“Yesterdays” | Stories of Standards

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“Roberta”, a Broadway musical, opened in the New Amsterdam Theater on November 18, 1933 featuring  “Yesterdays” by Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach. The musical, a romantic comedy based on Alice Duer Miller’s novel “Gowns by Roberta”, was a great success, going on for a run of 295 performances. Many of the original performers became better known in Hollywood (including Bob Hope, George Murphy, Fred MacMurray, Fay Templeton and Sidney Greenstreet). The 1935 movie version, also named “Roberta”, starred Irene Dunne and Randolph Scott with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers as a secondary couple with great dancing. In 1946 it was in “Till the Clouds Roll By” and in “Lovely to Look At”, the 1952 remake of “Roberta”JazzStandards.com ranks “Yesterdays” ninth among all jazz standards, the result of being “included most often on currently issued CDs by the greatest number of jazz artists.”

Jerome Kern (1885-1945) created an operetta-form songbook for “Roberta”. In addition to “Yesterdays” he  included “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”, “I’ll Be Hard to Handle” and “Let’s Begin”. Kern had studied first with his mother, then the New York College of Music, then in Heidelberg, Germany. Having begun with Broadway musicals (notably “Show Boat” and “Roberta”) he went on to Hollywood, where he produced songs such as “A Fine Romance” and “The Way You Look Tonight” (both with lyrics by Dorothy Fields). In 1944, on the Philco Hall of Fame, Judy Garland said of him “He has composed hundreds of songs; melodious, poignant, wistful, tender and utterly enchanting. Jerome Kern has brought to the treasury of American Song the wealth of his own great talent, and he’s enriched the American scene for his being part of it.”

Otto Harbach (1873-1963) was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and started writing lyrics when in his mid-thirties. Before that he earned a BA, an MA and a DHL, served as Professor of English at Columbia University and Whitman College, wrote for New York City newspapers and worked in advertising agencies. A charter member of ASCAP, he served as first as director, then vice-president, then president. Devoted to the stage, he was one of few lyricists/librettists who never moved to Hollywood.