Kern Summary of Early work and Berlin Easter Parade

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In A Walkthrough Shows, Songs and More
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We wanted to pull all of Kern’s Princess Theatre shows into a series of posts in order to show two things: the similarity of the compositions and the nuanced beauty of the songs. The songs reflect Kern’s stage of development and will give us a foundation, from which we can appreciate his more mature works. When we look at Kern’s more mature works, such as Show Boat, Sweet Adeline and Music in the Air, we see some similarity. Of course, we are excluding “Ol’ Man River” because it was a once-in-a-lifetime event, where God spoke directly to Kern. Instead of stone tablets, Kern came away with notes in treble and base clef.

“You Are Love” and “Make Believe” are operetta type songs from Show Boat and are similar to Kern’s songs for Sweet Adeline: “Why Was I Born” and “Don’t Ever Leave Me.” We see the same similarity in “The Song Is You” from Music in the Air.

Put that all in your back pocket as we move back to Irving Berlin. We are a little off our time line because we are going to look at a song he published in August 20, 1917: “Smile and Show Your Dimple.” It was not a big hit; in fact, it wasn’t any kind of a hit. The lyric was awful. In fact, Berlin would have fired the lyricist, except for the unfortunate fact that Irving wrote the music and lyrics.

Let us recite the chorus to you, at least in part:

“Smile and show your dimple;
You’ll find its very simple:
You can think of something comical”
etc.

You see what we mean.

Now, let’s take the same melody and put different lyrics to it. Let’s add some star power and put it in a movie. We would like you to see what a difference it made.

Here is Judy Garland and Fred Astaire.