American composer and lyricist, born April 3, 1919, New York City, New York, USA and died January 15, 2015 in Great Neck, New York, USA. He often collaborated with Jimmy Shirl.
Inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1983.
His brother Milton Drake was the lyricist of "Mairzy Doats" and other popular songs in the 1940s, and his other brother Arnold Drake became a noted comic book illustrator.
He began writing music when he was 12. While attending the City College of New York, he hung out at the offices of music publishers. His breakthrough came in the early 1940s, when he accepted a job that more-experienced tunesmiths turned down: supplying English words to Latin American melodies.
He graduated in 1940 from City College of New York where he had majored in art, hoping to pursue illustration if music fell through. A bad heart kept him from military service in WWII.
