Otto Harbach just might be related to J.S. Bach, but who really knows? Harbach was a songwriter born on this day in 1873. Think of that - 1873. Nobody would know him today if it hadn't been for "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes," the song he wrote with Jerome Kern in 1933 - he was the lyricist. The song sounds like a thoroughly modern song, though it is not. It was first used in 1933 and went to the top of the charts in 1934. It was first used in a movie featuring Fred Astaire in 1935. It has also been recorded numerous times by a very wide variety of artists, including Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, Eartha Kitt, and Jerry Garcia, who used it on a video in 1992. As recently as 2007, the title was used in the pilot episode for the hit drama Mad Men, a production of the American Movie Classics cable network. Who would have thought that a guy born in 1873 would write a popular song still being used in the 21st Century? That's why they're called classics. I hope his heirs are still getting royalties.
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