Harry Ruby

As 'Harry Ruby', Harry Rubenstein was a 'song plugger' for Gus Edwards and for George Gershwin at Jerome H. Remick's, the Detroit music publishing firm. He had unfulfilled ambitions to become a professional baseball player and had previously worked the vaudeville circuit as a pianist with The Bootblack Trio and The Messenger Boys Trio. Ruby's luck was to change after meeting the lyricist Bert Kalmar at a Tin Pan Alley publishing house. By 1918, the duo had formed a songwriting partnership which was to endure for almost three decades, resulting in numerous popular hits for Broadway shows and movies. Some of their best-known numbers included "I Wanna Be Loved by You", "Who's Sorry Now?", "Three Little Words", "Give Me the Simple Life", "A Kiss to Build a Dream On" and many more. A fictionalised biopic of Kalmar & Ruby, Three Little Words (1950) (in which Ruby was played by Red Skelton), was released by MGM three years after Kalmar's death. Ruby lived on until 1974, but managed just one hit song on his own, the 1949 chart topper "Maybe It's Because".