EARLY IN THE 1970S, as the Bicentennial anniversary of the United States of America approached, the relatively small group of scholars conversant with the history of this country’s music-making found themselves in demand. As part of that crew, I met individuals I never would have met otherwise. One was Martin Williams, a jazz critic whose work I had admired for years. In person, he turned out to be the kind of friend who told you what he thought you should be doing. And it didn’t take long to learn that Martin’s belief in his musical opinions was firmer than was mine about my own. Before long he took to sending me cassette tapes of jazz-oriented music that had caught his ear. And pretty much everything he sent found its way into my Again-and-Again Playlist—a sign, I realized, of a true critic’s talent. As we discussed American songs early in the 1980s, he commented that George Gershwin was a composer who deserved a biography that a person like me should tackle. And that notion planted a hearty seed in my mind.
This book’s Introduction has already reported how Williams’s advice came to pass. And in fact, once I started compiling the chronology in which my story of Gershwin is grounded, I found myself in a new place. In the past, my research and writing on American music as a scholar had centered on musicians in the days of yore, serving the needs of Protestant worship grounded in British and Germanic traditions. In fact, when, early in the 1990s, Michael Ochs of W. W. Norton invited me to write a history of American music, I accepted his invitation, on the grounds that at least I had an idea of how to begin such a project. Having been focused on organized music-making taking root on these shores, I’d moved on in America’s Musical Landscape (1993) to investigate this country’s musical historiography by studying a succession of exemplars, from George Hood’s History of Music in New England (1846) to Charles Hamm’s Music in the New World (1983). That exercise prepared me to take on Mike Ochs’s offer. And toward the end of 2001, America’s Musical Life: A History was published by W. W. Norton.
Having completed a history whose sweep spans four centuries, and having retired from the classroom in 2003, I relished the notion of narrowing my focus. Free to chart a new course, this author found years of investigating musical practices and trends over time yielding to the notion of centering my attention on a single American musician. Convinced by now that George Gershwin was the American musician I most wanted to study, I began to make a chronology of a life lived as fresh rhythmic vitality was marking the present with a musical label: the Jazz Age. That setting invited me to learn how Gershwin’s skills and imagination had thrived as he nourished his popular music-making with techniques from the classical sphere while, on occasion, fashioning his own kind of classical works.
George Gershwin hailed from a family of Russian immigrants who had no history of musical talent. But once he and his brother Ira won success in the world of musical entertainment, other members of their family embraced their achievements. Ira, deeply aware of the excellence of George’s music, had seen to it from the start that his manuscripts were saved. The family, we recall, lived together under one roof until 1929, and by the time George died in 1937, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., had already established its own Gershwin Collection. By 2003, when I began to compile my Gershwin chronology, sources covering the composer’s activities were readily available. Indeed, by the time I took that project as far as it needed to go, I had gathered so much data that I began to wonder whether a two-volume biography was in the offing. (The publication in 2005 of Howard Pollack’s monumental biography [884 pages] eventually put that notion to rest.)
Once my chronology reached the end of Gershwin’s life, I began to write a story that I hoped would describe the man and artist he was, and what his effort meant to his contemporaries. Still in touch with H. Wiley Hitchcock, my first mentor and now an éminence gris of American musical history who had long ago moved to New York City, I sought his advice on who might act as a reader of what I was writing about my subject. He recommended Robert Kimball: an expert on American musical theater, who had written extensively on the Gershwins and knew Ira well. Through the months and years that followed, I gradually mailed my draft to Robert, chapter by chapter. And each time, after he’d read the next chapter, the two of us had a conversation on the telephone. Kimball had not known George Gershwin, but throughout the writing of my forty-chapter draft I had the good fortune to be in touch with a reader whose appreciation and depth of knowledge of my subject helped to steer me in what felt like the right direction. Conversations with another New York friend, Joseph Horowitz, helped me to situate Gershwin’s work in that milieu during the 1920s.
