1.
Album
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Album, is a collection of audio recordings issued as a single item on CD, record, audio tape, or another medium. Albums of recorded music were developed in the early 20th century, first as books of individual 78rpm records, vinyl LPs are still issued, though in the 21st century album sales have mostly focused on compact disc and MP3 formats. The audio cassette was a format used from the late 1970s through to the 1990s alongside vinyl, an album may be recorded in a recording studio, in a concert venue, at home, in the field, or a mix of places. Recording may take a few hours to years to complete, usually in several takes with different parts recorded separately. Recordings that are done in one take without overdubbing are termed live, the majority of studio recordings contain an abundance of editing, sound effects, voice adjustments, etc. With modern recording technology, musicians can be recorded in separate rooms or at times while listening to the other parts using headphones. Album covers and liner notes are used, and sometimes additional information is provided, such as analysis of the recording, historically, the term album was applied to a collection of various items housed in a book format. In musical usage the word was used for collections of pieces of printed music from the early nineteenth century. Later, collections of related 78rpm records were bundled in book-like albums, the LP record, or 33 1⁄3 rpm microgroove vinyl record, is a gramophone record format introduced by Columbia Records in 1948. It was adopted by the industry as a standard format for the album. Apart from relatively minor refinements and the important later addition of stereophonic sound capability, the term album had been carried forward from the early nineteenth century when it had been used for collections of short pieces of music. Later, collections of related 78rpm records were bundled in book-like albums, as part of a trend of shifting sales in the music industry, some commenters have declared that the early 21st century experienced the death of the album. Sometimes shorter albums are referred to as mini-albums or EPs, Albums such as Tubular Bells, Amarok, Hergest Ridge by Mike Oldfield, and Yess Close to the Edge, include fewer than four tracks. There are no rules against artists such as Pinhead Gunpowder referring to their own releases under thirty minutes as albums. These are known as box sets, material is stored on an album in sections termed tracks, normally 11 or 12 tracks. A music track is a song or instrumental recording. The term is associated with popular music where separate tracks are known as album tracks. When vinyl records were the medium for audio recordings a track could be identified visually from the grooves
2.
Columbia Records
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Columbia Records is an American record label owned by Sony Music Entertainment, a subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America, Inc. the United States division of Sony Corporation. It was founded in 1887, evolving from an enterprise named the American Graphophone Company. Columbia is the oldest surviving brand name in the sound business. Columbia Records went on to release records by an array of singers, instrumentalists. It is one of Sony Musics three flagship record labels alongside RCA Records and Epic Records, rather, as above, it was connected to CBS, a broadcasting media company which had purchased the company in 1938, and had been co-founded in 1927 by Columbia Records itself. Though Arista Records was sold to Bertelsmann Music Group, it would become a sister label of Columbia Records through its mutual connection to Sony Music. The Columbia Phonograph Company was founded in 1887 by stenographer, lawyer and New Jersey native Edward Easton and it derived its name from the District of Columbia, where it was headquartered. At first it had a monopoly on sales and service of Edison phonographs and phonograph cylinders in Washington. As was the custom of some of the regional companies, Columbia produced many commercial cylinder recordings of its own. Columbias ties to Edison and the North American Phonograph Company were severed in 1894 with the North American Phonograph Companys breakup, thereafter it sold only records and phonographs of its own manufacture. In 1902, Columbia introduced the XP record, a brown wax record. According to Gracyk, the molded brown waxes may have sold to Sears for distribution. Columbia began selling records and phonographs in addition to the cylinder system in 1901, preceded only by their Toy Graphophone of 1899. For a decade, Columbia competed with both the Edison Phonograph Company cylinders and the Victor Talking Machine Company disc records as one of the top three names in American recorded sound. In order to add prestige to its catalog of artists. The firm also introduced the internal-horn Grafonola to compete with the extremely popular Victrola sold by the rival Victor Talking Machine Company, during this era, Columbia used the famous Magic Notes logo—a pair of sixteenth notes in a circle—both in the United States and overseas. Columbia was split into two companies, one to make records and one to make players, Columbia Phonograph was moved to Connecticut, and Ed Easton went with it. Eventually it was renamed the Dictaphone Corporation, in late 1923, Columbia went into receivership
3.
