Biography
Harry Ruby, who entered the world in N.Y.C. in 1895, built an extended career crafting songs for stage and screen musicals, most often alongside lyricist Bert Kalmar. His initial professional steps included serving as a house pianist for several music publishers, after which he traveled the vaudeville circuit as accompanist for acts including the Bootblack Trio and the Messenger Boys Trio. Although Ruby and Kalmar had previously teamed on occasion, they established their permanent songwriting partnership in 1920, a union that endured until Kalmar’s passing in the late 1940s. Together they generated numerous stage and screen successes, among them “I Wanna Be Loved by You,” “Who’s Sorry Now?,” “Three Little Words,” “A Kiss to Build a Dream On,” and countless others. Following a decade of supplying material for Broadway shows such as Ladies First (1918), Helen of Troy, New York (1923), The Ramblers (1926), and Good Boy (1928), the pair relocated to Hollywood, where they contributed songs to more than ten films, notably the Amos N Andy picture Check and Double Check (1930) as well as the Marx Brothers vehicles Animal Crackers (1930) and Duck Soup (1933). Following Kalmar’s death in 1947 Ruby composed far less frequently, yet he still scored occasional successes, including the 1949 Hit Parade number-one “Maybe It’s Because” and the 1951 release “A Kiss to Build a Dream On.” Red Skelton and Fred Astaire later depicted the two songwriters in the 1950 biographical film Three Little Words. Over the span of his working life Ruby also collaborated with Edgar Leslie, Rube Bloom, and Fred E. Ahlert.