SONGWRITER AND COMPOSER (1922)
FOR GERSHWIN THE SONGWRITER, 1922 began with both a notable number, “Do It Again,” and a notable show, For Goodness Sake, involving several of his future collaborators. Years later on a radio broadcast during the mid-1930s, he told the story of how the song came to be written. Sometime during the early winter of 1921–22, he happened to be in Max Dreyfus’s office when in walked Buddy DeSylva, the lyricist with whom he was to work on the next edition of George White’s Scandals. “DeSylva said jokingly to me, ‘George, let’s write a hit!’ I matched him by saying, ‘O.K.!’ I sat down at the piano, and began playing a theme which I was composing on the spot. . . . Buddy listened for a few minutes and then began chanting this title—‘Oh, Do It Again!’ which he had just fitted to my theme.” From that beginning, the two fashioned a thirty-two-bar refrain, and then a verse. No professional assignment was involved.1
In this unusual song, a young man and woman who have just met, finding themselves unexpectedly alone, are gripped by mutual attraction. He seizes the initiative by stealing a kiss, triggering a verse that starts with her show of shocked innocence. Then comes the refrain, built around the title line; female desire trumps propriety. “Do It Again” is about a feeling, and that feeling is embodied most of all in the rhythm, starting with the tempo; the sheet music calls for “fox-trot time.” The tune conveys a mood at once languid and aroused, as a character tries to hide her surging emotion. That evanescent blend is what DeSylva picked up as Gershwin sat at the piano. The syncopation of the “do it again” motive, and dotted rhythms beneath the sustained notes, hold the song’s emotional temperature at a slow boil. The Victorian upbringing of the singer is being challenged by the freedom of the Jazz Age.
Not long after he and DeSylva finished this freestanding song, Gershwin attended a party at the home of one of Manhattan’s leading hosts, Jules Glaenzer. Among the guests was actress and singer Irene Bordoni, the wife of producer Ray Goetz, with whom Gershwin had worked on Piccadilly to Broadway and other revues. When Gershwin played “Do It Again” for the company, Bordoni, “with a true Gallic flourish, rushed across the room and cried, ‘I mus’ have that song! It’s for me!’ ” Bordoni, fully aware of the new number’s theatrical charisma, sang the song in a show called The French Doll—an adaptation of a French play, produced by Goetz as a starring vehicle for his wife. The play opened in New York on February 20, 1922, and ran for 120 performances, and the sheet music for “Do It Again” sold well.2
Meanwhile, the evening that followed the onstage debut of “Do It Again,” February 21, saw the New York opening of For Goodness Sake, a musical comedy with several links to Gershwin’s career—past, present, and future. Some of the creative team overlapped with that of La-La-Lucille!: Alex Aarons was the producer, the book was by Fred Jackson, and the lyrics were by Arthur Jackson, co-lyricist with DeSylva for Lucille. Bill Daly and Paul Lannin composed the score, Daly also serving as conductor. The dance director, Alan K. Foster, would fill the same role the following year in Gershwin’s first English show, The Rainbow. Above all, what made For Goodness Sake tick was that it starred Adele and Fred Astaire, in their fifth Broadway appearance. Fred considered the show something of a breakthrough, as it was around this time that he “started to take hold at creating and choreographing our dances.” Robert Benchley of Life magazine had little to say about the show “that you couldn’t say about most musical comedies, except that the Astaires . . . are in it. When they dance everything seems brighter and their comedy alone would be good enough to carry them through even if they were to stop dancing (which God forbid!).”3
Two Gershwin songs appeared in For Goodness Sake, “Someone” and “Tra-La-La (This Time It’s Really Love),” back to back in the first act. In “Someone,” the character Jeff, a lawyer, played by Vinton Freedley, tries to convince Marjorie, played by Helen Ford, that they would make a perfect pair. It’s a rare example of a love song in the subjunctive: “If someone like you / loved someone like me, / life would be one long sweet song.” The number keeps emotion firmly in check as Jeff addresses a would-be lover in legalese. “Tra-La-La,” the playful song that follows, is based on a familiar vocable that registers euphoria. The singer has fallen in love and feels wonderful about it. Few, if any, Gershwin songs are as square-cut as this one. At the same time, his usual attention to harmony and voice-leading is revealed—in the verse’s descending chromatic line of whole notes in the accompaniment’s middle voice, in the refrain bass line’s firm melodic shape, and in the clarity of the overall harmonic plan.
