Billy Rose, songwriter: reference sources (web and print); selected songs; recordings, videos; miscellany

Overview and Commentary: Billy Rose (This section currently remains in preparation)

Wilfred Sheed, The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty, New York: Random House, 2007 (paper-bound ED. shown, 2008)

Commentary on Billy Rose almost always refers to his extreme ambition and indeed megalomania with regard to his career as a theater/show business producer and promoter and seldom fails to take either a for or against position with regard to his true contribution to the song lyrics for which he has been given (or taken) credit.

Humorous songs were among his earliest undertakings as a songwriter. During the early Twenties he wrote the lyrics for "Barney Google" and "Does the Spearmint Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight," though as Arnold Shaw suggests these songs were "hardly an index of Billy Rose's talents or scope." On the Lower East Side of Manhattan where he was born (and where his wife for a time, Fanny Brice, also grew up), Rose was everything from a fifty-yard dash champion to the shorthand champion -- in both speed and accuracy -- of New York City.

His motive for becoming a songwriter came from having heard about the money one could make, so after service in WWI, he turned his obsessive attention "to analyzing past hits" with an eye to figuring out how to write one himself. He succeeded in 1920 collaborating with composer Cliff Friend on the novelty song "You Tell Her I Stutter." When listing a string of Rose's successful songwriting credits in the twenties, Shaw writes, "He was associated with [italics ours] a long list of hits," thus suggesting that Rose wascutting in, a common practice among song promoters, publishers and band leaders who felt they deserved credit for a song's success and, therefore, a portion of the royalties, even though they did not actually write any of it.

Two pairs of Rose's songwriting collaborators during the Twenties were both anchored by Harry Warren writing the music. Rose received credit on six songs by Warren and lyricist Mort Dixon ("Cheerful Little Earful," "I Found A Million Dollar Baby" and "Would You Like To Take a Walk") as well as on the first song, "Too Many Kisses" written by Warren and Al Dubin, with whom Warren wrote the greatest number of his Hollywood successes. In both cases, Rose received higher billing for the lyrics over Dixon or Dubin. Tony Thomas in his bookHarry Warren and the Hollywood Musical, quotes Warren on Rose:

Billy was a catalyst and very ambitious . . . . He had some good ideas of his own, but he bought ideas from other writers and possibly appropriated others. He had a compulsion to be rich and famous. That might not be admirable to some people, but you need that kind in show business. They get things going when the rest of us can't (Thomas, p. 16).

Roy Hemming, in his bookThe Melody Lingers On: The Great Songwriters and Their Movie Musicals, confirms Warren's view of Rose. Hemming writes that Warren's success both as a songwriter and song promoter was very limited until 1924 when he teamed up with Rose and Dixon"

The songs [the three of them] wrote together were mostly Warren's and Dixon's, but the ideas and titles were usually Rose's -- and it was Rose's aggressive pushing of them with publishers and other song pluggers that got them heard.

Alec Wilder is less generous with Rose. While discussing "It's Only a Paper Moon" (music, Harold Arlen; words, Yip Harburg and Billy Rose), Wilder says, "It has a very innocent lyric by E. Y. Harburg to which Billy Rose probably contributed the word 'The' and so is listed as the co-lyricist" (Wilder, American Popular Song The Great Innovators, 1900-1950, p. 261, hard-cover Ed.).

Wilfred Sheed at first seems in step with the Wilder view of Rose, but then acknowledges Warren's kinder, gentler and, perhaps, more realistic view of the physically diminutive man with enormous chutzpah:

The nerve-racking Billy Rose . . . took big bows and major money for just supplying the title to Warren's early hit "I Found a Million Dollar Baby (in a Five and Ten Cent Store)." Rose was Widely resented by other writers for just such tricks, but not by Warren, who admired Billy for having precisely what he lacked himself, the gift for promotion. He felt Rose's salesmanship, which would later run to aquacades and live elephants, was worth his cut anytime (Sheed, The House That George Built , p. 202, hard-cover Ed.) .

