Touches a Chord With Over-40 Crowd : Sammy Cahn Still Able to Sell His Music

His voice is thin, his looks are unexceptional and he only plays piano in the key of F. So why do people flock to see this 75-year-old songwriter sing and strut his way through a 2-hour revue? Because Sammy Cahn has style.

His untrained, whispery singing voice has a range of A to B, but he sells a song so completely, even before he jumps off stage to shake hands, that the audience is humming along and quipping, “Play it again, Sam.”

The wiry entertainer also has a contagious stage presence and a repertoire of memory-stirring pop tunes that touch a chord with most people over 40 and a few precocious baby boomers.

Cahn’s show, “Words and Music,” is built around a score or more of the award-winning songs he has written with various composers during his 60 years in show business. Songs like “Three Coins in the Fountain” (1954), “Love and Marriage” (1955), “All the Way” (1957), “High Hopes” (1959) and “Call Me Irresponsible” (1963--”the year I was divorced from my first wife”). In addition, Cahn has put a number of lyrics in the mouths of such vocalists as Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Bing Crosby and Mario Lanza.

The show, which first opened on Broadway in 1974, is a homey retrospective woven together with Cahn’s storehouse of anecdotes about the Broadway and Hollywood stars he has worked with.

Backstage, before a performance, the irrepressible showman--who looks like a friendly pharmacist--is just as chatty as he he on stage.

“I’ve written hundreds and hundreds of songs, and I defy you to name one that I can’t tell you a story about,” says Cahn, segueing into a story about how he and composer Jule Styne wrote “Three Coins in a Fountain” in less than an hour.

“We hadn’t even seen the film, which was produced in Italy, and we only had a vague idea of the plot. But the producer needed a song, and we wrote it. Ta-da!

“When people ask me what comes first, the words or the music, I tell them, ‘Neither--it’s the phone call.’ When I’m hired, I’m inspired. Give me an assignment and I can write you a song called ‘Huh!’

“I don’t write a song as much as the song writes itself. I just follow the lead of the lyric, and I’m always very pleased and entertained by the way it takes me.”

Cahn recalls, for instance, dashing off “Saturday Night Is the Loneliest Night in the Week” one evening in 1944 after his family called and chided him for staying at home on what, for most people, was a special night out on the town.

He wrote “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen” by simply crafting English words for the Yiddish song and then asking his partner, Saul Chaplin, to make a new arrangement of the number, which became the top novelty tune of 1938.

Not all of Cahn’s songs were immediate hits. “Teach Me Tonight,” written with Jule Styne, was a flop until “a knock-about trio called the DeCastro Sisters” recorded it and made it the top-selling ballad in Cahn’s expansive catalogue.

“Before that, if you had held a gun to my head and said, ‘Write a song for the DeCastro Sisters,’ I would have said, ‘Shoot me.’ ”

Cahn, who doesn’t suffer from false modesty, calls himself “the king of the demonstrators.”

“After I write a song, I set about learning it so I can sell it,” he explains. “Sinatra never turned down a song I sang to him.”

Born on New York’s “lower Lower East Side” in 1913, Cahn started writing lyrics at age 15. He always wanted to be a performer, but until 1972 his songs were always sung by someone else. That year, Cahn gave a recital of his works at Manhattan’s 92nd Street Young Men’s and Women’s Hebrew Assn. Broadway producer Alexander Cohen heard a tape of Cahn’s demonstration and put him on Broadway in 1974 in his one-man “Words and Music” show. Critics hailed Cahn, the performer, as “the best new-old act of the season.”

Cahn has been playing in “Words and Music” sporadically ever since, when his health and writing commitments permit.