March 22nd, 2006
Adams, Lee (b. 1924)
Lee Adams, born in Mansfield, Ohio, received a bachelor’s degree from Ohio State University in 1949 and a master’s from the Columbia School of Journalism in 1950. For ten years he labored as an all-purpose popular writer, providing material for magazines, revues, and comedy acts. His long collaboration with the composer Charles Strouse, beginning in the 1950s, scored its first major success with Bye Bye Birdie in 1960 and another hit with Applause in 1970. Both shows, like many Broadway musicals, are about the theater. Bye Bye Birdie pokes fun at a situation surrounding the drafting of an entertainer who resembles Elvis Presley, while Applause is a musical version of the movie All About Eve. For both musicals, Adams used his comedic skills in songs such as “Kids,” and also to create ordinary love songs and cheerful expressions of optimism such as “Put on a Happy Face.”
“Those Were the Days,” the Adams-Strouse theme song for the long-running television series All in the Family, has been heard more than any other theme in popular media and also more than any song the pair wrote for Broadway. The material for that song seems to owe a lot to Adams’s background as an Ohioan born in 1924. “Those Were the Days” expresses nostalgia for the Big Band music of Glen Miller; “Kids” (from a show set in fictional Sweet Apple, Ohio) expresses nostalgia for the Big Band music of Sammy Kaye (an Ohioan, like Adams).