Biography
From the late 1920s into the early 1950s, pop composer Sam H. Stept created numerous hits, among them “Comes Love” and “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” many of which jazz vocalists and big bands later embraced as standards. Born in Odessa, Russia, in 1897, he arrived in the United States at age three and spent his childhood in Pittsburgh. At the outset of his professional life he served as staff pianist for a local publishing firm before accompanying vaudeville artists that included Ann Chandler, Mae West, and Jack Norworth. During the early 1920s he resided in Cleveland, Ohio, where he directed his own dance band. Within a few years he began writing songs with lyricist Bud Green; their initial success arrived in 1928 when Helen Kane recorded “That’s My Weakness Now,” and the pair continued their partnership into the early 1930s. Over the course of his career Stept also teamed with Sidney Mitchell and Ned Washington during his Hollywood songwriting stint from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, as well as with Lew Brown, Charles Tobias, and Eddie DeLange. Screen credits encompass “Laughing Irish Eyes” for the 1936 film of the same title, “Sweet Hearts” for Hit Parade (1937), and both “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree” and “Johnny Get Your Gun” for the 1942 motion picture Private Buckaroo. On Broadway he supplied material for Yokel Boy (1939) and Michael Todd’s Peep Show (1950). His productivity declined in the late 1940s, and by the late 1950s he devoted himself entirely to his music-publishing enterprise. Additional well-known compositions include “Next Time I Fall in Love” (1948), “Comes Love” (1939), “All My Life” (1936), “Tiny Little Fingerprints” (1935), and “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone” (1931), the last of which Frank Sinatra revived three decades afterward. Performers who have cut Stept’s material range across pop and jazz, among them Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Glenn Miller, Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, Henry “Red” Allen, Bunny Berigan, Count Basie, Fletcher Henderson, and Josephine Baker.