Something to Sing About America's Great Lyricists

Irving Caesar, the man who wrote the words to such classic songs as "Swanee" and "Tea for Two," died on December 17, 1996, it marked the end of a remarkable era in American song. At 101 years old, Caesar had been the last living member of a group of lyricists who were all born within a year of each other in 1895 or 1896: Ira Gershwin ("Someone to Watch Over Me"), Lorenz Hart ("Isn't It Romantic?"), Yip Harburg ("Over the Rainbow"), Oscar Hammerstein ("Some Enchanted Evening"), Leo Robin ("Thanks for the Memory"), Buddy DeSylva ("Somebody Loves Me"), Howard Dietz ("Dancing in the Dark"), and Andy Razaf ("Ain't Misbehavin'"). These gifted craftsmen wrote the words to most of the songs we call standards, songs that sound as fresh today as when they were written fifty, sixty, even seventy years ago. Heard in contemporary jazz and cabaret performances, Broadway revivals, or on Hollywood sound tracks, these evergreens are the closest thing America has to a living body of classical music. Just to name the titles of some of their songs "April in Paris," "Embraceable You," "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered" raises the inevitable question: "Why don't they write songs like that anymore?" Maybe it's because they don't write songs the same way anymore. Nowadays, performers write the lyrics and music for their own songs, but in what has been called the Golden Age of American Song (from the 1920s to the 1950s), performers performed period. Songs were written exclusively by songwriters, who usually worked in teams a composer and a lyricist. The answer to the perennial question about which came first is that it was usually the music, or at least the musical germ of a song. "I hit on a new tune," George Gershwin once explained with characteristic ease, "and play it for Ira and he hums it all