Jerome Kern

From Philosopedia

Jerome Kern (27 January 1885 - 11 November 1945]]

According to Dan Barker [[1]], Kern was one of many major musicians who were freethinkers. Following is his description of the popular American composer who wrote hundreds of songs and more than 100 complete scores for shows and films:

Jerome Kern is perhaps most responsible for making the Broadway musical different from anything that had ever come before, breaking entirely from European traditions, creating a style of singable melody that has come be known as “American,” the fount from which 20th-century songwriters drank. The 1927 musical Show Boat (lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein) was ground-breaking in its integration of music and story. Songs such as “Ol’ Man River” (Kern’s favorite), “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man,” as well as “The Way You Look Tonight” (1936 Academy Award, lyrics by Dorothy Fields), “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” “All The Things You Are,” “The Last Time I Saw Paris” (1941 Academy Award, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein), “A Fine Romance,” ”Long Ago (And Far Away),” and dozens more Kern melodies have defined what it means to be a “standard.”

This “inspired” songwriter, the “Father of American Music,” as many referred to him, did not believe in God.

Jerome Kern’s parents were German-Jewish immigrants who had no use for religion. “Their marriage at Temple Emanu-El was the last religious function in either of their lives,” writes biographer Michael Freedland in Jerome Kern: A Biography (Stein and Day, 1981). They gave their son no religious training, and “the Jewish faith, of which he never consciously felt himself a member” was simply social custom. “I don’t let a single day pass without writing something,” he once said, explaining why he worked on the Sabbath and on holidays.

“His religion was his music and his lifestyle - his enjoyment of elegance and his voracious appetite for having a good time,” Freedland writes. His daughter Betty said that her father was “charitable to a fault; a soft touch to everyone.”

Kern’s motto was “Life is to be enjoyed.” This probably saved his life. When he was 30, and recently married to a woman who was from England, they had planned to sail to Great Britain via Liverpool on May 1, 1915, on the S.S. Lusitania. They had heard the warnings that the ship might be attacked by German subs, but few people took much notice. While his wife made preparations for the trip, Jerome had stayed up late the night before, partying with a crowd of theater friends, playing music, and not getting home until early morning. He ended up oversleeping and missing the departure. Six days later the Lusitania was torpedoed, with tremendous loss of life. “Had it not been for Jerome Kern’s notorious love of late nights, he would doubtless have gone down with them - and would scarcely be remembered,” Freedland comments. There is no indication that Kern thanked a deity or found religion after this stroke of good luck.

Instead, he partied more and worked harder. He wrote about 700 songs and more than 100 complete scores for shows and films during his life. He collected rare books as a hobby. In 1929, he sold his entire collection in a famous 5-day auction, covered breathlessly by the press, that netted more than 1.7 million dollars, nine months before the stock market crashed. He was still a lucky nonbeliever.

In 1945, Kern was in New York City to begin consulting on the musical Annie Get Your Gun (concept by lyricist Dorothy Fields, eventually written by Irving Berlin), and after meeting with Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein for story ideas, he was walking down the street. When he reached Park Avenue at 57th Street, just outside the building of the American Bible Society, he collapsed on the sidewalk and never regained consciousness.

Jerome Kern, the nonreligious Founding Father of modern Broadway songs, inspired by human drama, lived and died while working on the music he loved.