26

I Got Rhythm

music by George Gershwin

words by Ira Gershwin

Roly-poly

Eating solely

Ravioli

Better watch your diet or bust

IRA GERSHWIN NEVER INTENDED TO use these words for his brother’s infectious new composition. According to Michael Feinstein it was a ‘dummy’ lyric, written to see how the rhyme scheme might fit the tune. Ira concluded that it didn’t work, that it gave the tune a ‘jingly, Mother Goose quality’, so he wrote another dummy, this time without rhymes, that he found he liked better: ‘Just go forward / Don’t look backward / And you’ll soon be / Winding up ahead of the game’.

The clue is in that first line, ‘Just go forward’. When a song is too closely rhymed, as in the earlier example, it can feel a little like running on the spot. It’s harder for the song to advance. Whereas the absence of rhymes makes the lyric more open ended – it moves forward and could go anywhere. And so ‘I Got Rhythm’ is a song that, except for the bridge, doesn’t rhyme at all. ‘I got rhythm / I got music / I got my man / Who could ask for anything more?’

Originally a slow song, written for the musical Treasure Girl in 1928, ‘I Got Rhythm’ found its proper place two years later in Girl Crazy as an up-tempo number sung by Ethel Merman, who was making her Broadway debut to great acclaim in the role of Frisco Kate Fothergill. The show also made a star of Ginger Rogers and introduced two more Gershwin classics, ‘Embraceable You’ and ‘But Not for Me’.

Having come up with a lyric that pleased him, Ira Gershwin was initially going to call the song ‘Who Could Ask for Anything More?’ After all, that’s the line that ends each stanza. ‘I got rhythm’, on the other hand, is merely the opening line. But not only is it a punchier title, it’s more accurate. Rhythm is what the song is about.

The basic structure of the chorus is a straightforward AABA over thirty-two bars, but rhythmically it’s an off-beat Charleston. If we assume the song to be in 4/4, then there’s nothing on beat one, ‘I’ comes on beat two, and ‘got’ on the second half of beat three. The next bar puts ‘rhy–’ on the downbeat and ‘–thm’ on the second half of beat two. The song trips across the metre and, at least for the first three lines, the rhythm is fixed. The melody is fixed, too. If we think of the song in its original key of D flat, the first line has four ascending notes of a pentatonic scale (A flat, B flat, D flat, E flat), the second has the same notes coming down, and the third line has them going up again. The fourth line is different, rhythmically and harmonically, hitting consecutive down beats on ‘ask’ and ‘more’, and introducing a diatonic F natural to put us squarely in D flat major.

‘I Got Rhythm’ quickly became one of the Gershwins’ most popular songs, and one of George’s most popular tunes. He often played a fast ragtime version of it as a piano showpiece, and his last orchestral work was a set of variations on the tune for piano and orchestra.

The timing of the song was also fortunate. The 1930s was the decade that cemented the relationship between Broadway and jazz, jazz singers and instrumentalists drawing on show tunes to provide what in time would get called ‘standards’ – a sort of canon of tunes that are common currency among jazz musicians. It was not only that the likes of Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Art Tatum and Duke Ellington played and recorded ‘I Got Rhythm’, but that the chord changes themselves became ubiquitous as the ‘rhythm changes’ underpinning many new compositions. This practice developed in bebop, with Charlie Parker using the rhythm changes several times, while Thelonious Monk’s ‘Rhythm-A-Ning’ advertises its source in its title. But in fact, the use of the ‘rhythm changes’ predated bebop – Lester Young’s ‘Lester Leaps In’ was based on them as early as 1939, and so was Ellington’s ‘Cottontail’.

You can’t help but wonder if George’s tune would have gained the same ubiquity had Ira called it ‘Who Could Ask for Anything More?’ – or if it had been about eating too much ravioli.