A friend of George Gershwin, Vincent Youmans had much in common with his famous friend: they both collaborated with George’s brother Ira, they both wrote pop songs & serious music, & they both, tragically, died young: George at 39 & Vincent at 47. Unlike George, Youmans left behind only a handful of songs that are truly famous: Tea for Two, I Want To Be Happy, Hallelujah, & the jazz standard Sometimes I’m Happy. For decades, a legend circulated that Youmans had left behind a trunk of unpublished songs, all notated in a secret code that only he could decipher. Music historians worked for years to determine if this was true. The trunk was discovered ,& the trunk contained unheard melodies & scores, written in his mysteriously mirrored & intricate Da Vinci-like code.
He came from privilege: Born in 1898 in Manhattan, he was raised on Central Park West. Youmans served in WW1, & while in the Navy, he fell in love with men & musical theater. After the war, he went to work as a song-plugger for the prestigious TB Harms Company, publisher of the Gershwins & Jerome Kern. Before phonographs, people purchased sheet music & sat around the piano at home & sing the hits of the day. It took talented pianists who could put a song over with panache to sell the sheet music songs to music stores. By performing the work of the great Tin Pan Alley songwriters of the day, Youmans grew familiar with the infrastructure of hit songs, & quickly decided he could create his own.
As a composer, he turned to other lyricists, & collaborated with the greatest: Oscar Hammerstein II, Irving Caesar, Leo Robin, Billy Rose, Mack Gordon, Buddy De Sylva & Gus Kahn. With Ira Gershwin, he wrote songs for Two Little Girls In Blue, which became a big Broadway smash in 1921.
The greatest triumph of his life was No, No Nanette. With lyrics by Irving Caesar, it became one of the most successful musicals of all time, with simultaneous productions on Broadway & London during much of the 1920s. It has been revived many times, & has been reinvented several times throughout the years. In the 1940s a version featured the beloved tap dancer- Ruby Keeler, which played on Broadway even longer than the original, & was a huge hit again in the 1970.
Youmans wrote songs for movies, most famously for Flying Down To Rio, with Fred Astaire. But his heart was on Broadway, & unfortunate failures followed, shows which bombed & closed quickly, although the songs he wrote for them were always memorable. In 1932 he took one more chance with a Broadway show- Take A Chance, but it also failed. Disheartened, he retired in 1934, after a career of only 13 years, but worked undercover for years on the songs & scores in his secret trunk. Youmans returned to Broadway in 1943 with a colossal & ambitious extravaganza called The Vincent Youmans’ Ballet Revue, which merged classical & Latin music. A failure of unprecedented proportions, it lost more than $4 million dollars, & this fiasco might have been the reason for the secret songs in his hidden trun , but its failure, along with a drinking problem & a life in the closet helped to bring on his final emotional & physical decline. He died alone & largely forgotten in 1946 of TB.
Tea For Two, his most famous song, is an ideal example of his economic use of short melodic phrases. Irving Caesar has said that the opening section was actually a dummy lyric on which Vincent could write a melody, but it worked so well, they kept it. The song is unusual as a hit, it is written in 2 keys at once:-A flat & C-major, a musical fusion that the Beatles would use 40 later, but which was mostly unheard of in the 1920s. Youman’s modernization of the American pop song inspired the musicologist Alec Wilder to say that Youmans was “one of the innovators of American popular song, & one of the truest believers in the new musical world around him.”
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