The world-renowned creator of stage-music, film scores and time-honoured melodies that rank among the treasures of popular music culture, Jerome David Kern was born in New York on 27 January 1885. His youthful talent was fostered by his mother (who taught him piano) and at seventeen, having enrolled at the New York College of Music, he was steeped in the classical idiom and had already written his first songs. In 1902, during the first of many visits to England, he contributed extra material to Leslie Stuart’s show The Silver Slipper and for the next few years (despite his father’s insistence that he should help him run the family’s New York furniture showroom) followed his instincts and opted for music instead. Returning to New York in 1904, he worked as a pianist and song-plugger in Tin Pan Alley (in this capacity, on occasions, he played for various leading entertainers of