Today’s musical selection is a two-song medley of gems written by Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers.

I recorded it many years ago with pianist Doug Hammer when I was putting together an hour-long program of songs with lyrics by Larry (Lorenz’s nickname) Hart.

Not only is Doug’s piano accompaniment extremely playful and inventive, Mr. Hart’s lyrics sit on Mr. Rodger’s music so comfortably and eloquently!

I wrote a blog post a while back about Larry Hart which you can read by clicking here.

I won’t repeat what I shared in that post about Mr. Hart’s life — which was a very generous (and at times heart-breakingly sad) one.

Instead I will share a little bit about these two songs.

“You Took Advantage Of Me” was first performed by a very tall guy nicknamed “Buzz” in the 1928 musical PRESENT ARMS.

Busby Berkeley (who had grown up in the world of theater) choreographed a bunch of musicals on Broadway — and then went on to choreograph and direct a bunch of movies in Hollywood.

Wikipedia tells us that on opening night Buzz forgot the lyrics to the second verse of “You Took Advantage of Me.”

Maybe he had been too focused on the choreography for the show?

Apparently he sang scat syllables during the second verse, and the audience thought it was funny, and Larry Hart eventually forgave him…

Deep breath in.

Deep breath out.

WIkipedia also tells us that it was a favorite song of the Prince Of Wales (Edward VIII), who once requested that Morton Downey — a very popular Irish-American tenor — perform it eleven times at a cafe in London.

The somewhat abusive message of the lyrics reminds me of another uptempo Rodgers & Hart uptempo song in which Larry writes “the furtive sigh, the blackened eye, the self-deception that believes the lie… I wish I were in love again.”

Nowadays — in this era of date rape drugs, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and more than one former president of the United States— our songs are much less likely to playfully jest about someone taking advantage of someone else.

Another deep breath in.

And out.

The second song, “I Could Write A Book,” was created for the 1940 musical PAL JOEY.

It was introduced by another dancer, Gene Kelly, who went from performing on Broadway to become a huge success — as a dancer, actor, singer, choreographer and director — in Hollywood.

The rhyming is quintessential Larry Hart, and I love the literate theme of the song.

Larry was very well educated and could speak English and German (and I am guessing Yiddish, too, since his Jewish parents had emigrated from Germany…)

He met future collaborators and friends such as lyricist/librettist/producer Oscar Hammerstein, composer/producer Richard Rodgers, and librettist brother Herbert Fields (along with his younger sister, the lyricist/librettist Dorothy Fields) while he was studying at Columbia University.

And Larry was also (on his mother’s side) the great-grandnephew of Heinrich Heine, whose poetry had been set to music by both Schumann and Schubert.

Perhaps this lineage helped inspire/embolden him to become a lyricist!

He was employed early in his career by the Schubert brothers as a translator of German plays into English.

He went on to co-create 26 Broadway musicals with Richard Rodgers as well as songs for many several Hollywood musicals — although they were much less happy working in the movie business, because they had much less power regarding how (or even if) their songs were used in a particular film.

Some of Larry’s other hit songs with Richard Rodgers include “My Funny Valentine,” “Blue Moon,” “The Lady Is A Tramp,” “Isn’t It Romantic,” “My Romance,” and “Where or When.”

Thank you for reading and listening to another one of my blog posts!

Thank you to the wonderful photographers at Pixabay (and the public domain images at Wikimedia).

And thank you to Doug Hammer for his terrific piano playing and patient engineering/producing chops.

If you like this two-song medley well enough to listen to it again, you are welcome to stream it by clicking here.

You may have read in a previous blog post about how Spotify abruptly changed its payment procedures at the beginning of this year.

They are no longer paying royalties to the owners of any recording which earns fewer than 1000 streams per year.

My recording with Doug of “You Took Advantage of Me/I Could Write A Book” has been streamed 569 times on Spotify since it was released at on October 6, 2023.

So I have five months to (I hope) drum up another 431 streams and reach their 1000-stream payment threshold…

May you continue to read and write and sing and dance — AND engage with our country’s political progress — for many years to come!

And you are always welcome to visit my musical website by clicking here.