ON MARCH 3, an editorial in Variety warned that a technological breakthrough called “radiophony,” which enabled sound signals to be transmitted at lightning speed to widely dispersed locations, might change the habits of show business customers. All a listener needed was a reception device—a “radio”—that cost as little as $17 or as much as $200, depending on the distances over which it could receive signals, and entertainment could be brought directly into the home. Few Americans owned receivers yet, but the numbers were growing, as shown by the appearance of programming schedules in more and more newspapers. Although the showmen who ruled the theatrical professions had so far paid little heed to the device, this Variety writer thought it was time they did, for its presence would surely divert ticket buyers from the box office.4
The 1920s saw commercial radio in America grow from a scattering of independent stations to a vast enterprise with national networks as well as local outlets. The expansion took place under the aegis of the U. S. Department of Commerce, which granted thirty-one licenses in 1921 and 576 in 1922. During those two years almost half the stations were owned by manufacturers of electronic equipment, and especially of radios. Others entering the business included newspaper or magazine publishers (70), educational institutions (65), and department stores (30), plus auto suppliers, churches, city institutions, banks, and railroads. Owners were financially responsible for installing and operating their stations. As one historian has put it, “only the performing talent was free.”5
With long stretches of time at their disposal, many broadcasters turned to music as an ideal way to fill them, yet much of the music they hoped to present was subject to copyright and performance licensing agreements. As early as 1922, those who controlled performance rights were lobbying for broadcast revenues. At this time, federal guidelines prohibited the direct advertising of products on the air. But as technology improved and the medium’s commercial possibilities became more evident, that situation changed. By mid-decade, companies with products to sell could devote advertising monies to the sponsorship of radio programs, and thereby determine the content of those programs. Sponsors hired performers and paid their salaries. Money from advertising also helped to resolve conflicts over performance revenues.6
During the 1920s, George Gershwin became one of many who contributed to the growing stock of music available for radio listeners. As a Broadway composer, he added to the repertory of songs that loomed large in the new medium’s offerings—show songs were often performed on such variety programs as the Eveready Hour and the Ipana Troubadours—and he sometimes played in broadcasting studios. From the early 1920s on Gershwin cultivated a relationship with radio broadcasting that came to be a major avenue for the dissemination of his music. Moreover, as his reputation grew onstage and in the press, radio came to be another medium through which, as an increasingly famous musician with clear and constructive ideas, he joined the public discourse.
A BROADWAY REVUE called Spice of 1922, which opened on July 6, featured a song by Gershwin—“Yankee Doodle Blues,” with lyrics by DeSylva and Irving Caesar—that was chosen by Harms for aggressive marketing, along with “Do It Again.” After an introduction with the quarter notes and four-beat rhythm characteristic of the blues, and a verse outlining its twelve-bar harmonic structure, the song’s refrain offers a hymnlike tribute to the singer’s feeling for America. This statement is followed by a “patter” section that visits Old World venues—London, Paris, Germany, Russia—and finds them inferior to the New. “Yankee Doodle Blues” was recorded on the Edison label by the Broadway Dance Orchestra as well as by The Virginians, an offshoot of the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. The song’s moment in the commercial spotlight continued after a prominent if puzzling notice in Variety on September 1 announced that “for the first time since we have been in business,” Irving Berlin, Inc., Music Publishers, have taken over from Harms this “outside song,” because “every one who has heard this number proclaims it the greatest song ever written for any and every kind of a singing act.” “Taking over” a song from another publisher did not necessarily mean transferring its copyright. But the song did enjoy a modest rise in sales that fall.
