Harry Warren (December 24, 1893 – September 22, 1981) was an American composer and lyricist. Warren was the first major American songwriter to write primarily for film. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song eleven times and won three Oscars. His songs have been featured in over 300 films.
Harry Warren was born Salvatore Antonio Guaragna, to Italian immigrant parents, in Brooklyn, New York ,as the eleventh of twelve children. His father changed the family name to Warren when Harry was a child. Although his parents could not afford music lessons, Warren had an early interest in music and taught himself to play his father's accordion. He also sang in the church choir and learned to play the drums. He began to play the drums professionally by age 14 and dropped out of high school at 16 to play with his godfather's band in a travelling carnival.
Soon he taught himself to play the piano and by 1915, he was working at the Vitagraph Motion Picture Studios, where he did a variety of administrative jobs, such as props man, and also played mood music on the piano for the actors, acted in bit parts and eventually was an assistant director. He also played the piano in cafés and silent-movie houses. In 1918 he joined the U.S. Navy and while in the service, he married Josephine Wensler. After the war, he became a rehearsal pianist and a song plugger.
After serving in the US Navy in World War I, Warren became a rehearsal pianist and a song writer. His first effort, "I Learned to Love You When I Learned My A-B-C’s," one of the rare compositions for which he wrote both music and lyrics, was never published, but it got him a job as staff pianist and song plugger for the music publishing house of Stark and Cowan. Warren’s first published song was "Rose of the Rio Grande," written in 1922 with Edgar Leslie and Ross Gorman.
This began Warren’s collaboration throughout his career with numerous lyricists. Some of his other notable songs from the 1920s are "I Love My Baby (My Baby Loves Me)" and "Where Do You Worka John?" Warren wrote songs for several Broadway shows in the early 1930s, including Crazy Quilt ("I Found a Million Dollar Baby in a Five-and-Ten Cent Store") and The Laugh Parade ("You’re My Everything").
Between 1929 and 1933 he wrote songs for a few minor movies, but made Hollywood his permanent home in 1933 when he was hired to work with Al Dubin on Warner Brothers’ 42nd Street. This movie introduced the songs "Shuffle Off to Buffalo" and "You’re Getting To Be a Habit With Me." During the rest of the decade, Warren wrote some 20 musicals with Dubin, which include the songs "We’re in the Money,""I Only Have Eyes for You," and "Lullaby of Broadway" (his first Oscar winner, from Gold Diggers of 1935).
Warren went to 20th Century Fox in the early 1940s, and teamed with Mack Gordon. Some of their best-known songs are "Chattanooga Choo Choo,""Serenade in Blue,""I Had the Craziest Dream,""There Will Never Be Another You,""You’ll Never Know" (his second Oscar winner, from Hello, Frisco, Hello), and "The More I See You." From 1945-1952, he worked at MGM, and won his third Oscar, in partnership with Johnny Mercer, for "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Sante Fe," from The Harvey Girls.
Other songs Warren wrote during this period are "This Heart of Mine" and "Friendly Star." Warren moved to Paramount in the 1950s, where he wrote his last big pop hit, "That’s Amore." Through the later 1950s, he mainly wrote scores for dramatic movies such as An Affair to Remember and Separate Tables.
He continued to write songs for movies throughout the 1960s and 1970s but never again achieved the fame that he had enjoyed earlier. His last movie score was for Manhattan Melody, in 1980, but the film was never produced. Warren wrote over 800 songs between 1918 and 1981, publishing over 500 of them. They were written mainly for 56 feature films or were used in other films that used Warren's newly written or existing songs. His songs eventually appeared in over 300 films and 112 of Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons.
42 of his songs were on the top ten list of the radio program "Your Hit Parade", a measure of a song's popularity. 21 of these reached number 1 on Your Hit Parade."You'll Never Know" appeared 24 times. His song "I Only Have Eyes for You" is listed in the list of the 25 most-performed songs of the 20th Century, as compiled by the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers.
(Edited from Songhall.com & Wikipedia)
Here’s a vintage documentary short "Harry Warren: America's Foremost Composer" (1933). Songwriter Harry Warren performs several of his own compositions, including "I Found a Million Dollar Baby" and "Shadow Waltz" featuring Gladys Brittain and the Leaders, Margie Hines and dancing by Marguerite & Le Roy.