Unchained Melody (History)

William Stirrat, aka Hy Zaret, was 16 when he wrote lyrics about Mary Louise "Cookie" Pierce. He was 16 years old and infatuated with "the prettiest girl in my neighborhood."  He remembers well the frustration of being too shy to act on his feelings - the stuttered response when she spoke to him, the frozen reaction when she smiled at him.  "Now, I think she was in love with me, too, but I was too shy to do anything or even talk to her," Stirrat says 67 years later. So the romantic teenager wrote about his need and his longing and then went on with his life, a life full of real and enduring relationships, engaging work, travel and recognition for accomplishments other than song writing. But all along, there was an unchained melody running through his life.   Cookie, it seemed, had married someone else.

 "The way I felt about Cookie was over in my mind when I heard that she had married the best catch in town," he said, adding, "I read about it in the papers. It was hard." And it wasn’t the girl, Mary Louise "Cookie" Pierce, that haunted his life, it was the song.

Stirrat wrote the words to "Unchained Melody" in 1936 when he was on a summer scholarship at Yaddo’s Triuna Arts of the Theatre School. It was there that he met North, who composed the music.   North, a composer and accompanist for a modern dancer at the time, was on the staff.

"I pestered him and pestered him to compose a piano copy for me. Finally, he told me that he had music for a song.  Basically, I sang the words and he guided me with what he wanted for the music. You might say I sang the song under his guidance," Stirrat said.

 When he and North were working on the song, Stirrat hoped that Bing Crosby would sing it since he was a neighbor.  "I’d spoken to Bing Crosby’s wife so I thought it was a good connection. I styled it for him, you know, his songs had a dip at the end," the lyricist said.   When that plan did not work out, Stirrat told North that he wanted Duke Ellington’s orchestra to record it.  It took 19 years, but they finally got Al Hibbler, who been Ellington’s vocalist, to record the song, Stirrat said.

"I never met anybody that didn’t believe I wrote that song, but another Hy Zaret who was a close friend of the lawyer that was representing the publisher, was collecting royalties," he said.   Stirrat said he had given up on the song when nothing happened with it between 1936 and 1955.   "In 1941, I signed documents authorizing Alex to use the song in a motion picture, so in 1955 when it was used in ‘Unchained,’ I didn’t even know about it," he said.
 
Alex North went on to become successful scoring Hollywood movies.  "Over his lifetime, North had been nominated about 13 times for an Oscar. They finally gave him one, an honorary one," Stirrat said. (Materials used from http://www.dansher.com/unchained/unchained.html).


It is very strange, that CBCNews, writing about the death of Hy Zaret, mentioned Hyman Harry Zaritsky as his real name. The 99-year-old songwriter died Monday at home in Connecticut. He was about a month shy of his 100th birthday (http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/music/story/2007/07/03/unchained-melody-obit.html).