Gershwin’s main work during the summer lay in writing a score for George White’s Scandals of 1922. In the course of this assignment, he formed a connection with orchestra leader Paul Whiteman that would prove exceptionally rewarding to both men. Whiteman was a classically trained musician; having played viola in the Denver Symphony Orchestra, then the San Francisco Symphony, he conducted a U.S. Navy band during World War I, and after war’s end formed his own ensemble on the West Coast and began to experiment with jazz-flavored dance music, hiring composer Ferde Grofé as his top arranger. Whiteman’s rise to prominence was swift. After moving east in 1920, his orchestra made its first records for the Victor Talking Machine Company that August. In September, the Palais Royal, New York’s largest café and supper club, hired the Whiteman ensemble as its house orchestra. By October, the New York Clipper could report that “Whiteman and his orchestra of nine are receiving $2500 weekly, the record price for such an organization.”7
Whiteman’s first Victor recordings with the Palais Royal Orchestra sold extremely well, especially “Whispering” and “Japanese Sandman,” both of which topped a million copies. By the fall of 1921, Whiteman, showing an entrepreneurial finesse that kept him atop the music business for many years, had broadened his reach in two directions. One was the establishment of Paul Whiteman, Inc., to book satellite dance bands under the Whiteman aegis for clubs, hotels, and restaurants in New York and elsewhere; by the fall of 1922, more than twenty such groups, including The Virginians, were on the roster.8 The other project was to make the Whiteman Orchestra a headline attraction in the theater. This effort got rolling with an October 1921 engagement at New York’s Palace Theatre, America’s premier vaudeville house. Variety’s critic observed that “the Whiteman time is dance perfect—his tone is always subdued—his scheme is simple if not intended—he gives drawing room music in a restaurant. It makes you dance, and the more softly played, the greater the desire. . . . Whiteman has made the old feel young; he has made them feel sentiment and he has made them dance.”9
It was against this background that George White hired Whiteman for an onstage stint in the Scandals of 1922, which opened in New York on August 28—the band’s first appearance in a Broadway show. Serving as a featured act alongside such stars as W. C. Fields and the Lightner Sisters, Whiteman and his orchestra were assigned the penultimate spot in the first act, performing their specialty—an assortment of compelling instrumental numbers—at center stage. When they finished their set, the Act I finale, a scene labeled “The Patent Leather Forest,” commenced: cloths on either side of the orchestra were removed and a pair of white staircases revealed. As Gershwin recalled the scene, the two circular staircases led “high up into theatrical paradise or the flies, which in everyday language means the ceiling.”10 The show’s principals took the stage to sing “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise,” joined by a female chorus in shiny black costumes that reflected the spotlights. “Huge palms drop glistening black fronds upon a white staircase draped in the glossy material,” noted one critic. “Up and down the stairs and in front of the scene girls in black satin dance and sing one of the piece’s musical hits.”11
Alexander Woollcott of the New York Times, no fan of the new popular music, nevertheless praised White’s decision to give “his stage over for a little while to such a festival of jazz as sets the audience to swaying like a wheat field touched by the wind.”12 Sime Silverman of Variety wrote, “The Whiteman Band just whanged them. They played high and low, slow and fast, straight and jazzy without faltering at any time. After the curtain came down on them the house orchestra could also have gone home for any more attention they received. There was no music that could follow Whiteman’s.”13 By consensus “Stairway” was the revue’s best number, and nobody found it more thrilling than Gershwin. He was captivated not just by the precision and nuance of Whiteman’s ensemble but by its energy and drive. “Paul made my song live with a vigor that almost floored me,” he said. And the dancers picked up the orchestra’s musical electricity. “A dance was staged in the song, and those girls didn’t need much coaxing to do their stuff to the accompaniment of Whiteman’s music.”14
“Stairway”’s genesis is no mystery, thanks to Ira’s account in Lyrics on Several Occasions. One day Buddy DeSylva, then working with George on the Scandals score, approached Ira with a question: “I’ve been thinking about a song you and George wrote, that ‘New Step Every Day.’ Anything particular in mind for it?” When Ira replied that he considered the song, written a few years back, an unremarkable specimen and had no plan to revisit it, DeSylva’s response tickled him: “I think the last line has an idea for a production number. If you like, we could write it up and I think it could be used in the Scandals.” That last line was “I’ll build a staircase to Paradise, with a new step every day,” and the young songwriters swung promptly into action. “The next night George and I had dinner in DeSylva’s Greenwich Village apartment,” wrote Ira, “and about nine p.m. we started on the new song. About two a.m. it was completed, verse included. Outside of the line DeSylva liked, the result was totally different from the simple ditty ‘A New Step Every Day’—and even ‘staircase’ had become ‘stairway.’ ”15
