Originally posted in 2013.
What a great day for songwriters! Not only were Louis Alter and Con Conrad, born on this day, but so was Sammy Cahn (Samuel Cohen, 1913-1993), not to be confused with Sammy Cohen and no relation to Gus Kahn.
Cahn came along a little too late for vaudeville, but he did attend constantly as a teenager and learned from it and later said “I think a sense of vaudeville is very strong in anything I do.” He also had some of his earliest songs performed in vaudeville, as when Jack Osterman sang “Like Niagara Falls, I’m Falling For You”. He also wrote special material for Milton Berle, Danny Kaye, Bob Hope and boyhood friend Phil Silvers. Later in life he was especially associated with Frank Sinatra.
Though Cahn had a musical background (he’d played violin in a burlesque pit orchestra and in Dixieland bands that toured the Catskills, and also knew his way around a piano), Cahn would become known as a lyricist who usually worked with musical collaborators such as Saul Chaplin, Jules Styne, and Jimmy Van Heusen. He began to enjoy success in Hollywood in the mid 1930s, starting with original competitions for Vitaphone shorts.
Cahn’s list of songs is too long (and hopefully too well known) to list here, but some of them include the English adaptation of “Bei mir bist du schön” (1937), “Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow” (1945), the songs for the Broadway musical High Button Shoes (1947), “It’s Magic” (1948), the songs for Walt Disney’s Peter Pan (1953), “Three Coins in the Fountain” (1954), “Love and Marriage” (1955, later used for Married with Children), “(Love is the) Tender Trap” (1955), “Come Fly With Me” (1958), “High Hopes” (1959), “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head?” (1960), “My Kind of Town (Chicago Is)” (1964), the theme songs for the Julie Andrews movies Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967) and Star! (1968), and the songs for the 1971 movie Journey Back to Oz.
Cahn was one of the few working within the Tin Pan Alley aesthetic to take it quite far past the advent of the rock era. And Cahn was still crankin’ ’em out long, long after that. In 1974 he wrote his memoir I Should Care: The Sammy Cahn Story, a most entertaining read. His first wife was a Goldwyn Girl; his second was in the fashion industry.
To find out about the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.
(Travalanche) 
Sammy was nothing but hip. I remember catching him being interviewed at the Beverly Hills Hotel, sampling some of the gourmet eats in the kitchen, and name checking Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, and Elvis Costello, along with Sinatra, Dino, and other greats. Costello said in an interview that he met up with Cahn in the early 80’s and Sammy introduced him to a lot of his fellow songwriters who as Costello said, “Would talk about their work at the drop of a hat, and believe me, I listened.”
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