LP record
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The LP is an analog sound storage medium, a vinyl record format characterized by a speed of 33 1⁄3 rpm, a 12 or 10 inch diameter, and use of the microgroove groove specification. Introduced by Columbia in 1948, it was adopted as a new standard by the entire record industry. Apart from a few relatively minor refinements and the important later addition of stereophonic sound, the new product was a 12- or 10-inch fine-grooved disc made of vinyl and played with a smaller-tipped microgroove stylus at a speed of 33 1⁄3 rpm. Each side of a 12-inch LP could play for more than 20 minutes, although the LP was suited to classical music because of its extended continuous playing time, it also allowed a collection of ten or more pop music recordings to be put on a single disc. The use of the word album persisted for the one-disc LP equivalent, the prototype of the LP was the soundtrack disc used by the Vitaphone motion picture sound system, developed by Western Electric and introduced in 1926. For soundtrack purposes, the less than five minutes of playing time of side of a conventional 12-inch 78 rpm disc was not acceptable. The sound had to play continuously for at least 11 minutes, long enough to accompany a full 1, the disc diameter was increased to 16 inches and the speed was reduced to 33 1⁄3 revolutions per minute. Unlike their smaller LP descendants, they were made with the same large standard groove used by 78s, unlike conventional records, the groove started at the inside of the recorded area near the label and proceeded outward toward the edge. Like 78s, early soundtrack discs were pressed in an abrasive shellac compound, syndicated radio programming was distributed on 78 rpm discs beginning in 1928. The desirability of a longer continuous playing time soon led to the adoption of the Vitaphone soundtrack disc format, 16-inch 33 1⁄3 rpm discs playing about 15 minutes per side were used for most of these electrical transcriptions beginning about 1930. Transcriptions were variously recorded inside out like soundtrack discs or with an outside start, some transcriptions were recorded with a vertically modulated hill and dale groove. This was found to allow deeper bass and also an extension of the frequency response. Neither of these was necessarily an advantage in practice because of the limitations of AM broadcasting. Today we can enjoy the benefits of those higher-fidelity recordings, even if the radio audiences could not. Initially, transcription discs were pressed only in shellac, but by 1932 pressings in RCA Victors vinyl-based Victrolac were appearing, by the late 1930s, vinyl was standard for nearly all kinds of pressed discs except ordinary commercial 78s, which continued to be made of shellac. Use of the LPs microgroove standard began in the late 1950s, the King Biscuit Flower Hour is a late example, as are Westwood Ones The Beatle Years and Doctor Demento programs, which were sent to stations on LP at least through 1992. RCA Victor introduced a version of a long-playing record for home use in September 1931. These Program Transcription discs, as Victor called them, played at 33 1⁄3 rpm and used a somewhat finer and they were to be played with a special Chromium Orange chrome-plated steel needle
4.
Compact disc
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Compact disc is a digital optical disc data storage format released in 1982 and co-developed by Philips and Sony. The format was developed to store and play only sound recordings but was later adapted for storage of data. The first commercially available Audio CD player, the Sony CDP-101, was released October 1982 in Japan, standard CDs have a diameter of 120 millimetres and can hold up to about 80 minutes of uncompressed audio or about 700 MiB of data. The Mini CD has various diameters ranging from 60 to 80 millimetres, they are used for CD singles, storing up to 24 minutes of audio. At the time of the introduction in 1982, a CD could store much more data than a personal computer hard drive. By 2010, hard drives commonly offered as much space as a thousand CDs. In 2004, worldwide sales of audio CDs, CD-ROMs and CD-Rs reached about 30 billion discs, by 2007,200 billion CDs had been sold worldwide. In 2014, revenues from digital music services matched those from physical format sales for the first time. American inventor James T. Russell has been credited with inventing the first system to record information on an optical transparent foil that is lit from behind by a high-power halogen lamp. Russells patent application was first filed in 1966, and he was granted a patent in 1970, following litigation, Sony and Philips licensed Russells patents in the 1980s. The compact disc is an evolution of LaserDisc technology, where a laser beam is used that enables the high information density required for high-quality digital audio signals. Prototypes were developed by Philips and Sony independently in the late 1970s, although originally dismissed by Philips Research management as a trivial pursuit, the CD became the primary focus for Philips as the LaserDisc format struggled. In 1979, Sony and Philips set up a joint task force of engineers to design a new audio disc. After a year of experimentation and discussion, the Red Book CD-DA standard was published in 1980, after their commercial release in 1982, compact discs and their players were extremely popular. Despite costing up to $1,000, over 400,000 CD players were sold in the United States between 1983 and 1984, by 1988 CD sales in the United States surpassed those of vinyl LPs, and by 1992 CD sales surpassed those of prerecorded music cassette tapes. The success of the disc has been credited to the cooperation between Philips and Sony, who came together to agree upon and develop compatible hardware. The unified design of the disc allowed consumers to purchase any disc or player from any company. In 1974, L. However, due to the performance of the analog format
5.
