From Tin Pan Alley to Hollywood

Hail and Farewell, lyric by Mort Green, music by Lew Pollack. From the 1944 musical Seven Days Ashore.

Lew Pollack (1895-1946) was one of that small number of gifted people who enjoyed considerable success both as a composer and as a lyricist. Shortly before his untimely death from a heart attack his "Silver Shadows and Golden Dreams," written for the ice-capade film Lady, Let's Dance, earned him an Oscar nomination for best original song. It lost out to Jimmy Van Heusen's "Swinging on a Star," which Bing Crosby made famous in Going My Way.Throughout the 1920s Pollack's songs consistently made their way to "top 10" status on the charts, earning recordings by a host of well-known musicians.

Pollack first achieved notice for his ragtime-jazz composition "That's a Plenty," which he produced in 1914. The piece was recorded numerous times: by Miff Mole and His (Little) Molers in 1929, later on by Bing Crosby and, in the late 1970s, by the Pointer Sisters. His lyrics to "Charmaine," based on music by Erno Rapee, were the moving force for a tune that was the top-selling silent movie theme song of the 1920s and which was successfully recorded by Guy Lombardo and Mantovani, among others. Among the more than 40 films for which Pollack created songs or scores was Shirley Temple's Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, for which he adapted Raymond Scott's instrumental "Toy Trumpet."

Pollack registered 192 songs with ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers). The library's recently acquired collection is comprised almost entirely of material written between 1940 and the end of Pollack's life. It includes printed or near-print versions of 32 songs, as well as a "serious" jazz composition written in collaboration with Nat Shilkret and Al Sherman. But it also includes more than two dozen of Pollack's autograph manuscript "lead sheets" and the manuscripts of lyrics written by others which appeared with music by Pollack.

The library gratefully acknowledges the research and writing of musicologist Hank Bordowitz, without whose generous cooperation this article could not have been written.