George Gard “Buddy” DeSylva was born in New York City but grew up in California where he attended USC. His father, Aloysius J. DeSylva, was better known to American audiences as the Portuguese-born actor, Hal De Forrest. His mother, Georgetta Miles Gard, was the daughter of Los Angeles police chief, George E. Gard. DeSylva’s Broadway career began in the late 1910s with songwriting credits as lyricist and/or composer on independent Tin Pan Alley songs, revues, and musicals. As “Bud de Sylva”, he wrote the music to a number of songs to Al Jolson’s 1918-19 smash hit revue Sinbad, including “I’ll Tell The World”, “‘N’ Everything”, “It’s Wonderful”, and the lyrics to two Songbook classics, “I’ll Say She Does”, and “Avalon”, which was also interpolated into Jolson’s subsequent vehicle Bombo (1921-22). Another major Jolson interpolation was “If You Knew Susie”, a saucy little smash hit number DeSylva wrote with Joseph Meyer that eventually made it into 4 shows, including Jolson’s 1925 Big Boy.
DeSylva seems to have worked seriously in all corners of Broadway, including for the waning forms of operetta and European-centric musical theatre: The French Doll, The Yankee Princess, and Little Miss Bluebird fit into this category, as does Orange Blossoms, one of Victor Herbert’s last scores, for which DeSylva provided the lyrics, including “A Kiss In The Dark”. Two collaborations with Jerome Kern, “Whip-Poor-Will” and “Look For The Silver Lining” made their way into the long-running musical comedy Sally (1920-22).
DeSylva worked just as extensively for the revues: one Nifties (1923), two Whirls, a Greenwich Village Follies (1920), three Ziegfeld Follies, and all of George White’s Scandals from 1922 on, where he teamed up on several occasions with George Gershwin. DeSylva had first worked with Gershwin in 1919 on the musical comedy La La Lucille, which introduced the moderately successful “Nobody But You”. But their most important songs came out of the Scandals. Their most interesting work on that show made it one night in the 1922 edition. DeSylva had the idea of creating a small jazz opera set in Harlem based on Pagliacci, which the pair did with the one-act Blue Monday (The Shedd re-created this piece at OFAM 1993). Viewed by scholars today as a forerunner to Porgy And Bess 15 years later, the effort was, alas, not a good fit for the Scandals in 1922. More successful that year was “I’ll Build A Stairway To Paradise”, which is a great production number and appeared to have wowed the Scandals audiences, who were just learning about jazz, although it has not faired as well since. Just as impressive was their “Somebody Loves Me” from the Scandals of 1924. This song has enjoyed ongoing success, with extensive covers up to the present day by vocalist and jazz musicians alike.
In 1925, DeSylva joined lyricist Lew Brown and composer Ray Henderson to form a songwriting team and established a publishing firm. With DeSylva and Brown collaborating on the lyrics, and Henderson writing the music, the threesome contributed songs to several Broadway revues, most notably George White’s Scandals of 1925 and 1926 which featured the songs “The Birth of the Blues”, “Black Bottom”, and “Lucky Day”. The threesome’s own Broadway musical, Good News, with a book co-authored by DeSylva, opened in 1927 and ran for 557 performances. Among its hits were “The Best Things In Life Are Free”, “Good News”, “The Varsity Drag” and “Lucky In Love”.
In 1928, Hold Everything! (book by DeSylva and John McGowan) opened and ran for 413 performances, making a star of Bert Lahr, and featured the song “You’re the Cream In My Coffee”. 1929’s Follow Thru, again with a book co-authored by De Sylva, ran for 403 performances and introduced “Button Up Your Overcoat”. And in the 1930 production of Flying High, Brown joined DeSylva and John McGowan as book writer, as well, of course, as collaborating with De Sylva on the lyrics. Once again Bert Lahr was in the cast, and the show ran for 347 performances.
In 1929, the team sold the publishing firm and moved to Hollywood under contract with Fox Studios. Their first film was The Singing Fool, starring Al Jolson, and included the trio’s hit songs “Sonny Boy”, and “It All Depends On You”. Say It With Songs, another Jolson film, including the songs “Little Pal”, and “(Keep Your) Sunny Side Up”, and Just Imagine (the film version of their Broadway hit Follow Thru), were both released in 1930. The popularity of this team was so great that Gershwin’s mother supposedly chided her sons for not being able to write the sort of hits turned out by the trio.
The partnership continued in this fashion until DeSylva left in 1931. DeSylva stayed in Hollywood and served as a producer of stage and screen musicals. During this tenure, he produced movies such as The Little Colonel, The Littlest Rebel, Captain January, Poor Little Rich Girl, and Stowaway. In 1941, he became an executive producer at Paramount Pictures, a position he would hold until 1944. At Paramount, he was also an uncredited executive producer for Double Indemnity, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Story of Dr. Wassell, and The Glass Key. The Paramount all-star extravaganza Star Spangled Rhythm, which takes place at the Paramount film studio in Hollywood, features a fictional movie executive named “B.G. DeSoto” (played by Walter Abel) who is a parody of DeSylva. In 1942, with Johnny Mercer and Glenn Wallichs, he co-founded Capitol Records.