Composer had string of hits
It Was a Very Good Year, Good Morning Heartache among his finest
Ervin Drake, who died Jan. 15 at age 95, was the songwriter behind the Frank Sinatra classic It Was a Very Good Year (1966), Billie Holliday’s heart-wrenching Good Morning Heartache (1946) and dozens of other standards.
During a career spanning more than 60 years, Drake composed or wrote the lyrics for some 400 to 500 songs, ranging from show tunes (he was the composer and lyricist behind the 196465 Broadway hit What Makes Sammy Run?) to gospel songs (Frankie Laine’s version of his I Believe spent 18 weeks at No 1 in the U.K. singles chart in 1953).
He also worked in television, writing material for such performers as Louis Jourdan, Yves Montand, Ethel Merman, Julie Andrews and Gene Kelly.
The son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, he was born Ervin Maurice Druckman in Manhattan on April 3, 1919. After studying art at the City College in New York, Ervin (who changed his surname to Drake) joined his father’s furniture business.
He had wanted to be a composer — his mother liked to sing, and as a teenager he wrote songs for her — but as he recalled: “My father said to me that he did not want to aid and abet me on the road to hell and he insisted I come into his business.”
He stayed for 14 months, but hung around music publishers in his spare time: “Then some songs I had sold to a publisher suddenly yielded the magnificent sum of $300, and in 1941, $300 was all the money in the world … I left the furniture business. I had a feeling I never would have been in the furniture man’s hall of fame.”
A heart ailment kept Drake from military service in the Second World War. Instead he embarked on a fulltime career as a lyricist. When Tico Tico became a hit for the Andrews Sisters in 1944 it established him as a writer of English lyrics to Latin American melodies, and he went on to work on (Yo Te Amo Mucho) And That’s That for Xavier Cugat, Desi Arnaz’s You Can in Yucatan and Nat King Cole’s Come to the Mardi Gras, among others.
In 1944 he collaborated with Juan Tizol on the lyric to the Duke Ellington jazz standard Perdido. Ellington also recorded Drake’s Second World War marching song, Hayfoot, Strawfoot.
Drake had a major hit in 1945 with the words and music of The Rickety Rickshaw Man, which was recorded by Eddy Howard and his Orchestra, selling more than a million copies. He provided the lyrics for the Perry Como hit Sonata (1946) and would later provide the singer with the words and music for The Father of Girls (1968).
He had written the lyrics for Good Morning Heartache at the age of 23 when his then-girlfriend gave him his marching orders, and was in the recording studio in 1946 when Billie Holliday gave it her own characteristically tragic spin for Decca. In Drake’s case there was a happy postscript. In later life, after the deaths of their respective spouses, he and the cause of his youthful angst, Edith Berman, were reunited.
After the death of his first wife, Ada, in 1975, he married Edith Berman, who survives him with the two daughters of his first marriage and a stepson.