As an antidote, I assume, to political insanity (like my shirt and duck hunting posts were today) Buddy emails this timely post:
Oscar Greeley Hammerstein's birthday was a few days ago. The New Yorker wrote nearly 1000 songs in his career. In the "Rogers & Hammerstein" partnership enterprise, he wrote the lyrics while Richard Rogers wrote the melody.
OH's parents were immigrants - father a German Jew, mother a - Scots-English (the son was raised Episcopalian). The father is credited with inventing the 'pie in the face' vaudeville routine.
Oscar pronounced his name not as 'hammer-styne' but in the German 'ohmer-schteen'. He spanned the time of America's great rise, born in Belle-Epoch 1895, and left this earth in in the JFK era, as we began to go the moon, in 1960.
Only in America.
And this clip from the eponymous 1955 film of the wartime Broadway hit (it opened in bloody and depressing 1943, when the Axis was yet rampant, and won a Special Pulitzer in the dark year 1944) depicts a time from the turn of the 19th to 20th century.
So we get a layered helping of entertainment here - the great talent and performance, but also three looks at America, all roughly a half-century apart per each.
Wiki doesn't (but should) mention that the familiar hollywood supporting actors are by-and-large not professional singers. The effect of the common (AKA "not all that technically good") voice seems to "break the fourth wall" and charm the audience plumb silly.
Of course the leads, Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones, are sher-nuff professional singers (Jones makes her debut here, but still you have to call that voice 'professional').
