle‐European and American musical traits. The Cat and the Fiddle (1931), written with Otto Harbach, and Music in the Air (1932), written with Hammerstein, both followed similar styles.
Kern’s journey at Hollywood had also started in 1930 when he signed a contract with Warner Brothers to produce a series of musicals and in this brief voyage, Kern contributed to the industry in a big way. The first fruit the collaboration bore was the production “Men of the Sky” which was released in 1931 but went unnoticed due to the sudden surplus of musicals that had greeted the American viewers with the advent of sound in its films. As a consequence to this rejection by the public, Warner Bros. ended their brief association with Kern and he returned to where he belonged, the stage.
It was only in 1935 that Kern decided to shift once again towards Hollywood as musical films were making a comeback once again. His affair with Broadway never however took a back seat. Kern’s Hollywood career was more successful in its second chapter and was appreciated to a much greater extent by both critics and the public. For the film of Roberta, Dorothy Fields was invited to write the lyrics. The result of this association was “lovely to look at”. Since Hammerstein, Kern’s regular partner, was not enamored by Hollywood, Kern developed a strong liking for Fields as work partner and they gave a slew of great songs together. The partnership’s first, operetta-style film score, for “I Dream Too Much” was received poorly by the audiences. For Swing Time (starring Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire), Kern wrote “The Way You Look Tonight” (with lyrics by Dorothy Fields), which won the Academy Award in 1936 for the best song. The film also included songs like “A Fine Romance”, “Pick Yourself Up”, and “Never Gonna Dance”. A decade after the death of Kern, Fields brought to the world three unused Kern melodies, “April Fooled Me”, “Nice to be Near” and “Introduce Me.”
Returning to Broadway in 1939, Kern aided the production of the show, “Very Warm for May”. While the show failed to attract audiences, the score brought to the world one of the classic Hammerstein-Kern standards, “All the Things You Are”. Kern effortlessly moved his Bach-like theme through five keys in 32 bars.
In 1941, Kern and Hammerstein wrote “The Last Time I Saw Paris”, in homage to city that had gotten occupied by the Germans during the same period. The song also featured in the film Lady Be Good and another Oscar for Kern for the best song. In 1944, Kern along with Ira Gershwin wrote the songs for classic musical film, Cover Girl, starring Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly. It included the timeless song “Long Ago and Far Away”, a dance number more remembered for the use of trick photography in choreography than anything else. That same year Kern also wrote the music for songs in Universal Pictures’ Deanna Durbin musical comedy, “Can’t Help Singing”. In the area of more sombre music, Kern composed Portrait for Orchestra (Mark Twain), which premiered in 1942 by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and Montage for Orchestral Suite for full orchestra and two pianos.
Jerome Kern was honoured by the nation by setting aside a week (December 11-17, 1944) for a Jerome Kern Jubilee which was chaired by Paul Whiteman. Throughout the week, songs composed by Kern were played in every nook and corner of the country.
Kern suffered a heart attack in 1939 and was told by his doctors to concentrate on film scores which was seemingly a less stressful task since Hollywood songwriters were not as deeply involved with the production of films as Broadway songwriters were with the production of stage musicals. Kern was a man of stage and hence despite the stardom he earned at Hollywood, he missed the thrill of the Broadway. His growing restlessness also owed to the fact that there wasn’t much hard work or team work involved for the composers in Cinema apart from doing their own bit. Thus he immediately accepted the proposal from Hammerstein to re-join hands in reviving Show Boat in 1945. He had not worked with Hammerstein for some time. Their last great successes were Sweet Adeline (1929) and Music in the Air (1932).
Sadly, Kern died before the revival was performed. He died of a heart attack on 11 November, 1945 – with Oscar Hammerstein and Eva Leale in attendance at his bedside. Deems Taylor, president of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, said when he was informed of Mr. Kern’s death: “I know that my own sorrow at his passing must be shared by the millions who for many years have derived so much pleasure from his lovely tunes. I think that no composer in his field since Victor Herbert has inspired so much real affection from countless hearers who never saw him face to face.”
( http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0127.html)
At his death, “Till the Clouds Roll By,” a musical biography was put into production by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer with appearances by Judy Garlans, Lena Horne, and Frank Sinatra amongst many others who admired the works of this musical great. It was released in 1946 with Robert Walker playing the role of Kern.
Jerome Kern was nominated 8 times for Academy Awards, and won twice. Many of his works were featured posthumously in various revues, musicals, and concerts on and off Broadway, for example, “Kern Goes to Hollywood” (1986), “Dream” (1997) and more recently, “Jerome Kern: All The Things You Are” (2008).
The centennial of Kern’s birth was celebrated in 1985 and a rediscovered recording of a radio production featuring the original cast received a Grammy Nomination as Best Cast Show Album. “All the Things You Are” has been recorded several times including a 1949 version by trumpeter Maynard Ferguson that enraged Eva Leale for its outrageousness and was withdrawn from sale. A US postage stamp was issued in his honour along with the release of more recordings and performances by him.
Jerome Kern’s style evolved over the span of 40 years of his career showing greater sophistication with each song he composed. Kern’s outstanding musical gifts and his decisive revolutionary styles that contrasted the prevalent idioms earned him recognition as the father of the modern musical. He played a pivotal role in promoting the ballad form, modernizing musical comedy to what we see today, and crafting the modern American operetta or musical play. http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/332831/the_origins_of_modern_broadway_musical.html