Background
Ray Henderson was born Raymond Brost on December 1, 1896 in Buffalo, New York, United States. He was the son of William Brost, a merchant, and Margaret Baker, a piano teacher.
Ray Henderson was born Raymond Brost on December 1, 1896 in Buffalo, New York, United States. He was the son of William Brost, a merchant, and Margaret Baker, a piano teacher.
From his earliest years Henderson was educated to be a musician. His mother gave him piano lessons before he was five.
He attended local schools in Buffalo while studying piano, organ, harmony, counterpoint, and music theory with private tutors (1911-1914). By the time he was eight, he was creating melodies for the piano. He also played the organ and sang in the choir of the Episcopal church in Buffalo.
Brost continued his formal training at the Chicago Conservatory of Music. To support himself while at the conservatory, he played the piano in jazz bands, performed songs at parties, and served as an accompanist for an Irish tenor. He later studied privately with the British composer Benjamin Britten.
The strong rhythms and inventive melodies of jazz ultimately lured Henderson from classical music, and during World War I he made his way to New York's Tin Pan Alley. There he found a job with the Leo Feist music publishing company, playing Feist's songs for vaudeville and cabaret singers.
He soon became a staff pianist and arranger for the Shapiro-Bernstein Company. He also began to compose tunes on his own. In 1920, Henderson adopted the professional name Ray Henderson. Henderson met the lyricist Lew Brown in 1922, and they began to work together. One of their songs, "Georgette, " was used in the Greenwich Village Follies of 1922. During the next three years Henderson collaborated with a number of different lyricists, creating a series of eminently singable and danceable songs that captured the spirit of the post-World War I years. During this period he wrote the music for the sweetly sentimental "That Old Gang of Mine, " with lyrics by Billy Rose and Mort Dixon (1923); "Follow the Swallow, " with Rose and Dixon (1924); the rollicking "Alabamy Bound, " with B. G. ("Buddy") De Sylva and Bud Green (1925), which achieved a million-copy sheet-music sale after Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson took it into their repertoire; the euphonious "I'm Sitting on Top of the World, " with Sam M. Lewis and Joe Young (1925), which was also popularized by Jolson; and "Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue, " with Lewis and Young (1925).
Henderson's big break came when George Gershwin, who had written the music for George White's popular Scandals revues, bowed out in 1924 to focus on his own musical productions. Henderson, chosen as Gershwin's replacement, was teamed with Buddy De Sylva and Lew Brown, and in 1925 the three began what was to become one of the most successful musical collaborations of the 1920s. The trio's first effort, George White's Scandals of 1925, failed to flourish, despite the presence of Helen Morgan in her Broadway debut, but White confidently engaged the team again for the Scandals of 1926, and the result was what the New York World critic Wells Rout called "the master Scandal of the series. " Indeed, the revue, the longest-running Scandals by far, featured one showstopper after another: "Lucky Day, " "The Girl Is You, " and two songs destined to become smash hits, "The Birth of the Blues" and "Black Bottom, " which inspired one of the most famous dance crazes of the flapper age. What made the team of De Sylva, Brown, and Henderson unique, observed the music historian David Ewen, "was the way in which they functioned with a unanimity of thought, feeling, purpose, and style, as if they were a single person. More times than one, De Sylva and Brown crossed the line from words to music to suggest to Henderson ways and means of developing a melody. Just as often, Henderson offered ideas for lyrics and contributed valuable suggestions for individual lines or rhymes. "
Nowhere was the team's affinity with each other and with their era more in evidence than in their first musical comedy, the rousing Good News! , which opened on Broadway on September 6, 1927, and ran for 557 performances. Often called the quintessential college musical, Good News! focuses on a football hero who will not be able to play in a big game unless he passes astronomy and the lovestruck girl who tutors him despite her suspicion that he loves someone else. The spirited score includes "The Varsity Drag, " the title song, and the memorable "The Best Things in Life Are Free. " The De Sylva, Brown, and Henderson songs for George White's Scandals of 1928 have passed into history, but their score for Hold Everything! (1928), a musical comedy that pokes gentle fun at the world of professional boxing, featured the phenomenally popular "You're the Cream in My Coffee, " plus other hits such as "To Know You Is to Love You" and "Too Good to Be True. " Equally successful was Follow Thru (1929), a lighthearted send-up of golf and swank country clubs. The show's musical highlights are the tender "My Lucky Star, " "I Want to Be Bad, " and the audience-pleasing "Button Up Your Overcoat. " With Flying High (1930), the triumvirate turned from sports to another 1920s obsession, air travel.