Maurice Ravel
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Joseph Maurice Ravel was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, in the 1920s and 1930s Ravel was internationally regarded as Frances greatest living composer. After leaving the conservatoire Ravel found his own way as a composer, developing a style of great clarity, incorporating elements of baroque, neoclassicism and, in his later works, jazz. He liked to experiment with form, as in his best-known work, Boléro. He made some arrangements of other composers music, of which his 1922 version of Mussorgskys Pictures at an Exhibition is the best known. As a slow and painstaking worker, Ravel composed fewer pieces than many of his contemporaries. Among his works to enter the repertoire are pieces for piano, chamber music, many of his works exist in two versions, a first, piano score and a later orchestration. Some of his music, such as Gaspard de la nuit, is exceptionally difficult to play. Ravel was among the first composers to recognise the potential of recording to bring their music to a wider public, from the 1920s, despite limited technique as a pianist or conductor, he took part in recordings of several of his works, others were made under his supervision. Ravel was born in the Basque town of Ciboure, France and his father, Pierre-Joseph Ravel, was an educated and successful engineer, inventor and manufacturer, born in Versoix near the Franco-Swiss border. His mother, Marie, née Delouart, was Basque but had grown up in Madrid, in 19th-century terms, Joseph had married beneath his status – Marie was illegitimate and barely literate – but the marriage was a happy one. Both Ravels parents were Roman Catholics, Marie was also something of a free-thinker, a trait inherited by her elder son and he was baptised in the Ciboure parish church six days after he was born. The family moved to Paris three months later, and there a younger son, Édouard, was born and he was close to his father, whom he eventually followed into the engineering profession. Maurice was particularly devoted to their mother, her Basque-Spanish heritage was an influence on his life. Among his earliest memories were folk songs she sang to him, the household was not rich, but the family was comfortable, and the two boys had happy childhoods. Ravel senior delighted in taking his sons to factories to see the latest mechanical devices, in later life, Ravel recalled, Throughout my childhood I was sensitive to music. My father, much better educated in art than most amateurs are, knew how to develop my taste. There is no record that Ravel received any formal schooling in his early years
6.
Frankie Carle
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Frankie Carle, born Francis Nunzio Carlone, was an American pianist and bandleader. As a very popular bandleader in the 1940s and 1950s, Carle was nicknamed The Wizard of the Keyboard, Sunrise Serenade was Carles best-known composition, rising to No.1 in the US in 1938 and selling more than one million copies. Carle was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on March 25,1903, in 1916, a teenage Carle began working with his uncles band as well as a number of local bands in the Rhode Island area. Carle started out working with a number of dance bands. In 1934, he played with Mal Hallett and his orchestra, in 1935, he had his own orchestra and was billed in an ad for one night club as Americas Greatest Pianist. He received attention when he joined Horace Heidt and His Musical Knights in 1939 and he later became co-leader of the band. The popularity he attained while with Heidt’s band allowed him to leave the band in 1944 and form his own band, when his daughter, Marjorie Hughes, sang with his band, he did not reveal their relationship until Walter Winchell published it. His band disbanded after 1955 and he performed mainly as a soloist thereafter, from the 1950s until the 1980s, Carle performed as a single artist and maintained a close following of loyal fans. During World War II, he participated in the V-Disc program, 210A which featured his new composition Moonlight Whispers. Sunrise Serenade was released as a V-Disc by the U. S, War Department in July,1944 as No. 230A in a new recording by Frankie Carle and his Orchestra, Carle had early exposure on radio as pianist for The Four Belles singing group in transcribed programs distributed by the World Broadcasting System. In the mid-1940s, Carle and singer Allan Jones starred in the Old Gold Show on CBS radio, Carle also was featured in Pot o Gold, Treasure Chest, and The Chesterfield Supper Club. His major compositions included Sunrise Serenade, Falling Leaves, Roses in the Rain, A Lovers Lullaby, Swing, in 1989, Carle was Inducted into the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame alongside such other greats as Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman. In 1968, he was inducted into the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame, on February 8,1960, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The legendary pianist and educator Joanne Brackeen has credited him with inspiring her early self-studies on the instrument, Carle died of natural causes in Mesa, Arizona, in 2001, a few weeks shy of his 98th birthday. A Roman Catholic, Carle had a Mass of Christian burial at Holy Cross Church in Mesa and he is survived by his daughter, Marjorie Hughes Wahl, granddaughter Susan Zimmerman, grandson Richard Douce, and great-granddaughter Veronica. Ralph Patt, jazz guitarist who toured with Carle Lagumina, Salvatore, new York Times obituary, Frankie Carle,97, Band Leader Who Wrote Sunrise Serenade, by William H. Honan, March 10,2001 Frankie Carle at Solid. Frankie Carle at Space Age Pop Music Frankie Carle at Musicmatch Guide Frankie Carle and his orchestra play in a scene from the film Variety Time
7.
