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Overview and Commentary:
Saul Chaplin (This section is currently in preparation)
Chaplin, a songwriter, pianist, vocal arranger, music director and producer, has worked on such movie musicals as The Jolson Story, An American in Paris, West Side Story and The Sound of Music. He started out in Hollywood in 1940 with songwriting partner, Sammy Cahn whom he had met while playing piano in an orchestra in which Cahn played violin. While in Hollywood he also collaborated on songs with Johnny Mercer and other lyricists. He went on to Columbia Pictures and MGM, and ultimately became involved, in various capacities, both creative and administrative, with dozens of movies. In his autobiography (See below.) he has harsh words for Harry Cohn, the imperious head of Columbia, and Al Jolson, whom he found abusive to everyone, but Chaplin maintained fond reminiscences of Frank Sinatra, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Leonard Bernstein, Julie Andrews, Oscar Levant and Cole Porter. (partially adapted from Publishers Weekly review of The Golden Age of Movie Musicals and Me.)
Max Wilk. They're Playing Our Song: Conversations with America's Classic Songwriters. New York and Stratford, CT: Easton Studio Press, 2008. (originally published 1973 as They're Playing Our Song: From Jerome Kern to Stephen Sondheim—The Stories behind the Words and Music of Two Generations)--chapter on Saul Chaplin, "Oh, How We Danced," pp. 275-287, soft-cover edition.
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Cafe Songbook
Master List of Great American Songbook Songwriters
Names of songwriters who have written at least one song included in the Cafe Songbook Catalog of The Great American Songbook are listed below.
Names of songwriters with two or more song credits in the catalog (with rare exceptions) are linked to their own Cafe Songbook pages, e.g. Fields, Dorothy.
Names of songwriters with only one song credit in the catalog are linked to the Cafe Songbook page for that song, on which may be found information about the songwriter or a link to an information source for him or her.
Please note: Cafe Songbook pages for songwriters are currently in various stages of development.
(books by and about, recordings, videos, etc.)
, University of Oklahoma Press, 1994.
. New York: Schirmer Books, 1997 (multiple references).