Dum dum da da.(Jerome Kern)(Book review)

Stephen Banfield Jerome Kern. Yale University Press, 392 pages, $35

George Dorris notes, "To an astonishing degree, the study of the American musical, like the study of Greek drama and baroque opera, ought to come under the heading of archeology." He points out that, of Sophocles' one hundred plays, we have seven and change. Mutatis mutandis, Jerome Kern (1885-1945) might be the Sophocles of Broadway. He was ferociously productive--one two-year period saw him write eight complete (and produced) shows. In all, he wrote well over 1,000 songs; more than 800 of them once graced the pianos of a grateful nation, but now fewer than 50 are easily available in print. Of his more than forty stage shows, none was ever published with a complete script and score. If you share Bertie Wooster's taste in song, you'll deplore the loss of such shows as Oh, Boy! (1917), Oh, Lady! Lady! (1918), and Toot-toot! (1918). And if your ears have ever been tantalized by "(If Your Heart's On Fire) Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" or "The Way You Look Tonight," "I'm Old Fashioned" or "All The Things You Are," you crave more.

In a very unprominent warehouse in Secaucus one day in 1982, a treasure trove of Warner Bros. scores and documents was unearthed. Gershwin, Herbert, Rodgers, Porter: eighty boxes in all. They also included over 175 unpublished Kern songs. That find has brought to life many new productions and recordings, and made this exemplary addition to the Yale Broadway Masters series possible.

Stephen Banfield is a scholar, a professor of music at the University of Bristol in England, and this is a scholarly book that assumes a baseline of technical and historical musical knowledge. He is not needlessly jargony, but he does use professional shorthand for brief musical examples and specialized but not rebarbative vocabulary (e.g., using "diegetic" to distinguish those moments when the characters on stage hear or perform music themselves). But from introduction to second index, this book is brimming with fabulous fare and includes many musical quotations, all helpful and some of startling transcendence. Here's an odd fact: Paul Robeson, the embodiment of Show Boat's Joe, "sang in Kern's grandfather's synagogue for twenty-five years."

Banfield begins his book with a short biography. Kern had a middle-class Jewish upbringing in Manhattan and Newark, but was not destined to follow his father as a successful merchant. (He once made a mistake in an order for two pianos: "You can't imagine what it looks like for two hundred pianos to come off vans.") Banfield traces Kern's love of polkas back to his German and Bohemian parents. Are there really that many Kern polkas, I wondered? Figure 1.1 had me humming "I've Told Ev'ry Little Star" and "Pick Yourself Up"--and damn if they aren't polkas. Kern's early career pingponged between New York and London; the anglophilia of his work complemented his choice of wife. He met her while he was on a boating jaunt, at her father's pub along the Thames towpath--shades of Jerome K. Jerome here. They had one daughter who grew up to be one of the many wives of Artie Shaw.

Kern knew everyone: He worked with P. G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton (these shows are often called ...