Theme song from iconic TV sitcom “All In The Family, 1970. Longtime collaborators, as of 1949, Lee Adams, lyricist, and Charles Strouse, composer, put together one of the most easily recognized TV theme songs ever. Particularly memorable is the version sung by Archie and Edith (Carol O'Connor and Jean Stapleton) for the 2nd season because one of the lines reportedly had been hard to understand (you remember, “Gee, our old LaSalle ran great.”) Jean, who was also a Broadway singer, enunciated that line extremely carefully! The show was @ #1 with Nielsen from 1971-1976, introducing topics previously unheard of in TV sitcoms – racism, homosexuality, women's liberation, religion, miscarriage, abortion, breast cancer, the Vietnam war, menopause and impotence! This show definitely changed the landscape of television comedy forever.
Both Adams, born 1924, and Strouse, 1928, are in the Songwriters' Hall of Fame. Adams was nominated for a Tony for “Golden Boy”in 1965. Along with Strouse he won Tonys for “Bye Bye Birdie, 1960, and“Applause, (the musical version of “All About Eve” and winning a Tony for Lauren Bacall), 1970. Strouse, with a different lyricist, won a Tony for “Annie” 1977. (Strouse won an award from the Freedom From Religion Foundation in 2011 as “a public figure who made known his dissent from religion.”, but I digress.) They've been an incredibly prolific pair since meeting in 1949, writing more shows, for more films and for more entertainers than we have space here to enumerate. Adams “has a lifelong fascination with words” and has been involved with non-musical material extensively as a writer and editor in the magazine field. Strouse attended Eastman School of Music, then on to Tanglewood where he studied under Aaron Copeland and began his composing in earnest.
Following “Annie” they wrote several Broadway shows which had short runs but left behind some songs which gained popularity on their own - “Put On A Happy Face”, “Before The Parade Passes By” and “Once Upon A Time” (the original A side for “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”, by someone else entirely but a major find for Tony Bennett). Strouse said, “Some of the best reviews I've ever gotten were for shows that didn't work.” At ages 91 and 88 respectively, Adams and Strouse are working on a musical about “Marty”, film from 1955 that garnered Ernest Borgnine an Oscar, and Theodore Dreiser's 1925 novel, “An American Tragedy”. Hang in there, boys.
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