Herman Hupfeld - Biography

Biography

Hupfeld studied violin in Germany at 9. He was in the military during World War I, and he entertained camps and hospitals during World War II. He never wrote a whole Broadway score, but he became known as a composer who could write a song to fit a specific scene within a Broadway show.

His best known songs include "Sing Something Simple", "Let's Put Out The Lights (And Go To Sleep)", "When Yuba Plays The Rhumba On The Tuba", "I've Got To Get Up And Go To Work", "Are You Making Any Money?", "Savage Serenade", "Down the Old Back Road", "A Hut in Hoboken", "Night Owl", "Honey Ma Love", "Baby's Blue", "Untitled" and "The Calinda". "As Time Goes By" is most famous from the film Casablanca, though it was originally written in 1931 for the Broadway show Everybody's Welcome, which ran for 139 performances.

While not known as a public performer, Hupfeld was featured on a Victor Young & His Orchestra 78 recorded on January 22, 1932. He sang and played piano on two of his compositions, "Goopy Geer (He Plays Piano and He Plays by Ear)" and "Down the Old Back Road".

Hupfeld never married and, with rare exceptions, he stayed in his home town of Montclair, New Jersey for his entire life. He was buried at Mount Hebron Cemetery in Montclair.

Read more about this topic:  Herman Hupfeld

Famous quotes containing the word biography:

    As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.
    Richard Holmes (b. 1945)