“Words and Music: Rodgers and Hart”

Abstract Margaret Case Harriman’s two-part New Yorker profile, originally published in 1938, appears here as it was modestly updated in Take Them Up Tenderly, a collection of Harriman’s essays published several months after the death of Hart. Harriman offers the most substantial contemporary introduction to Rodgers and Hart, already “regarded in their profession as musical dramatists rather than as songwriters: Like most writing on Broadway songwriters, then and now, technical discussion is reserved for Hart’s lyrics, including brief explanations of such matters as exterior (male), interior (female) rhymes, and dummy lyrics. Little is said about Rodgers’s music other than a remark about an alleged resemblance between “Here in My Arms” and the African-American spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” Harriman emphasizes Rodgers and Hart’s “belief that a musical comedy should be as well constructed as a straight drama’’ and notes their recently successful integration of songs into stories in On Your Toes and Babes in Arms. Rodgers himself remarked on several occasions in Musical Stages that his concern with, and sensitivity to, dramatic action did not begin with Oklahoma! Harriman also introduces several anecdotes that remain in wide circulation, for example, the story of how “Blue Moon” belatedly evolved into its present title and lyric to take its place among popular song perennials.