Gifted Humans

Composer Vincent Youmans was born today in 1898, one day after George Gershwin.  Perhaps he wasn't quite in a class with Jerome Kern or Richard Rodgers, but to be fair, his active career was shorter than Gershwin's.  If he'd had a couple more decades, who knows what would have happened..

I'd guess his best-known song is "Tea For Two" from the 1925 Broadway smash No, No, Nanette.  It's the seventh-most recorded song of the first half of the 20th centruy.  There have been hundreds of covers, from Lawrence Welk to Django Reinhardt to Art Tatum, not to mention Tommy Dorsey's cha cha version.  Then there was the day someone challenged Shostakovich to orchestrate it from memory in under an hour, and this was the result:



He also wrote the music for Flying Down To Rio, the 1933 RKO production that brought Astaire and Rogers together.  If he hadn't come up with "The Carioca," which allowed them their only dance in the film, the world of movie musicals might have been very different.