On this date in 1928, composer Charles Strouse was born in New York City to Ira Strouse, a traveling salesman, and Ethel (Newman) Strouse, a homemaker and amateur pianist. The composer of the musical “Annie” (“The sun’ll come out tomorrow”), “Bye Bye Birdie” (“Gray skies are gonna clear up. Put on a happy face”) and the song “Those Were the Days” (on which he played the piano) from the TV show “All In The Family,” became an inseparable part of the fabric of modern popular American music.
His songs have been performed by almost every major vocalist, including Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Bobby Darin, Mandy Patinkin, Harry Connick Jr., Bobby Rydell, Jay Z, Vic Damone, Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, Grace Jones and Duke Ellington and his Orchestra.
Strouse grew up in Manhattan with a father plagued with serious health problems and a mother who was institutionalized for two years in a psychiatric hospital. He enrolled in the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., majoring in composition, and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1947.
Strouse wrote the score to over 30 stage musicals, 14 scores for Broadway (including “Applause,” starring Lauren Bacall, and “Golden Boy,” starring Sammy Davis Jr.), four Hollywood films (including “Bonnie and Clyde,” 1967, and “All Dogs Go To Heaven,” 1989), two orchestral works and an opera. He has been inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Theatre Hall of Fame. He is a three-time Tony Award winner, a two-time Emmy Award winner, and his cast recordings have earned him two Grammys.
With hundreds of productions licensed annually, “Annie” and “Bye Bye Birdie” are among the most popular musicals of all time produced by regional, amateur and school groups all over the world. He “discovered” Sarah Jessica Parker, backing her selection to play the lead in “Annie” after the originator of the Broadway role outgrew it. Strouse married Barbara Siman, a director and choreographer, in 1962. They had four children.
“I grudgingly went to Sunday Hebrew school,” Strouse wrote in his 2008 memoir Put on a Happy Face. “We were not what you would call religious, and this has stuck with me to this day.” He described a full and purpose-filled life, working for music as well as civil rights (a theme of “Golden Boy”). He traveled as an accompanist with actress Butterfly McQueen, experiencing firsthand the racial discrimination she faced in the South. He marched with Sammy Davis Jr., in Selma, Ala., in 1965.
“Though my father wasn’t an atheist, I am,” he said on Freethought Radio (June 20, 2009). “I understand why people do believe [in God] and frankly, I’m a little puzzled, though a little pleased, that there is a radio program like yours that talks about it, because as an atheist, at least my kind of it, I don’t need any persuasion. I’ve been persuaded for a great number of years now, by the wars, the calamities, the religious antagonism among people and their stupid rules.”
In 2011 at FFRF’s 34th national convention in Hartford, Conn., he graciously accepted an Emperor Has No Clothes Award given to public figures who make known their dissent from religion. He died in Manhattan at age 96. He and his wife, who died in 2023, were married 61 years. (D. 2025)
PHOTO: Strouse in 2013; GustavM photo under GNU 1.2.
