TST: Gary, your previous books were about American history but The Tunesmith is a book about your grandfather. It’s so different from your other books. How did it come about?
Gary May: I was always very close to my grandfather. We spent a lot of time together. He was a great storyteller and since I loved movies, I ate everything up. But I began to think about him as a historical subject in 2020 when James Taylor entered my life.
James Taylor? The singer songwriter?
Yes. In January of 2020, my friend Janet Roitz, the actress, singer, and dancer, alerted me to story in Rolling Stone magazine. Taylor was planning to release a new album, American Standard, a salute to the Great American Songbook. The songs were classic tunes by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Henry Mancini, and others.
Among them, I read, was a number by my grandfather, M.K. Jerome and his lyricist partner, Jack Scholl. That came as a real shock. The song was “As Easy As Rolling Off a Log,” which appeared in a Warner Brothers cartoon, Katnip Kollege. I’m not sure that on that day that I had ever heard it. So I was both puzzled and excited.
Why were you puzzled?
Taylor was such a heavyweight artist, how did he come to choose what seemed to be one of my grandfather’s most obscure songs? It was a mystery I had to solve.
So you followed the clues?
Right. And they came quickly. Taylor was inte
