CAHN, SAMMY

CAHN, SAMMY (Samuel Cohen; 1913–1993), U.S. songwriter. The son of Jewish immigrants, Cahn was born on the Lower East Side of New York City. He studied the violin as a child, and in his teens worked as an itinerant fiddler at weddings and bar mitzvahs. With his first songwriting collaborator, Saul Chaplin, he wrote material for vaudeville. They had their first success in 1935 with "Rhythm Is Our Business," written for the bandleader Jimmie Lunceford; it later became his signature song. In 1938 Cahn and Chaplin wrote the English-language lyrics to a song from the 1933 Yiddish musical "I Would if I Could." The result was the enormously popular "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen" (music by Sholom Secunda), which launched the recording career of the Andrews Sisters and became a No. 1 hit. Cahn and Chaplin also wrote "Until the Real Thing Comes Along." In the early 1940s the songwriting team moved to Los Angeles to write songs for Columbia Pictures. After they split, Chaplin became a well-known orchestrator of Hollywood musicals and Cahn began a collaboration with jule styne . Between 1942 and 1951 they wrote songs for 19 films, including Anchors Aweigh (1944) and Romance on the High Seas (1948), which gave Doris Day her first No. 1 recording, "It's Magic." Many of the team's 1940s songs became synonymous with wartime nostalgia: "I'll Walk Alone," "Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry," and "It's Been a Long, Long Time." They achieved a major success on Broadway with the 1947 musical High Button Shoes, whose score included "Papa, Won't You Dance With Me" and "I Still Get Jealous." In 1954, two years before they split, they wrote the title song for the film Three Coins in the Fountain, which won an Oscar and was a hit for Frank Sinatra. Cahn had other collaborators, including Axel Stordahl and Paul Weston, with whom he wrote two of Sinatra's biggest 1940s hits, "Day by Day" and "I Should Care." In 1956 Cahn began a full-time collaboration with Jimmy Van Heusen, and they concentrated on songs for Sinatra, starting with the title song for his film The Tender Trap. The singer recorded 89 Cahn songs, including "Love and Marriage," "All the Way," "High Hopes" (which became the theme of the Presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy), "Call Me Irresponsible," "The Second Time Around" and "My Kind of Town." They also wrote the title songs for four classic Sinatra albums: "Come Fly With Me," "Come Dance With Me," "Only the Lonely," and "September of My Years." Cahn's autobiography, I Should Care, was published in 1974, the year he starred on Broadway in a one-man show about his career. It ran for nine months and Cahn toured with it extensively. Cahn was a prolific lyricist, who was famous for writing special material for nightclub performers and for parodies and adaptations of his own and other people's lyrics. He won four Academy Awards. (Stewart Kampel (2nd ed.)