In his autobiography, Richard Rodgers writes of Billy Rose during the time Rose was producing the Rodgers and Hart scored show, Jumbo that opened on Broadway November 16, 1935. The show reenacted a circus with all of its spectacle. Rodgers writes:

Billy wasn't going to stint on a thing and was getting the best designers, directors and writers available. Jimmy Durante and Paul Whiteman and his band would be in the show, and his agents were scouring Europe for the greatest jugglers, tumblers, clowns, animal acts and trapeze artists they could find. It was, he assured us, going to be the most mammoth attraction of its kind, and appropriately, he was calling it Jumbo . . . . . . . . . . As befitting the super-showman that he was, Billy seldom thought along conventional lines. For his story, he went to Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, the co-authors of The Front Page and Twentieth Century , who had never before written a musical comedy book ( Musical Stages , p. 172, hard-cover Ed.) .

• Great Day!
• I Found a Million Dollar Baby (in a five and ten cent store)
• I Wanna Be Loved
• It's Only a Paper Moon
• I've Got a Feelin' I'm Fallin'
• Me and My Shadow
• More Than You Know
• Without a Song
• Would You Like To Take a Walk?

Research Resources: Billy Rose

• Amazon
• DBOPM (Database Of Popular Music: song list, awards, hit songs, co-writers)
• Discogs.com (songwriting and arranging credits)
• Indiana University Sheet Music Collection (In Harmony): Billy Rose
• Internet Broadway Database (IBDB) (Broadway productions and song credits)
• Internet Movie Database (brief biography, filmography, movie song credits)
• New York Public Library (catalog entries for books, personal papers, recordings, scores, etc.) -- The Theater Division of the New York Public Library is named The Billy Rose Theater Division.
• The New York Times (articles about or related to the songwriter)
• Songwriters Hall of Fame (biography and song list)
• Wikipedia (Billy Rose article)
• ASCAP Biographical Dictionary, New York: American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, Cattell/Bowker, Fourth edition, 1980 (dates, collaborators, shows/movies, songs, etc., entry p. 429)
• Arnold Shaw, The Jazz Age: Popular Music in the 1920s, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987 (multiple and substantial references to Rose).
• Allen Forte, The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era, 1924-1950, Princeton, Princeton Univ. Press, 1995 (multiple brief references to Rose).
• Warren W. Vaché, The Unsung Songwriters: America's Masters of Melody, The Scarecrow Press, 2000 (brief Bio.; entry pp. 416-418).
• David A. Jasen, Tin Pan Alley: An Encyclopedia of the Golden Age of American Song, New York: Routledge, 2003 (entry, pp. 350-351).
• Ken Bloom. The American Songbook, The Singers, The Songwriters and the Songs. New York: Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers, 2005 (multiple references to Rose).
• Philip Furia and Michael Lasser, America's Songs: The Stories Behind the Songs of Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley, New York: Routledge, 2006 (multiple references to Rose).
• Wilfred Sheed, The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty, New York: Random House, 2007 (paperback edition, 2008 -- several references)
• Thomas S. Hischak. The Oxford Companion to the American Musical: Theatre, Film, and Television. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008 (entry, p. 643).
• What's My Line, Billy Rose: joanfontainefan
• "My Romance" Doris Day: reVknOcK3

Notes

• Arnold Shaw, The Jazz Age: Popular Music in the 1920s , New York: Oxford University Press, 1987
• Tony Thomas (with forward by Bing Crosby) Harry Warren and the Hollywood Musical , Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1975
• Roy Hemming, The Melody Lingers On: The Great Songwriters and Their Movie Musicals , New York: Newmarket Press, 1986.
• Alec Wilder, American Popular Song The Great Innovators, 1900-1950 , New York: Oxford University Press, 1972 -- paper-bound Ed. shown
• Billy Rose cutting in : Detractors and Defenders
• Richard Rodgers, Musical Stages: An Autobiography New York: Random House, 1975 (Da Capo paper bound ed., 2002, pictured above).
• Billy Rose's Jumbo (1962 Film Soundtrack)

Cite this page: Billy Rose, songwriter: reference sources (web and print); selected songs; recordings, videos; miscellany, Cafe Songbook, https://greatamericansongbook.net/pages/songwriters/r_sws/rose_billy.html