A unique helpmate whose advice has enhanced this book considerably is Wayne Shirley, a staff member of the Library of Congress’s Music Division. A scholar whose first article on Gershwin dates from the 1970s, Wayne is still at work, as Summertime goes to press, editing the score of Gershwin’s magnum opus: the folk opera Porgy and Bess, whose enduring success has only in recent years won for it a version of Gershwin’s score that deals with the changes he made while he was still alive. Readers of my account of that composition will encounter Wayne Shirley’s contribution to my outlook on the opera whose place in the story of Gershwin’s life and work looms large.
Thanks to a family connection—Amy Crawford, a daughter living and working in California—my go-to source for documents began in 2005 to be the archive of the Ira and Leonore Gershwin Trusts in San Francisco: a mecca for me until 2012, when its contents were added to the Gershwin holdings in the Library of Congress. That archive, managed by Michael Owen, a significant contributor to this biography, was built around the materials saved, gathered, and kept by Ira, who, once the brothers left New York for Hollywood in 1936, had remained in Southern California until his death in 1983. The story of how these holdings found their way to San Francisco is beside the point. But the archive, professionally run and informally welcoming, was a place whose ambience and clientele gave a reader a taste of the Gershwin family’s legacy: pride in its artistic past, respect for people who appreciated that past, and a readiness to aid and abet their needs and desires. I was able to visit the archive often, and its holdings added much data to my chronology. On the home front, I added to my modest store of Gershwin scores a gift from conductor and friend Gustav Meier: his well-worn copy of the Porgy and Bess vocal score.
Graduate students at the University of Michigan during my latter teaching years have proved to be helpful in gathering Gershwiniana on my behalf. Especially active early on were Todd Decker and Joshua Duchan. Eric Saylor also helped on that front, as did Sara Suhodolnik later on. Special thanks are due to Mark Clague, a Michigan undergraduate who later joined the faculty, is now a dean there, and who was instrumental in bringing the Gershwin Initiative to the Michigan campus. A couple of years ago Mark taught a course on Gershwin’s music, which he invited me to address. After that encounter I got to know Kai West, a graduate student who assisted me during the summer and fall of 2018, and then participated in a fortunate scholarly transaction. Visiting the Library of Congress that summer, he was told by Ray White, curator of the Music Division’s Gershwin’s Collection, that letters acquired recently had yet to be seen by Gershwin scholars, including me. One batch added to that of the collection’s correspondence was between Gershwin and Isaac Goldberg, his first biographer. The other batch preserved an exchange with Gregory Zilboorg, who became Gershwin’s psychiatrist in 1935 and proved to be a trusted friend. The Zilboorg letters add significantly to what we know about the love life of a man who, engaged over the years with many different women, failed to find the life partner for whom he yearned. Ray White’s heads-up and Kai West’s delivery to my doorstep of copies of “new” Goldberg and Zilboorg letters have enabled me to weave fresh information into the story near the end of its telling.
Editors at Norton have assisted me in the fashioning of this biography. Maribeth Payne shepherded the project before retiring in 2017. Susan Gaustad, who had edited America’s Musical Life, took charge of a still-swollen manuscript and exercised her gift for finding in it the clearest and most engaging story the author had managed to offer. After Helen Thomaides gave the manuscript a final editorial polish for a trade audience, Harry Haskell applied his musical knowledge plus a sharp-eyed and rigorous command of the scholarly trade’s formal conventions.
Finally, I thank three long-term Ann Arborites for help in other realms of furtherance: Jamie Abelson, a fan of music and dance in the neighborhood who, through many years of morning dog-walking, has always been ready to discuss my Gershwin venture since it was hatched; Professor Glenn Watkins, a musicological colleague at the University of Michigan since the 1960s, for his friendship and his outlook on the job each of us had taken on, including encouragement from the start to read each other’s work-in-progress; and this book’s dedicatee, my wife Penelope Crawford, an accomplished pianist whose presence, brain, and ingenuity have enabled the author to complete a book almost guaranteed to be his last.
—Easter Sunday, April 21, 2019