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John Francis "Johnny" Burke was born on 3 October 1908 in Antioch, California. His parents were William Earl Burke, a structural engineer, and Mary Agnes Mungovan Burke, a schoolteacher. The Burke family moved to Chicago when Johnny was still a boy. He studied piano and drama as a youth and graduated from Lindblom High School in 1924. He was a student at Crane College in Chicago for one year and then attended the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he played piano in the orchestra. Burke went to work in Chicago as a staff pianist and song plugger for the Irving Berlin Music Corporation in 1926. In his spare time he played piano in dance bands and vaudeville houses.
Irving Berlin Music eventually moved Burke to their office in New York, where he continued to work as a pianist and earned additional income as a vocal coach. He was already writing song lyrics and came up with his first hit, written with composer Harold Spina and co-lyricist Joe Young, in 1933.
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