“My father said to me that he did not want to aid and abet me on the road to hell, and he insisted I come into his business,” Mr. Drake once recalled. “I was in that business for 14 months, and then some songs I had sold to a publisher suddenly yielded the magnificent sum of $300, and in 1941, $300 was all the money in the world. That was my declaration of independence. I left the furniture business. I had a feeling I never would have been in the furniture man’s hall of fame.”
Ervin Drake at his home in Great Neck, N.Y., in 2001. He wrote his first big hits in the 1940s, including one for Billie Holiday.
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