Cohan ended his shows with these now famous closing remarks: "My mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sisters thanks you, and I thank you."
Sheet music cover page for one of Cohan's most popular songs, "Over There." |
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Whether George M. Cohan was born on July Fourth, as he loved to claim, or on the third as more recent reviewers maintain, there is no doubt that he was a real "Yankee Doodle Dandy," to use a famous phrase from one of his earliest hit songs. "Never was a plant more indigenous to a particular part of the earth than was George M. Cohan to the United States of his day," wrote songwriter Oscar Hammerstein II in a 1957 tribute to Cohan.
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He had made a permanent contribution to American musical theater by bringing a youthful new exuberance to it.
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A legendary figure in American musical theater, Cohan was literally born to show business. His parents were traveling vaudevillians on the small-city circuit; Cohan was carried onstage as an infant in a skit of his father's. "We were all small-town folks, when you get right down to it," Cohan wrote in a 1939 article for THE ROTARIAN magazine. He played the violin in a vaudeville orchestra at age eight; at age nine, he spoke his first lines onstage. He began to write sketches at age eleven and songs at age thirteen; his first published song came at age sixteen. By then he was an old hand, having performed the lead role in "Peck's Bad Boy" from the age of twelve. His family, although successful, left vaudeville in 1900 because of a billing dispute with their manager, fomented by Cohan.
At this point, Cohan, who handled the family's business as well as writing most of its material, was yearning for the bigger stage: Broadway. He wrote a musical comedy, "The Governor's Son" (1901), based on an earlier vaudeville sketch of his, for the family to perform, but it flopped in New York: the family was nervous, and Cohan sprained his ankle in the first scene. Undeterred, the Cohans took the show on the road for a successful run. A second play, "Running for Office," was treated indifferently by New York audiences the following year. Digging in, Cohan formed a business partnership with Sam H. Harris in order to leave more of his own time for writing. By this time, Cohan's stage personality, which, according to the drama critic Brooks Atkinson "could not be ignored," had been developed through years of practice. As Atkinson describes it, "He rolled his eyes and dropped his eyelids with a confidential grimace that seemed to be directed at individual members of the audience; he sang through his nose, carried a jaunty cane, wore his hat on the side of his head, and danced exuberantly. Since he was a short man, he avoided standing near taller people and wore thick heel lifts. ... [H]e was overpoweringly loud and busy. He invented a type of musical show in which everybody talked at the top of his voice, everybody sang full out and danced ferociously." (Critic Arthur Ruhl, in 1910, summarized these qualities of enthusiasm as "childlike cocksureness.")
Photo credits: George M. Cohan (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten collection, [Reproduction number: LC-USZ62-126361 DLC]); "Over There, 1917." (Historic American Sheet Music, "Over There, 1917." Music #1170, Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library)
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