The new song, for which DeSylva shared credit with “Arthur Francis,” is a celebration of modern dance, and the sanctified spirit achieved through disciplined practice, the right footwear, and the will to battle life’s discouragements. The verse, in the manner of blues music, unfolds over the orchestra’s repeated quarter notes. But Gershwin complicates the harmony’s trajectory and quickens the pace of its modulations. His novel harmonic “steps” support a vocal line that rises over fifteen bars, a semitone at a time, from G to D-flat. The tonal territory traveled is huge, yet each step receives solid underpinning in whole notes. The verse’s tonal complexity exceeds that of any song Gershwin had written to date; it is easy to imagine Gershwin’s delight in sharing it with Kilenyi.
The shorter refrain then brings other blues earmarks to the fore, including a flatted seventh in the melody. But once the fair skies above the earthly turmoil cited in the bridge are glimpsed, the protagonist’s faith in the orderly pursuit of dancing is affirmed: the grip of the blues relaxes, and the final steps to paradise are climbed. Of the seven published songs Gershwin wrote for the Scandals, “Stairway” was the most popular. Ira, who had not expected Harms to publish the number, admitted surprise that “the bands around town and some record companies played up ‘Stairway to Paradise’ more than anything else in the show, and it became a hit—that is, for a revue. (Most hit songs from the stage emerge from musicals rather than revues.)” Ira’s earnings from the song were another pleasant outcome: $3,500, “enough to support me for a year.”16
During July, as the Scandals of 1922 went into rehearsal, George White faced a decision. As Gershwin recalled in 1931, “DeSylva and I had discussed for some time the possibilities of writing an opera for colored people.” They proposed their plan to White, who “thought it was a swell idea and wanted to incorporate it as a small act” in the Scandals. By the time the new edition of the Scandals was under way, Shuffle Along, the top musical hit of the 1921–22 Broadway season, was closing after 484 performances and preparing to tour.17 Its success owed everything to its African American cast and creative team: Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles wrote the book, Noble Sissle the lyrics, and Eubie Blake the music. White, who expected white performers to apply blackface for his show, told his lyricist and composer to hold back on writing the scene because he wasn’t sure how practical it would be for performers to change their makeup as quickly as the revue’s projected twenty-one scenes might require. (There is no hint that he considered hiring African American performers.) But around the start of August, White “came to us and said he would like to try it, anyway. So DeSylva sat down with his pencil and I dug down and found a couple of suitable tunes and we began writing. After five days and nights we finished this one act vaudeville opera. It was rehearsed and staged and was thought of highly by those in connection with the show, which included Paul Whiteman and his orchestra.”18
The “vaudeville opera”—a sketch in operatic style—was set in Mike’s Uptown Saloon, a Harlem nightspot. Given the character of the Broadway revue, a comic piece might have been expected, but DeSylva’s story was a melodrama: a love triangle involving two men and a woman whose jealousy leads her, through a misunderstanding, to gun down the man she loves. Gershwin’s score included a prologue, a blues song, a love song, an aria, a dance, some operatic-style recitative, and, to weave the story together, a good deal of instrumental music. When the music was complete, his friend Will Vodery orchestrated it. Vodery’s score labels the work Blue Monday (Opera ala Afro American). Lasting more than twenty minutes, the sketch opened the second half of the Scandals.19
If we were to seek an early moment in Gershwin’s career when a line can be drawn clearly between his songwriting and his composing selves, Blue Monday is a good place to start. Gershwin’s growing familiarity with the blues idiom enabled him to compose a striking fifty-plus bars of orchestral introduction. A range of blues techniques and earmarks—melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, formal, and expressive—are used in this beginning, but they are subject neither to a continuous accompanimental four-beat rhythm nor to the harmonically defined twelve-bar form. They amount more to a family of tonal affinities than to a structural framework. Indeed, the orchestral beginning suggests a blues fantasy, tapping a vein of inventiveness and lyricism that Gershwin was discovering here and also in “Stairway to Paradise.”
