The songwriting team of lyricist
Johnny Burke and composer Jimmy Van Heusen may have been the most successful of the 1940s, even if it wasn't the most visible. Since
Burke and Van Heusen were staff songwriters at Paramount Pictures and were
Bing Crosby's personal songwriters, their material was given tremendous exposure, leading to numerous hits. But as Hollywood songwriters, they gained much less recognition than attends Broadway songwriters. It's hard to think of an album-length tribute to the team (which dissolved in 1953) before
Lena Horne's A Friend of Yours: Songs by Burke and Van Heusen. She proves that there should be more. This is only a slice of their work, but even at that it presents recognizable standards such as "Like Someone in Love" and "But Beautiful," and the combination of singable melodies and well-constructed lyrics impresses throughout. The songs also work surprisingly well as vehicles for
Horne, having been introduced by much more staid performers such as
Crosby,
Dinah Shore, and
Tommy Dorsey. There's nothing staid about
Horne, of course, and it seems fair to say that
Burke and Van Heusen have never seemed as sexy as they do here, certainly not in
Crosby's avuncular readings.
Horne even makes an innocuous number like the old
Dorsey chestnut "Polka Dots and Moonbeams" smolder, and that takes some doing. And this is really just the tip of the iceberg, perhaps signaling an overdue comeback for one of the ‘40s most popular (if largely unknown) songwriting duos. ~ William Ruhlmann