Birthday: January 27, 1895 in New York City, New York, USA
Birth Name: Harry Rubinstein
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 Messenge...
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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, Trois petits mots (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". Show less «
[on beginning his career as a 'song-plugger'] I knew how to play the piano, and that's how I got the...Show more »
[on beginning his career as a 'song-plugger'] I knew how to play the piano, and that's how I got the job. Twenty-five bucks a week. It was a very nice job - only seven days a week, eleven in the morning until one in the morning. Here's what pluggers had to do. Every one of the publishing companies would have four, five, maybe even ten little offices with pianos. The vaudeville actors, the cafe performers, and the singing waiters would come in, and we'd demonstrate whatever songs the company was plugging. This was from eleven in the morning until six. At six at night you got into the subway and went home to the Bronx to have your supper, then you came back. Five cents each way - which was a lot cheaper than the sixty cents that a downtown restaurant would charge. Then you met a singer someplace in a cafe and demonstrated a song. Then you went back to the nickelodeons with the illustrated slides - the projectionist up in the booth threw the slides on the screen, while you were downstairs at the piano playing the song and singing it with the audience. That's the way songs were made, back in the 1912-13s. Show less «
