Talk:Rida Johnson Young

Assessment

This article is a good start but needs more references. -- Ssilvers (talk) 23:24, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Irish Eyes? Year of birth?

This source says that Young wrote the lyrics for "When Irish Eyes are Smiling", but it seems to be a mistake: http://nfo.net/cal/ty2.html -- Ssilvers (talk) 15:37, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the source. Yes, most other sources say "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" was made by Ernest R. Ball, Chauncey Olcott, and George Graff, Jr . But the song appeared in the play The Isle o' Dreams (1913), written by Young. A dispute over Copyright renewal of that song even ended up in the US Supreme Court 1943: U.S. Supreme Court FRED FISHER MUSIC CO. v. M. WITMARK & SONS, 318 U.S. 643 (1943).

I also notice that Rida Johnson Young's birthdate seems to be disputed! (The source you point at says, "b. February 28, 1875 (Not 1869)".

By the way, thank you for improving the article! It was actually proposed as a "Good article" by "AlexNewArtBot", and has been nominated for DYK by "User:Komusou". Oceanh (talk) 21:55, 23 November 2007 (UTC).

• Just to clear one thing about DYK: "AlexNewArtBot" is of course a robot (a "bot") that detects recent articles that seem lenghty enough and referenced, and lists them as good candidates at the bottom of the DYK pool. There, human volunteers may sift through them and nominate to DYK those that are actually good articles and can be fit into the DYK guidelines.
• About the birthdate, I was interested in the topic because one of the DYK hooks is entirely based on the wordplay "Young died young", so 1875 would accentuate that, but the alt source doesn't seem reliable. (In many such cases, it is found out that a female person lied during her life about her YoB, thus leaving a trail of documented but wrong dates, and the real one is exhumed posthumously from official documents.) At any rate, it was preferable to insert a note telling the reader what exists and why we select one version, which I did. — Komusou ^talk @ 18:37, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

Ah ha! Young wrote The Isle O' Dreams, in which "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" was an interpolated song. Young did not write the song, but it appeared in collections of songs from the show with Young's name on the cover. See, e.g., http://www.perfessorbill.com/pbmidi10.shtml -- Ssilvers (talk) 07:06, 25 November 2007 (UTC)