Kurt Weill
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Kurt Julian Weill was a German composer, active from the 1920s in his native country, and in his later years in the United States. He was a composer for the stage who was best known for his fruitful collaborations with Bertolt Brecht. With Brecht, he developed such as his best-known work The Threepenny Opera. Weill held the ideal of writing music that served a useful purpose. He also wrote works for the concert hall. He became a United States citizen on August 27,1943, Weill was born on March 2,1900, the third of four children to Albert Weill and Emma Weill. He grew up in a religious Jewish family in the Sandvorstadt, the Jewish quarter in Dessau, Germany, where his father was a cantor. At the age of twelve, Weill started taking lessons and made his first attempts at writing music. In 1915, Weill started taking lessons with Albert Bing, Kapellmeister at the Herzogliches Hoftheater zu Dessau, who taught him piano, composition, music theory. Weill performed publicly on piano for the first time in 1915, koch, and also attended philosophy lectures by Max Dessoir and Ernst Cassirer. The same year, he wrote his first string quartet, from May to September 1920, Weill spent a couple of months in Leipzig, where his father had become the new director of a Jewish orphanage. Before he returned to Berlin, in September 1920, he composed Sulamith, a fantasy for soprano, female choir. Back in Berlin, Weill had an interview with Ferruccio Busoni in December 1920, after examining some of Weills compositions, Busoni accepted him as one of five master students in composition at the Preußische Akademie der Künste in Berlin. From January 1921 to December 1923, Weill studied music composition with him, during his first year he composed his first symphony, Sinfonie in einem Satz, as well as the lieder Die Bekehrte and two Rilkelieder for voice and piano. To support his family in Leipzig, he worked as a pianist in a Bierkeller tavern. In spring of 1922, Weill joined the November Groups music faction and that year he composed a psalm, a divertimento for orchestra, and Sinfonia Sacra, Fantasia, Passacaglia, and Hymnus for Orchestra. On November 18,1922, his childrens pantomime Die Zaubernacht premiered at the Theater am Kurfürstendamm, out of financial need, Weill taught music theory and composition to private students from 1923 to 1925. Among his students were Claudio Arrau, Maurice Abravanel, Heinz Jolles, in December 1923, Weill finished his studies with Busoni
8.
Richard Rodgers
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Richard Charles Rodgers was an American composer of music for more than 900 songs and for 43 Broadway musicals. He also composed music for films and television and he is best known for his songwriting partnerships with the lyricists Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II. His compositions have had a significant impact on popular music up to the present day and he has also won a Pulitzer Prize, making him one of two people to receive each award. Richard began playing the piano at age six,10, Townsend Harris Hall and DeWitt Clinton High School. Rodgers spent his teenage summers in Camp Wigwam where he composed some of his first songs. Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, and later collaborator Oscar Hammerstein II all attended Columbia University, at Columbia, Rodgers joined the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity. In 1921, Rodgers shifted his studies to the Institute of Musical Art, Rodgers was influenced by composers such as Victor Herbert and Jerome Kern, as well as by the operettas his parents took him to see on Broadway when he was a child. In 1919, Richard met Lorenz Hart, thanks to Phillip Leavitt, Rodgers and Hart struggled for years in the field of musical comedy, writing several amateur shows. They made their debut with the song Any Old Place With You. Their first professional production was the 1920 Poor Little Ritz Girl and their next professional show, The Melody Man, did not premiere until 1924. When he was just out of college Rodgers worked as director for Lew Fields. Among the stars he accompanied were Nora Bayes and Fred Allen, Rodgers was considering quitting show business altogether to sell childrens underwear, when he and Hart finally broke through in 1925. They wrote the songs for a show presented by the prestigious Theatre Guild, called The Garrick Gaieties. Only meant to run one day, the Guild knew they had a success, the shows biggest hit — the song that Rodgers believed made Rodgers and Hart — was Manhattan. The two were now a Broadway songwriting force, throughout the rest of the decade, the duo wrote several hit shows for both Broadway and London, including Dearest Enemy, The Girl Friend, Peggy-Ann, A Connecticut Yankee, and Present Arms. Their 1920s shows produced standards such as Here in My Arms, Mountain Greenery, Blue Room, My Heart Stood Still, with the Depression in full swing during the first half of the 1930s, the team sought greener pastures in Hollywood. Rodgers also wrote a melody for which Hart wrote three consecutive lyrics which either were cut, not recorded or not a hit, the fourth lyric resulted in one of their most famous songs, Blue Moon. In 1935, they returned to Broadway and wrote an almost unbroken string of hit shows that only with Harts death in 1943
9.
