John Hanrahan Publishing Company, Inc., photograph by Alfredo Valente · Public domain

Wrote more than 700 songs, including "Ol' Man River," "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," and "All the Things You Are," and helped invent the modern Broadway musical along the way — building melodies into the plot and characters rather than treating songs as interludes between scenes. His 1927 Show Boat, written with Oscar Hammerstein II, is the only one of his dozens of shows still regularly revived, but songs from his other works remain jazz standards. He collaborated across four decades with virtually every major lyricist of his era, from P.G. Wodehouse to Ira Gershwin.