This Day in Music History

February 15, 1905 – Twin sons were born to Buffalo cantor Samuel Arluck and wife Celia. The larger of the two boys died the next day, while the smaller, four-pound twin lived and was given the name Hyman, that of his dead brother. At age 19, having taken up jazz instead of the Hebraic melodies and Italian operas his father favored, the cantor’s son adopted a new name for his first copyrighted melody: Harold Arlen.

Who would have thought that a hackneyed story like the Al Jolson film The Jazz Singer could echo real life? Yet, no matter what elements of environment, genetics, and ambition could have produced his alchemy of talent, the fact remains that Harold Arlen composed for stage and screen, in a career spanning five decades, more than 400 melodies, many of which have entered the Great American Songbook: “Get Happy,” “Stormy Weather,” “Let’s Fall in Love,” “Lydia the Tattooed Lady” (a particular favorite of one of my friends!), “Come Rain or Come Shine,” and “My Shining Hour.”

To my mind, there are three career-defining Judy Garland musical sequences on screen: “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” from Meet Me in St. Louis; “Over the Rainbow,” from The Wizard of Oz; and “The Man That Got Away,” from A Star is Born. Arlen was at least partly responsible for the last two. Though composed with two different lyricists as collaborators (E.Y. “Yip” Harburg and Ira Gershwin), both songs featured strong undercurrents of yearning and loss—qualities not only innate to Garland but also to Arlen, a decent man trapped in a long, tormented, sometimes dangerous marriage.

Perhaps the most unusual lyricist that Arlen—or, perhaps, any composer—had was Truman Capote. I first became aware of their partnership while attending a 1993 Berkshire Theatre Festival performance of Sweet and Hot, a revue of Arlen songs.

One song in the revue was “A Sleepin' Bee,” from the Broadway musical House of Flowers. It’s doubtful that Arlen’s long and fruitful collaboration with the good-natured Southerner Johnny Mercer could have prepared him for writing with Truman Capote, a man who asked, when the idea of a collaboration was broached, “Who’s Harold Arlen?” (What rock was Truman sleeping under when The Wizard of Oz came out?)

At the best of times, Capote was—what’s the best phrase?—high maintenance. But I could only imagine what it must have been like for Arlen to begin composing songs with a guy stuck in Rome, frantically rewriting Beat the Devil for John Huston, and forced to send lyrics by mail.

A particularly fine profile of Arlen was written by a theater critic for The New Yorker, John Lahr. If the last name sounds familiar, it should—he’s the son of Bert Lahr, who played the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, lending his indelible presence to the songwriter’s tunes of glory.