In 1925, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart had been song-writing partners for six years but only sold one song to be put in a Broadway show, "Any Old Place with You", that was bought by former vaudeville performer, now a producer, Lew Fields. On August 26, 1919, he inserted it into his current musical, A Lonely Romeo, at the Casino Theater. (Inserting new songs into running musicals was a common practice at that period.)
Since then, they had not sold another. They continued writing but were only able to donate songs to a long list of amateur or benefit shows. Rodgers was so discouraged he briefly considered going into a business when they got an offer from the prestigious Theater Guild to contribute all the songs for a two–performance benefit musical review on Sunday, May 17, 1925. Called Garrick Gaieties, it was to raise money for curtains for the Theater Guild's new theater. Given the Theater Guild’s reputation, they accepted. Rodgers also conducted the eleven member orchestra.
Halfway through the matinee's second act, Holloway and Cochran performed the song in front of a plain curtain. It stopped the show. They sang two encores, using all the lyrics they had. Rodgers and Hart knew they had a hit, but there was only one more scheduled performance. They convinced the Guild to present matinees during the next week, before the evening performances of the Guild's current production. When these performances were all standing–room only, Rodgers convinced the Guild to close its current production and replace it with Garrick Gaieties. It ran for 211 performances with both getting $50 a week in royalties and Rodgers an additional $83 a week for conducting. Within a year they had three shows on Broadway simultaneously.[1]
Lyrics and story
The song describes, in several choruses, the simple delights of Manhattan for a young couple in love. The joke is that these "delights" are really some of the worst, or cheapest, sights that New York has to offer; for example, the stifling, humid stench of the subway in summertime is described as "balmy breezes", while the noisy, grating pushcarts on Mott Street are "gently gliding by". A particular Hart delight is the use of New York dialect to rhyme "spoil" with "boy and goil".
In the first stanza, the couple is obviously too poor to afford a honeymoon to the popular summertime destinations of "Niag'ra" or "other places", so they claim to be happy to "save our fares". In the second stanza, they go for a walk down Delancey Street, which was in the 1920s a boisterous commercial strip, part of the working-class Lower East Side. In the third stanza, they plan to go to Greenwich Village, to watch "Modern men itch to be free". In the fourth stanza, it is revealed that the only rural retreat they can afford to go to is "Yonkers", and the only restaurant they can afford is to "starve together in Childs'" – a restaurant chain serving inexpensive meals, popular with middle- and working-class people.[2] In later stanzas, other places they will go to are likewise free – Central Park, "the Bronx Zoo", Coney Island, Brighton Beach, and to view the much-criticized statue of "Civic Virtue".
As times progress, the song's reference to whatever long-running show is popular on Broadway changes with each cover version. The original lyrics reference Abie's Irish Rose, which ran on Broadway from 1922 to 1927. The Ella Fitzgerald rendition from 1956 mentions My Fair Lady, as does Dinah Washington's 1959 recording, while Lee Wiley and Rosemary Clooney reference South Pacific.
In the early and mid-1950s, singer Julius La Rosa became a national celebrity for his exposure on several of the shows hosted by one of the most popular television stars of the era, Arthur Godfrey. On October 19, 1953, La Rosa sang "Manhattan" on one of Godfrey's radio shows. Immediately after he finished, Godfrey fired him on the air, saying, "that was Julie's swan song with us", although the song had nothing to do with the firing. On another CBS radio program, the crime drama Broadway Is My Beat, its closing theme was a version of "Manhattan" played piano-bar style.
For many years during the 1960s and 1970s, radio station WABC (AM) used the notes from the "We'll turn Manhattan" lyric and used it as the basis for their jingles.[5]
The jingles were changed (specifically, the second note) around 1976 so that WABC would no longer be required to pay royalties for use of the melody.[6][7]
Notable recordings
Lee Wiley recorded the song in December 1950 for her album Night in Manhattan[8]
Harry James recorded a version in 1952 on the album Soft Lights, Sweet Trumpet (Columbia CL 6207).[9]
Bing Crosby recorded the song in 1956[10] for use on his radio show and it was subsequently included in the box set The Bing Crosby CBS Radio Recordings (1954-56) issued by Mosaic Records (catalog MD7-245) in 2009.[11]
Tony Martin performed the song in the 1951 film Two Tickets to Broadway
Influence
Stan Freberg uses the line "You'll have Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island too" as the setup for a joke about paying royalties, in "The Sale of Manhattan" on his 1961 album "Stan Freberg Presents The United States of America, Volume 1."
References
^Todd S. Purdum, Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein's Broadway Revolution, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2018, pp. 44–47