Pop music
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Pop music is a genre of popular music that originated in its modern form in the United States and United Kingdom during the mid 1950s. The terms popular music and pop music are used interchangeably, although the former describes all music that is popular. Pop and rock were synonymous terms until the late 1960s, when they were used in opposition from each other. Although pop music is seen as just the singles charts, it is not the sum of all chart music. Pop music is eclectic, and often borrows elements from other such as urban, dance, rock, Latin. Identifying factors include generally short to medium-length songs written in a format, as well as the common use of repeated choruses, melodic tunes. David Hatch and Stephen Millward define pop music as a body of music which is distinguishable from popular, jazz, according to Pete Seeger, pop music is professional music which draws upon both folk music and fine arts music. Although pop music is seen as just the singles charts, it is not the sum of all chart music, the music charts contain songs from a variety of sources, including classical, jazz, rock, and novelty songs. Pop music, as a genre, is seen as existing and developing separately, pop music continuously evolves along with the terms definition. The term pop song was first recorded as being used in 1926, Hatch and Millward indicate that many events in the history of recording in the 1920s can be seen as the birth of the modern pop music industry, including in country, blues and hillbilly music. The Oxford Dictionary of Music states that while pops earlier meaning meant concerts appealing to a wide audience. Since the late 1950s, however, pop has had the meaning of non-classical mus, usually in the form of songs, performed by such artists as the Beatles. Grove Music Online also states that, in the early 1960s pop music competed terminologically with beat music, while in the USA its coverage overlapped with that of rock and roll. From about 1967, the term was used in opposition to the term rock music. Whereas rock aspired to authenticity and an expansion of the possibilities of music, pop was more commercial, ephemeral. It is not driven by any significant ambition except profit and commercial reward, and, in musical terms, it is essentially conservative. It is, provided from on high rather than being made from below, pop is not a do-it-yourself music but is professionally produced and packaged. The beat and the melodies tend to be simple, with limited harmonic accompaniment, the lyrics of modern pop songs typically focus on simple themes – often love and romantic relationships – although there are notable exceptions
10.
Patti Page
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Clara Ann Fowler, known by her professional name Patti Page, was an American singer of traditional pop music. She was the female vocalist and best-selling female artist of the 1950s. She was often introduced as the Singin Rage, Miss Patti Page, New York WNEW disc-jockey William B. Williams introduced her as A Page in my life called Patti. Page signed with Mercury Records in 1947, and became their first successful female artist, in 1950, she had her first million-selling single With My Eyes Wide Open, Im Dreaming, and would eventually have 14 additional million-selling singles between 1950 and 1965. Pages signature song, Tennessee Waltz, was one of the singles of the 20th century. It spent 13 weeks atop the Billboard magazines Best-Sellers List in 1950, Page had three additional No.1 hit singles between 1950 and 1953, All My Love, I Went to Your Wedding, and Doggie in the Window. Unlike most pop singers, Page blended country music styles into many of her most popular songs. As a result of this appeal, many of Pages singles appeared on the Billboard Country Chart. Towards the 1970s, she shifted her career towards music and began having greater success on its charts. The rise of Rock and Roll in the half of the 1950s. In 1997, Patti Page was inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame and she was posthumously honored with the Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award in 2013. Clara Ann Fowler was born on November 8,1927, in Claremore, Oklahoma into a large and her father, B. A. Fowler, worked on the MKT railroad, while her mother, Margaret, and older sisters picked cotton. As she related on television years later, the family went without electricity. She was raised in Foraker, Hardy, Muskogee and Avant, Oklahoma, before attending Daniel Webster High School in Tulsa, Fowler started off her career as a songstress with Al Clauser and his Oklahoma Outlaws at KTUL. Fowler became a singer on a 15-minute radio program on radio station KTUL, Tulsa, Oklahoma. The program was sponsored by the Page Milk Company, on the air, Fowler was dubbed Patti Page, after the Page Milk Company. In 1946, Jack Rael, a player and band manager. Rael heard Page on the radio and liked her voice, Rael asked her to join the band he managed, the Jimmy Joy Band
11.
