Sheet Music to The Bowery, 1892
"The Bowery" is a song from the musical A Trip to Chinatown with music by Percy Gaunt and lyrics by Charles H. Hoyt. The musical toured the country for several years and then opened on Broadway in 1891. [1]
"The Bowery" is a song from the musical A Trip to Chinatown with music by Percy Gaunt and lyrics by Charles H. Hoyt. The musical toured the country for several years and then opened on Broadway in 1891. [1]
The song is written in 3/4 time in a major key. The lyrics describe an incident in New York City and have nothing to do with the plot, a story set in San Francisco. [2] They consist of six verses interspersed with the chorus, which ends with the vow:
The Bowery, the Bowery,
I'll never go there anymore!
Although the Bowery neighbourhood of New York City was where theater life flourished from about 1860 to 1875, by the 1880s it had become a sordid district. [3] The experience of the singer is described in part by the Village Voice: [4]
He's [the singer] buttonholed by a grifter and conned by a shopkeeper before entering "a concert hall," where he starts a row because he thinks "A New Coon in Town" is directed at him. Bye-bye rube: "A man called a bouncer attended to me./I'll never go there any more."
The Bowery [2] Verse 1 |
The producer/playwright/lyricist Charles H. Hoyt (1849–1900) collaborated on at least 11 musicals with conductor/composer Percy Gaunt (1852–1896). [5] Hoyt, who has been called the Father of American Farce, [6] developed a style in his musicals based upon fast action, outrageous situations, witty dialogue, dancing, acrobatics, and singing. The meager plot of A Trip to Chinatown did not remain constant during its long run but varied with changes in novelty acts, songs, characters, and lines. [6] One constant was The Bowery, which had been interpolated initially to shore up the musical's appeal. [7] The strategy proved successful, and The Bowery became a major factor in the show's success. [7] It was introduced on Broadway by comic Harry Conor. [7] A Trip to Chinatown ran for 650 performances and set a Broadway record that stood for 20 years. [6] The Bowery sold more than 1 million copies of sheet music and has remained a familiar song. [8]
Bing Crosby included the song in a medley on his album Join Bing and Sing Along (1959).
Jerome David Kern was an American composer of musical theatre and popular music. One of the most important American theatre composers of the early 20th century, he wrote more than 700 songs, used in over 100 stage works, including such classics as "Ol' Man River", "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man", "A Fine Romance", "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", "The Song Is You", "All the Things You Are", "The Way You Look Tonight" and "Long Ago ". He collaborated with many of the leading librettists and lyricists of his era, including George Grossmith Jr., Guy Bolton, P. G. Wodehouse, Otto Harbach, Oscar Hammerstein II, Dorothy Fields, Johnny Mercer, Ira Gershwin and Yip Harburg.
Lew Brown was a lyricist for popular songs in the United States. During World War I and the Roaring Twenties, he wrote lyrics for several of the top Tin Pan Alley composers, especially Albert Von Tilzer. Brown was one third of a successful songwriting and music publishing team with Buddy DeSylva and Ray Henderson from 1925 until 1931. Brown also wrote or co-wrote many Broadway shows and Hollywood films. Among his most-popular songs are "Button Up Your Overcoat", "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree", "Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries", "That Old Feeling", and "The Birth of the Blues".
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William Alan Finn is an American composer and lyricist. He is best known for his musicals, which include Falsettos, for which he won the 1992 Tony Awards for Best Original Score and Best Book of a Musical, A New Brain (1998), and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (2005).
Gustave Edwards was an American composer, songwriter and film director. He also was a vaudevillian, organised his own theatre companies and was a music publisher.
Charles Strouse is an American composer and lyricist best known for writing the music to such Broadway musicals as Bye Bye Birdie, Applause, and Annie.
Bowery is an anglicization of Bouwerie, the archaic form of the Dutch for "farm", that was used in numerous New Netherland placenames. It most prominently refers to a street in Lower Manhattan, New York City.
