Quotes

You know all this stuff about how songs are written? Well, kid, if you're a born songwriter, you just know how to do it. It's instinct. Go ask a tightrope walker how he walks that tightrope. He says, 'Well, when I think I'm going too much to the left, I go to the right, et cetera'. And he walks the tightrope and makes a helluva living.

I'm a lyric-writer, correct? What is a real lyric-writer? He's a fellow who can't help singing, and he sings through his words. A poet or a versifier - they must be satisfied to write their words down. That's all. But a lyricist - he's a minstrel.

I'm an inarticulate composer, Believe me, if I could write music instead of lyrics I'd be glad to, because it's much easier. Why composers, even the great ones, ought to get down on their knees every day and say 'Thank God I'm a composer - it's so easy. I can write a tune every hour of the day or night, but thank God I do't have to write the words!' Look at the statistics. For every lyric-writer there are thirty composers at least! Most of my time I'm hovering over the piano with my collaborator, helping him to get the right melodic line. Just remember this fact - when you write a song in ten or twenty minutes, nobody knows who did what to whom.

It may sound a little immodest, but you'd be amazed--perhaps you shouldn't be--that most of my songs that sold were written in less than 15 minutes. "Tea for Two" was written in less than four minutes, "I Wanna Be Happy" in about 12 minutes. "Swanee"--George Gershwin and I wrote that in about 15 minutes while there was a card game going in the parlor. "Just a Gigolo"--no, that took me overnight, that required a little work.

. . . when George Gershwin and I wrote "Swanee, How I Love Ya" we'd never seen the Swanee River . . . we'd never been south of the Battery in New York. When we finally did see the river, however, on a trip down to Florida, it was a good thing we had written the song first because the Swanee turned out to be just a muddy stream.