"You'll Never Walk Alone"

Rogers and Hammerstein

Here I am back with yet another piece by Richard Rogers for the week’s Sometimes a Song, this time with a lyric by Oscar Hammerstein, who joined Rogers just before the death of his decades-long collaborator Lorenz Hart. Unlike many of the great song composers of the 20th century, Richard Rogers didn’t work with a lot of lyricists in his career. As it happened, as a freshman at Columbia University in 1919, Rogers (with his friend Larry Hart) wrote the Varsity review, a musical called “Fly with Me,” to which Hammerstein contributed two songs. But he and Hammerstein went their separate and successful ways for the next twenty five years until necessity and I believe mutual admiration and respect and perhaps some great alignment of the stars brought them together at the peak of their musical powers.

In 1943, both Rogers and Hammerstein were — independent of each other — working on ideas for a musical adaptation of a play called, “Green Grow the Lilacs” (named for the folk song). Oscar…