Irving Berlin

Although he could play piano in only one key and never learned to read music, or to transcribe it, Irving Berlin wrote some 1,500 songs, dozens of them part of the enduring body of Broadway lore. Irving Berlin was born in czarist Russia in 1888. His family immigrated to America in 1893 and settled in a tenement on New York's Lower East Side. Running away from home at age thirteen, he worked as a busker in the flamboyantly disreputable Bowery bars. He tried his hand on Broadway, was a singing waiter in Chinatown, and was also hired as a song plugger and lyricist for a Tin Pan Alley music publisher. So begins one of the biggest success stories of twentieth-century popular music. Berlin's first writing credit was for the lyrics of the 1907 song "Marie from Sunny Italy." His first landmark hit came in 1911 with the publication of "Alexander's Ragtime Band," and in 1919 Berlin celebrated the formation of his own music publishing firm with "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody." Irrepressible classics that followed include "Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee," "Cheek to Cheek," "This Is the Army, Mr. Jones," and "There's No Business Like Show Business." These and many more were part of his output for Hollywood and Broadway. Among his film credits are three Astaire and Rogers romps - Top Hat, Follow the Fleet, and Carefree - and his Broadway shows include As Thousands Cheer, This Is the Army, Annie Get Your Gun, and Call Me Madam.