Yip Harburg
Isadore Hochberg
BORN: April 8, 1898, New York, NY
DIED: March 5, 1981, Los Angeles, CA
One of the top American pop lyricists of the 1930s and 1940s, E.Y.
"Yip"
Harburg wrote many hits for Broadway and Hollywood with his main
collaborators,
composers Jay Gorney and Harold Arlen, teaming with the latter on the
well-known
songs of The Wizard of Oz. Born in 1898 in N.Y.C., Harburg grew up in
lower
Manhattan and worked on his high school newspaper with Ira Gershwin.
Both
he and Gershwin went on to attend the City College of New York
(C.C.N.Y.),
and it was there that he began writing lyrics. After graduation,
Harburg
worked as a journalist in South America, then returned to New York and
began
an electrical appliance business, which lasted until the stock market
crash
of 1929. It was then that Harburg focused on work as a lyricist and,
through
Gershwin, met his first long-term collaborator, composer Gorney. The
songwriting
duo wrote for film and the stage beginning with Earl Carroll's
Sketchbook
of 1929, and still collaborating as late as the early '60s for the
(unsuccessful)
stage show The Happiest Girl in the World. The biggest hit for the duo
was
"What Wouldn't I Do for That Man" (1929), which was sung by Helen
Morgan
in two different Paramount films that year. Harburg and Gorney were
also
responsible for a defining song of the Depression, "Brother, Can You
Spare
a Dime?" (1932). Through the 1930s, Harburg also worked with composer
Vernon
Duke, with whom he wrote "April in Paris" (1932). Harburg's main
collaborator,
however, was composer Harold Arlen. The duo wrote "It's Only a Paper
Moon"
in 1933 and a year later, wrote hit songs for the stage show (and later
Paramount
film) Life Begins at 8:40 with the help of lyricists Ira Gershwin and
Billy
Rose. Among the popular tunes from this production are "You're a
Builder
Upper" and "Let's Take a Walk Around the Block." Harburg and Arlen
wrote
for many more Broadway and Hollywood productions, but their crowning
achievement
was their work for the 1939 cinema classic The Wizard of Oz, which
included
the Academy Award-winning song "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," as well as
many
other hits. Harburg continued to write songs for Hollywood and Broadway
productions
through the early '70s and over the years, worked with many other
composers,
including Johnny Green, Lewis Gensler, Burton Lane, and Jerome Kern.
Harburg
also wrote English lyrics for many French, German, and Spanish songs;
authored
the book Rhymes for the Irreverent; and is a member of the Songwriters
Hall
of Fame. ~ Joslyn Layne, All Music Guide
According to Burton Lane, Yip liked to work with the music first
(working off a title); something to inspire the lyrics.