John Stromberg

John Stromberg (born Stramborg, 9 November 1858 – 5 July 1902) was an American songwriter, composer, and conductor born in British Canada of Swedish ancestry (name originally "Stramborg"). He was a Freemason. on stage shows for the Weber and Fields comedy team.

Career

Weber and Fields began as a two-man show in the genre of ethnic (German) humor. They were a funny man/straight man comedy duo, a precursor to such famous acts as Abbott & Costello and Laurel & Hardy. They later expanded their act into the genre of vaudeville based on burlesque, musical stage shows that broadly and somewhat raucously parodied other well-known contemporary Broadway shows, without the striptease acts with which the term was later associated.

John "Honey" Stromberg, whose career began formally in Tin Pan Alley, where he worked as an arranger for the Witmark musical publishing house, was already the writer of a popular song hit ("My Girl's a Corker, She's a New Yorker") before becoming the principal composer and orchestra conductor (with Edgar Smith the principal writer) for these shows in 1896 with "The Art of Maryland," with which Weber and Fields opened their Broadway Music Hall. Stromberg wrote the scores for ten productions, conducting nine of them. His most famous composition (the lyrics, however, credited to Robert B. Smith) was "Come Down Ma Evenin' Star" from Twirly Whirly, written for the great diva of the day Lillian Russell and (as the story goes) found in the pocket of Stromberg's coat after he had committed suicide in July 1902, having ingested Paris Green insecticide.