Peter DeRose
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Peter DeRose was a US Hall of Fame composer of jazz and pop music during the Tin Pan Alley era. DeRose was born in New York City and as a boy exhibited a gift for things musical and he learned to play the piano from an older sister but composing music was a gift that saw him have his first song published at the age of eighteen. In 1923 he met ukulele musician May Singhi Breen performing on radio with a female ukulele group known as the Syncopators. A personal relationship developed and she left the group to join DeRose in a radio show on NBC called the Sweethearts of the Air in which he played piano. The popular show ran for sixteen years during which time the two entertainers were married, the show not only provided them with a good living, but was also a vehicle for the introduction of a number of his compositions. DeRose collaborated with a number of prominent lyricists such as Charles Tobias, Al Stillman, Carl Sigman, the music of Peter DeRose has been recorded by many other artists including John Coltrane, Spike Jones, Art Tatum, Les McCann, and Peggy Lee. In addition to Wagon Wheels, Peter DeRose wrote songs for the Broadway musicals Yes Yes Yvette, the most famous of his songs, Deep Purple, was written in 1934 as a piano composition with lyrics added a few years later by Mitchell Parish. It was a top hit for Larry Clinton & His Orchestra in 1939 and recorded by Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller, Sarah Vaughan. In 1957, it was a No.20 hit record for Billy Ward & the Dominoes then a No.1 hit on the 1963 Billboard charts for Nino Tempo & April Stevens and it would become popular again in 1976 with another duet by Donny and Marie Osmond. In 1932 Peter DeRose wrote religious sheet music with radio star Phillips H. Lord for one of Lords Seth Parker religious music books, DeRose also composed music for the 1941 Ice Capades show and in the late 1940s and early 1950s wrote songs for several Hollywood motion pictures. Peter DeRoses final hit was You Can Do It, written just before his death in New York City in 1953, interred in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, his tombstone is etched with the words Every friend he ever made, he kept. In 1970, Peter DeRose was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame
12.
Sammy Cahn
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Sammy Cahn was an American lyricist, songwriter and musician. He is best known for his lyrics to films and Broadway songs. He and his collaborators had a series of hit recordings with Frank Sinatra during the tenure at Capitol Records. He played the piano and violin and he won the Academy Award four times for his songs, including the popular song Three Coins in the Fountain. Among his most enduring songs is Let It Snow, cowritten with Jule Styne in 1945. Cahn was born Samuel Cohen in the Lower East Side of New York City, the son of Abraham and Elka Reiss Cohen. His sisters, Sadye, Pearl, Florence, and Evelyn and his mother did not approve of Sammy studying it though, feeling that the piano was a womans instrument, so he took violin lessons. After three lessons and following his bar mitzvah, he joined a small band called Pals of Harmony. This new dream of Cahns destroyed any hopes his parents had for him to be a professional man. At age 16, he was watching vaudeville, of which he had been a fan since the age of 10, and he witnessed Jack Osterman singing a ballad Osterman had written. Cahn was inspired and, on his way home from the theater, wrote his first lyric, years later he would say I think a sense of vaudeville is very strong in anything I do, anything I write. They even call it a vaudeville finish, and it comes through in many of my songs, just sing the end of All the Way or Three Coins in the Fountain—Make it mine, make it mine, MAKE IT MINE. If you let people know they should applaud, they will applaud, much of Cahns early work was written in partnership with Saul Chaplin. They first met when Cahn invited Chaplin to audition for him at the Henry Street Settlement, Cahn said, Id learned a few chords on the piano, maybe two, so Id already tried to write a song. Something I called Shake Your Head from Side to Side, billed simply as Cahn and Chaplin, they composed witty special material for Warner Brothers musical short subjects, filmed at Warners Vitaphone studio in Brooklyn, New York. There was an outfit on West 46th Street, Beckman. They were the MCA, the William Morris of the Borscht Belt, I got a room in their offices, and we started writing special material. For anybody whod have us—at whatever price and they did not make much money, but they did work with up-and-comers Milton Berle, Danny Kaye, Phil Silvers, and Bob Hope
