45 Facts About Jerome Kern

Jerome David Kern was an American composer of musical theatre and popular music.

Jerome Kern collaborated with many of the leading librettists and lyricists of his era, including George Grossmith Jr.

Many of Jerome Kern's songs have been adapted by jazz musicians to become standard tunes.

Jerome Kern was born in New York City, on Sutton Place, in what was then the city's brewery district.

Jerome Kern's parents were Henry Kern, a Jewish German immigrant, and Fannie Kern nee Kakeles, who was an American Jew of Bohemian parentage.

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Jerome Kern grew up on East 56th Street in Manhattan, where he attended public schools.

Jerome Kern showed an early aptitude for music and was taught to play the piano and organ by his mother, a professional player and teacher.

Jerome Kern wrote songs for the school's first musical, a minstrel show, in 1901, and for an amateur musical adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin put on at the Newark Yacht Club in January 1902.

Jerome Kern left high school before graduation in the spring of his senior year in 1902.

Jerome Kern failed miserably in one of his earliest tasks: he was supposed to purchase two pianos for the store, but instead he ordered 200.

Jerome Kern's father relented, and later in 1902, Kern became a student at the New York College of Music, studying the piano under Alexander Lambert and Paolo Gallico, and harmony under Dr Austin Pierce.

Jerome Kern's first published composition, a piano piece, At the Casino, appeared in the same year.

Jerome Kern began to provide these additions in 1904 to British scores for An English Daisy, by Seymour Hicks and Walter Slaughter, and Mr Wix of Wickham, for which he wrote most of the songs.

Jerome Kern contributed to the New York production of The Catch of the Season, The Little Cherub and The Orchid, among other shows.

In 1909 during one of his stays in England, Jerome Kern took a boat trip on the River Thames with some friends, and when the boat stopped at Walton-on-Thames, they went to an inn called the Swan for a drink.

Jerome Kern was much taken with the proprietor's daughter, Eva Leale, who was working behind the bar.

Jerome Kern wooed her, and they were married at the Anglican church of St Mary's in Walton on October 25,1910.

Jerome Kern is believed to have composed music for silent films as early as 1912, but the earliest documented film music which he is known to have written was for a twenty-part serial, Gloria's Romance in 1916.

Jerome Kern contributed two songs to To-Night's the Night, another Rubens musical.

The best known of Jerome Kern's songs from this period is probably "They Didn't Believe Me", which was a hit in the New York version of the Paul Rubens and Sidney Jones musical, The Girl from Utah, for which Jerome Kern wrote five songs.

Jerome Kern was able to use elements of American styles, such as ragtime, as well as syncopation, in his lively dance tunes.

In May 1915, Jerome Kern was due to sail with Charles Frohman from New York to London on board the RMS Lusitania, but Jerome Kern missed the boat, having overslept after staying up late playing poker.

Jerome Kern's exquisitely flowing melodies were employed to further the action or develop characterization.

Jerome Kern's first show of 1920 was The Night Boat, with book and lyrics by Anne Caldwell, which ran for more than 300 performances in New York and for three seasons on tour.

Later in the same year, Jerome Kern wrote the score for Sally, with a book by Bolton and lyrics by Otto Harbach.

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Jerome Kern had been impressed by Edna Ferber's novel Show Boat and wished to present a musical stage version.

Jerome Kern persuaded Hammerstein to adapt it and Ziegfeld to produce it.

Jerome Kern was pleasantly surprised when the next morning brought ecstatic reviews and long lines at the box office.

In 1941, the conductor Artur Rodzinski wished to commission a symphonic suite from the score, but Jerome Kern considered himself a songwriter and not a symphonist.

Jerome Kern never orchestrated his own scores, leaving that to musical assistants, principally Frank Saddler and Robert Russell Bennett.

In January 1929, at the height of the Jazz Age, and with Show Boat still playing on Broadway, Jerome Kern made news on both sides of the Atlantic for reasons wholly unconnected with music.

Jerome Kern sold at auction, at New York's Anderson Galleries, the collection of English and American literature that he had been building up for more than a decade.

In 1929 Jerome Kern made his first trip to Hollywood to supervise the 1929 film version of Sally, one of the first "all-talking" Technicolor films.

Jerome Kern collaborated with Harbach on the Broadway musical The Cat and the Fiddle, about a composer and an opera singer, featuring the songs "She Didn't Say Yes" and "The Night Was Made for Love".

In 1935, when musical films had become popular , thanks to Busby Berkeley, Jerome Kern returned to Hollywood, where he composed the scores to a dozen more films, although he continued working on Broadway productions.

Jerome Kern songs were used in the Cary Grant film, When You're in Love, and the first Abbott and Costello feature, One Night in the Tropics.

Jerome Kern set it, the only time he set a pre-written lyric, and his only hit song not written as part of a musical.

Jerome Kern collected rare books and enjoyed betting on horses.

Identifiable only by his ASCAP card, Jerome Kern was initially taken to the indigent ward at City Hospital, later being transferred to Doctors Hospital in Manhattan.

Jerome Kern is interred at Ferncliff Cemetery in Westchester County, New York.

Jerome Kern was nominated eight times for an Academy Award, and won twice.

Jerome Kern was not eligible for any Tony Awards, which were not created until 1947.

Elisabeth Welsh was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance in Jerome Kern Goes to Hollywood in 1986, and Show Boat received Tony nominations in both 1983 and 1995, winning for best revival in 1995, and won the Laurence Olivier Award for best revival in 2008.

Jerome Kern was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame posthumously, in 1970.

From 1912 to 1924, the more-experienced Jerome Kern began to work on dramatically concerned shows, including incidental music for plays, and, for the first time since his college show Uncle Tom's Cabin, he wrote musicals as the sole composer.

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