Bert Lahr, the scene-stealing comedian who played a supporting role in Hold Everything! , starred as an aviator who sets a world record for time in the air because he does not know how to land his plane. Songs include "Without Love, " "Thank Your Father, " "Wasn't It Beautuful?" and "Red Hot Chicago, " in which the Windy City is celebrated as the birthplace of jazz. De Sylva, Brown, and Henderson also collaborated on songs for three early sound motion pictures, The Singing Fool (1928) and Say It with Songs (1929), both starring Al Jolson, and Sunny Side Up (1929). For The Singing Fool, the team responded to Jolson's request for a tear-jerking ballad by concocting the purposely maudlin "Sonny Boy. " To the writers' surprise the song--with its saccharine melody and lyrics like "You're my dearest prize, Sonny boy / Sent out from the skies, Sonny boy"--sold 1. 5 million copies of sheet music and became a best-selling Jolson recording. Sunny Side Up, a Janet Gaynor-Charles Farrell vehicle, charmed critics and audiences with its Cinderella story and lively score, which included the spirited title number, "Aren't We All, " and "If I Had a Talking Picture of You. " The success of their film scores prompted De Sylva, Brown, and Henderson to move to the West Coast in 1930. Within a year, however, the partnership broke up.
De Sylva remained in Hollywood, and Brown and Henderson returned to Broadway, where they collaborated on the 1931 George White's Scandals. The revue fared well on the strength of a talented cast that included Ethel Merman, Rudy Vallee, and Everett Marshall, and a score highlighted by "Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries, " "This Is the Missus, " "My Song, " "The Thrill Is Gone, " and "That's Why Darkies Were Born, " a tribute to the courage of blacks in the face of injustice.
In 1932, Henderson and Brown wrote the score for the Broadway musical Hot-Cha! , a spoof of bullfighting, and the next year they collaborated on the irreverent Strike Me Pink, an old-fashioned musical revue. Neither show did well in the politically charged atmosphere of the Great Depression. In 1934, when Brown departed for Hollywood, Henderson joined forces with a succession of lyricists, including Ted Koehler and Irving Caesar. The Shirley Temple favorite "Animal Crackers in My Soup" was one of the highlights of the Henderson-Koehler-Caesar score for the film Curly Top (1935).
On Broadway, Henderson worked with Koehler on the score of the short-lived Say When (1934) and with Jack Yellen on the 1936 edition of George White's Scandals, which opened on Christmas Day 1935 and ran for only 110 performances. Henderson, Yellen, and Caesar wrote the songs for the motion picture musical George White's Scandals (1943), which was sparked by Alice Faye's memorable rendition of "Oh, You Nasty Man. " Henderson's last theater score, for the 1943 edition of the Ziegfeld Follies, flourished as a nostalgia piece. Yellen wrote the lyrics and Henderson the music for songs such as "Love Songs Are Made in the Night, " "Come Up and Have a Cup of Coffee, " and "Hold That Smile. "
He spent the last two decades of his life in semiretirement in his home in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he died.
The Best Things in Life Are Free, a film depicting the careers of Henderson, De Sylva, and Brown, was released in 1956, with Dan Dailey portraying Henderson. The film, which showcased the team's best-known songs, gave 1950's audiences a taste of the thumping rhythms and devil-may-care spirit that characterized the 1920s and to which Ray Henderson's talents were so well suited.
From 1942 to 1953, Henderson served as a director of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers.
On October 18, 1918, Henderson married Florence Hoffman; they had three children.