Growing up to the constant presence of father Giuseppe Valente's accordion playing, she took up guitar and became quite adept but didn't necessarily feel it would lead to a lifelong career. In 1955 it served as a benchmark in the long, diverse career of Caterina Valente, 24 at the time, an Italian born in Paris, France, who lived in Germany for many years and had her greatest success there. In 1940, bandleader Jimmy Dorsey's adaptation of "The Breeze and I," with vocals by Bob Eberly, was a major hit, establishing the Lecuona melody as a standard in America. His most famous achievement had already come 14 years earlier: "Andalucia" (named after the southern region of Spain) incorporates Latin rhythms in a classical suite that includes the magnificent "Malagueña" and a sequence with added lyrics in Spanish by Emilio de Torre, later made famous by way of an English language rewrite by Al Stillman as "The Breeze and I." For these and other works, Lecuona was nicknamed "The Cuban Gershwin." His later contributions to film resulted in an Oscar nomination in 1942 (for the song "Always in My Heart," with lyrics by Kim Gannon, from the film of the same title). The first recordings by the Havana-born pianist were made in New York in 1916, leading to his eventual notoriety as arguably the most important Cuban composer and musician of the 20th century a gradual inclination towards the popular field made his better-known works, moreso than the composer himself, familiar to most Americans while his fame rose to extraordinary levels across the globe. The great composer Ernesto Lecuona was a teenage prodigy, having written several musical pieces, some that would classify as opera or ballet, before reaching the age of 18 in 1913.
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