Harold Arlen wrote the most famous song in American cinema, and he did it with a melodic sensibility shaped on the streets of Buffalo, New York. Born Hyman Arluck on February 15, 1905, in Buffalo, Arlen grew up in a household where music was sacred — literally. His father, Samuel Arluck, was a celebrated cantor at the Pine Street synagogue, serving as the congregation’s music director, and young Hyman sang in his father’s choir before he could read.
A Buffalo Education
Arlen’s mother bought him a piano when he was nine. By twelve, he had taught himself a ragtime piece called “Indianola” that redirected his musical interests from the synagogue to the jazz age. At fifteen, he quit school, formed a series of bands — the Snappy Trio, the Southbound Shufflers, and the Buffalodians — and was performing professionally in Buffalo nightclubs and on Lake Erie steamers. At twenty-one, his first solo piano piece, “Minor Gaff (Blues Fantasy),” was published, though the sheet music misspelled his name as Harold Arluck. He soon changed his surname to Arlen, derived from his mother’s maiden name, Orlin.
Tin Pan Alley and the Cotton Club
Arlen moved to New York City at twenty with dreams of singing and acting, but songwriting claimed him instead. In 1929, lyricist Ted Koehler put words to an Arlen melody, producing “Get Happy” — and a career was launched. Arlen and Koehler became the house songwriting team at Harlem’s Cotton Club, where they created a string of standards: “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” (1931), “I’ve Got the World on a String” (1932), and “Stormy Weather” (1933), the latter becoming one of the most recorded songs in American music.
Over the Rainbow
Arlen’s collaboration with lyricist Yip Harburg produced the song that would define his legacy. “Over the Rainbow,” written for MGM’s 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1940. The melody — which Arlen reportedly conceived while driving on Sunset Boulevard — became synonymous with Judy Garland and with the idea of American longing itself.
In total, Arlen received eight Academy Award nominations for Best Original Song, winning once for “Over the Rainbow”. His other collaborators included Johnny Mercer, with whom he wrote “Blues in the Night,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “That Old Black Magic,” and “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive.” His most prolific period stretched from 1929 through the 1950s, during which he composed hundreds of songs for Broadway, Hollywood, and the Great American Songbook.
Buffalo’s Quiet Giant
Arlen is sometimes overlooked in the pantheon of American songwriters — overshadowed by the more public profiles of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and George Gershwin. But his catalog is as deep as anyone’s, and his Buffalo roots — the cantor’s son who heard jazz in ragtime and blues in hymns — gave American popular music a melodic voice it had never heard before.