Emerging out of Gershwin’s bluesified orchestral opening, DeSylva’s operatic Prologue announces the imminent tragedy “of a woman’s intuition gone wrong.” With this prospect in the air, an evening at Mike’s Uptown Saloon in Harlem gets under way: the boss orders Sam, the saloon’s man-of-all-work, to sweep the floor. Sam responds with a song cast in a blues scale, concluding in two stanzas that he’s got “the Blue Monday Blues.” A short time later, after the boss calls for more sweeping, Sam picks up his broom and complies with a third stanza. Later, after a crowd has arrived and the dance floor fills with couples, the melody of the “Blue Monday Blues,” serving as a theme song of sorts, is heard again in full, this time hummed gently by the dancers.
Vi arrives at Mike’s establishment looking for Joe, her man. “Has any of you seen Joe?,” she sings, to a melody with a gentle lilt. Although Joe is absent, a musician character named Tom reveals his own interest in Vi, who, in rejecting his advance, flashes a pistol given to her by Joe as protection against overtures from pests like Tom. Once Joe appears, Vi declares her love for him—“my Joe”—to the same melody, even as she reminds him that she counts on his being faithful to her. By this time the audience knows that Joe, who has just won big in a craps game, has a plan for spending the money: a trip south to visit family members with whom he has long been out of touch. In a solemn delivery of eight unrhymed lines set to a sprawling melody, Joe confides to Mike the details of his plan and explains that he needs to hide his departure from Vi, who will surely oppose his leaving. Then, in a rhymed sixteen-bar utterance marked “Dolce” (sweetly), Joe reveals a profound yearning to be in the presence of his mother, ending with a smoothly lyrical melody most likely borrowed from a preexistent but unused song composed for an instrumental piece during Gershwin’s study with Kilenyi.
Having notified his mother by telegram to expect a visit from him, Joe awaits a reply while the customers entertain themselves with dancing. During the wait, the conniving Tom tells Vi that the wire Joe is expecting will be “from a woman.” When it arrives and Joe moves to keep it out of her hands as he opens it, Vi pulls the revolver out of her purse and shoots him. After falling to the floor, Joe reads the message, from his sister: “No need to come now Joe. Mother has been dead three years. Sis.” Horrified by her fatal error, Vi begs Joe for forgiveness, which he grants. Then, with his last breath, he repeats the “Dolce” melody and its maternal tribute in “Grandioso” (majestic) fashion to a more elaborate orchestral accompaniment, including a high B-flat in his penultimate phrase.
George White’s Scandals of 1922 was introduced to the public on August 21 at New Haven’s Shubert Theatre. After four performances there, the show moved to New York, where it opened on August 28 at the Globe. An all-white cast made up to look black played the Blue Monday segment, including Jack McGowan, who sang the Prologue and took a role in the drama, Coletta Ryan as Vi, Richard Bold as Joe, and Lester Allen as Sam. There is no doubt that Gershwin worried about executing the operatic challenge posed by the sketch, for only rarely did he admit to less than full confidence in his creative powers, as he did then. “I can trace my indigestion back to that opening night in New Haven; my nervousness was mainly due to ‘Blue Monday.’ ”20
IN NEW HAVEN, Blue Monday made a strong impression on a local critic. “Although Mr. White or any of his confreres may not be aware of it,” he wrote, “they will have done one thing which will, or ought to, go down in history: they have given us the first real American opera in the one-act musical piece called ‘Blue Monday Blues.’ . . . Here at last is a genuinely human plot of American life, set to music in the popular vein.”21 This writer showed an early grasp of issues that would concern composers and critics alike in the years to come. He cited Gershwin’s balancing of four homegrown genres: jazz music, used “only at the right moments”; the sentimental song; the blues; and, above all, a new and free ragtime recitative.
