12/19/2023 0 Comments Who wrote red swan![]() ![]() ![]() He wrote a melody for the “Pledge of Allegiance” (all proceeds of which he donated to charity) and from an obscure 1929 Austrian song called “Schöner Gigolo,” he created “Just A Gigolo,” a sad story reset in a Parisian café, which became a standard as recorded by a vast range of artists, from Marlene Deitrich to David Lee Roth. Like other great lyricists of his day, Caesar was a clever and crafty guy who could adapt almost anything into a popular song. I had to learn it by ear from a folk singer… I taught it to Al, and it was one of the greatest things he ever did.” “He was a Litvak he talked Litvak Yiddish. “Jolson had no trouble with it,” Caesar remembered. Performed by Shirley Temple in Curly Top, it became her theme song.Īl Jolson also recorded and performed Caesar’s “Oh Donna Clara,” which, although mostly forgotten now, was one of the most famous songs of vaudeville, performed comically in English, Russian and German. Caesar also wrote songs for movies, most famously “Animal Crackers In My Soup,” written in 1935 with Ray Henderson and Ted Koehler. While George went on to work mostly with his brother Ira, Caesar turned to other composers, most notably Vincent Youmans, with whom he wrote both “Tea for Two” and “I Want To Be Happy” for the 1925 hit show No, No Nanette. The song’s success was unparalleled at the time. The lives of all three men-Gershwin, Jolson and Caesar-were never the same. They got “Swanee” it in Demi-tasse, a Broadway revue, but it didn’t receive much attention.īut when Jolson heard Gershwin sing it at a party, he recognized the precise blend of heart and schmaltz he could wring out of it, and he adopted the song as his own. George Gershwin was 20 years old then and making his living as a demonstration pianist, playing the hits in music stores to sell sheet music. He wrote songs then as a lark-both words and music-but when two of them found their way into a 1918 Broadway revue called Hitchy Koo, he recognized songwriting could be a real career, and he headed to Tin Pan Alley. Though words always came easily for him, after a year at City College, he accepted a job as a secretary for Henry Ford’s Peace Ship, which traveled to ports around the globe as a means of sparking pacifist awareness during World War I. His father was a Socialist lawyer who ran a second-hand bookstore, where Caesar absorbed literature and started writing poetry when he was six. He grew up in the Yorktown neighborhood, where the Marx Brothers were neighbors. He was born on the 4th of July in 1895 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, like his friend Irving Berlin, his name was also originally Isadore. ![]()
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