This is a selected list of the longest-running musical theatre productions in history divided into two sections. The first section lists all Broadway and West End productions of musicals that have exceeded 2,500 performances, in order of greatest number of performances in either market. The second section lists, in alphabetical order, musicals that have broken historical long run records for musical theatre on Broadway, in the West End or Off-Broadway, since 1866, in alphabetical order.
Edward Kleban was an American musical theatre composer and lyricist. Kleban was born in the Bronx, New York City, in 1939 and graduated from New York's High School of Music & Art and Columbia University, where he attended with future playwright Terrence McNally.
David Joel Zippel is an American musical theatre lyricist, director, and producer.
Charles Hale Hoyt was an American dramatist and playwright. He was married twice, to stage actresses Flora Walsh and Caroline Miskel Hoyt, both of whom died young. The shock of the death of his second wife contributed towards his own behavior and alcohol consumption which culminated in his own death.
A Trip to Chinatown is a musical comedy in three acts by Charles H. Hoyt with music by Percy Gaunt and lyrics by Hoyt. In addition to the Gaunt and Hoyt score, many songs were interpolated into the score at one time or another during the run, as was fashionable for musicals of the era. The story concerns a widow who accidentally maneuvers several young suburban couples into a big city restaurant and brings romance to them and herself, as in Hello, Dolly!
"After the Ball" is a popular song written in 1891 by Charles K. Harris. The song is a classic waltz in 3/4 time. In the song, an uncle tells his niece why he has never married. He saw his sweetheart kissing another man at a ball, and he refused to listen to her explanation. Many years later, after the woman had died, he discovered that the man was her brother.
Michael Elder Rourke, who assumed the pen name Herbert Reynolds in 1913, was an Irish-American lyricist. Reynolds wrote the lyrics to Jerome Kern's first big hit, "They Didn't Believe Me", interpolated into the 1914 American version of The Girl from Utah, produced by Charles Frohman. The show had a successful run of 140 performances at the Knickerbocker Theatre, opening on August 14, 1914. Frohman had hired the young Kern to write five new songs for the score together with Reynolds to strengthen what he felt was a weak first act. Julia Sanderson and Donald Brian starred in the production.
"They Didn't Believe Me" is a song with music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Herbert Reynolds.
Frederick A. Thompson, usually credited as Fred Thompson was an English writer, best known as a librettist for about fifty British and American musical comedies in the first half of the 20th century. Among the writers with whom he collaborated were George Grossmith Jr., P. G. Wodehouse, Guy Bolton and Ira Gershwin. Composers with whom he worked included Lionel Monckton, Ivor Novello and George Gershwin.
Oh, Lady! Lady!! is a musical with music by Jerome Kern, a book by Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse and lyrics by Wodehouse. It was written for the Princess Theatre on Broadway, where it played in 1918 and ran for 219 performances. The story concerns an engaged young man, Bill, whose ex-fiancée arrives unexpectedly on his wedding day. Bill works to convince his old flame that he was not worthy to marry her, but his clumsy efforts do not make him look good to his new fiancée, whose mother already dislikes Bill. A couple of crooks cause further complications.
Leave It to Jane is a musical in two acts, with music by Jerome Kern and book and lyrics by Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse, based on the 1904 play The College Widow, by George Ade. The story concerns the football rivalry between Atwater College and Bingham College, and satirizes college life in a Midwestern U.S. town. A star halfback, Billy, forsakes his father's alma mater, Bingham, to play at Atwater, to be near the seductive Jane, the daughter of Atwater's president.
Miss 1917 is a musical revue with a book by Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse, music by Victor Herbert, Jerome Kern and others, and lyrics by Harry B. Smith, Otto Harbach, Henry Blossom and others. Made up of a string of vignettes, the show features songs from such musicals as The Wizard of Oz, Three Twins, Babes in Toyland, Ziegfeld Follies and The Belle of New York.
Harry Conor was an American comic actor, best known for playing the role of Welland Strong in A Trip to Chinatown.
