Vincent Millie Youmans (1898-1946) was a prolific Tin Pan Alley composer. Not a lot of his work is remembered today, but he did write a handful of hardy perennials.
At the level of individual songs, Youmans wrote the music for ‘I Want to Be Happy’ and ‘Tea for Two’. Of his stage musicals, No, No, Nanette (1927) has endured.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer did not use a lot of Youman’s work, but he did compose the beautiful ‘Without a Song’ for The Prodigal. His 1927 Broadway hit Hit the Deck was filmed by MGM in 1955, with many of Youmans’s numbers retained.
Probably the most frequently revived screen musical with Youmans’s music is RKO’s proto-Astaire/Rogers picture Flying Down to Rio (1933).
