Ralph Rainger was a composer whose brief but prolific career produced some of the most enduring popular songs of the 1930s and early 1940s. Trained as a classical pianist, with studies under Arnold Schoenberg and Clarence Adler, he began writing for Broadway in the late 1920s before moving to Hollywood in 1932. There he formed a celebrated partnership with lyricist Leo Robin, and together they wrote songs for over one hundred films in just a decade. Their collaboration yielded Thanks for the Memory, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1938 and became Bob Hope's lifelong theme, as well as Easy Living and If I Should Lose You, both of which entered the jazz standard repertoire and continue to be widely performed. Other well-known Rainger compositions include Love in Bloom, which became Jack Benny's signature tune, and June in January, sung by Bing Crosby. His writing combined classical harmonic sophistication with the accessible, singable melodies that Hollywood demanded. Rainger died in a plane crash in 1942 at age forty-one, cutting short a partnership that had made him and Robin the leading film songwriting team of their era.