By the time the Scandals took the stage in New York, however, George White was having second thoughts about his second-act opener; after the first night’s performance, he removed it from the show. Gershwin’s response to this decision is not a matter of record. Perhaps he found it a clear disappointment—that would seem to accord with the “composers’ stomach” that plagued him later. Or maybe he took it more or less in stride—that would signal an attitude for which he was admired later in life, an ability to place the fortunes of a show above any attachments he might have to his own contributions. The latter may be inferred—has been inferred—from the matter-of-fact explanation he gave Isaac Goldberg in 1931: “Mr. White took it out after because he said the audience was too depressed by the tragic ending to get into the mood of the lighter stuff that followed.”22
Several reviews of the first night’s New York performance survive, but perhaps because Blue Monday immediately disappeared from the Scandals, the most negative has come to be the most often cited. Charles Darnton of the New York World judged the scene “the most dismal, stupid and incredible black-face sketch that has probably ever been perpetrated. In it a dusky soprano finally killed her gambling man. She should have shot all her associates the moment they appeared and then turned the pistol on herself.”23
Yet Charles Pike Sawyer in the Post offered a different opinion: “From an artistic point of view, ‘Blue Monday Blues’ was by far the best number of the twenty.” Sawyer found “a little bit of ‘La Boheme,’ with the liebestod of ‘Tristan’ to close, burlesqued almost beyond recognition,” yet “remarkably well sung and acted.”24 Another testimonial from Merle Armitage, later an important Gershwin booster and friend, recalls its impact on opening night:
Included in this Scandals potpourri was Gershwin’s Blue Monday, now known as his one-act opera 135th Street. The audience had never heard anything like it. The next two or three numbers, comparative froth, made little impression on me. On the way out of the theater I purchased three tickets for the following night, so that friends might enjoy with me the new mood of Blue Monday: jazz in somewhat operatic form. We waited in vain throughout that second performance. No Blue Monday. The producers had seen the devastating effect of this compelling work upon the rest of their show and had withdrawn it. The other acts could not stand up to the impact of Blue Monday.25
The evidence at hand fails to support the idea that Blue Monday was cut because it was an inferior piece of work or a poor fit for the show. For White’s immediate problem was more practical than artistic. The standard time slot for a Broadway show was 8:30 to 11:15 p.m., and the Scandals ended after 11:45. As the longest scene, as well as one that brought a whole different pace to the enterprise, the Opera ala Afro American was a logical candidate for removal.
George White’s Scandals of 1922 has proven significant mainly for its impact on Gershwin’s career. His acquaintance with Whiteman led to a request to write what became the Rhapsody in Blue. Yet beyond that, as his first opera-style foray, Blue Monday deserves its own place in history. Its full-blooded engagement with African American subject matter expresses an affinity that nourished his music-making throughout his life.
While none of the Blue Monday episodes found their way into print, three Gershwin songs from the 1922 Scandals did. “I Found a Four-Leaf Clover,” sung by Coletta Ryan and an obvious concession to the popular ear, reminded Ira of a Sousa march and his father of the World War I song “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” (“Play me that war song,” Morris was known to request of George.) “Across the Sea,” also sung by Ryan, accompanied a sea spectacle dominated by fancy costumes and dancing. And in “Argentina,” the show’s paean to exoticism, Gershwin’s music tackles the problem of expression in Latin American music. With its bolero-style vamp and sinuous melody, Gershwin appears to be at home in this Latin style. “Argentina” seeks to mirror the story’s elements and passions by juxtaposing changes of meter, between three-beat and two-beat, and mode—minor-major-minor-major. Rather than smoothing rough edges, the music emphasizes them. Gershwin had learned the Latin idiom years earlier when, in December 1917, he served a stint as pianist at the Century Theatre’s all-Spanish revue, featuring the music of the Spanish composer Quinito Valverde.26 He was not an artist to let any experience go to waste.