Jerome David Kern (1885-1945) was one of the most important American writers of musical theatre in the first half of the twentieth century. He composed dozens of standards for the Great American Songbook, including ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, ‘The Way You Look Tonight’, ‘A Fine Romance’, ‘Long Ago (and Far Away)’ and ‘They Didn’t Believe Me’.
In his forty-year career, Kern composed many Broadway shows and also worked for Hollywood. His most influential and frequently revived musical was Show Boat, which was first staged in 1927, and was filmed several times, including by MGM.
Like many other songwriters of the time, Kern started out as a rehearsal pianist and song plugger, before contributing his first song to a stage show in 1905. His first full score for Broadway came in 1912. In the 1910s, Kern occasionally wrote scores to accompany silent films, notably for the serial Gloria’s Romance (1916).
Kern worked with many lyricists, but none more successfully than Dorothy Fields, with whom he wrote his finest original film score for Swing Time (1936), which includes ‘Never Gonna Dance’ and ‘Pick Yourself Up’. He also wrote the stage show Roberta (1933) with Fields, which was filmed twice, including by MGM as Lovely to Look At.
MGM’s The Cat and the Fiddle was adapted from a stage show and included Kern music, and the studio made a highly-fictionalized biopic about him, Till the Clouds Roll By, shortly after his death.
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