Summertime

CHAPTER 1. THE GERSHWINS: MORRIS AND ROSE AND FAMILY

4.On 1 March 1916, a contract was issued for George’s first published song, “When You Want ’Em, You Can’t Get ’Em; When You’ve Got ’Em, You Don’t Want ’Em,” with words by Murray Roth, issued by Harry Von Tilzer music publishers. The seventeen-year-old composer signed his name as “George Gershwin,” and that is how it appeared on the song when it was published in May. Robert Kimball and Alfred Simon, The Gershwins (New York: Bonanza Books, 1973; henceforth Kemball and Simon), 12. They report: “George had always admired Ed Wynn, the comedian, and so changed the ‘vin’ ending to ‘win’ in honor of his idol.” The Perfection Music Company’s March 1916 advertisement for the first piano rolls made by the composer also lists him as “George Gershwin.” However, when Ira began his diary in September 1916, he signed his name “I. Gershvin,” and he continued to do so for some time after. The family’s adoption of the now-standard spelling was a gradual process.

CHAPTER 2. A PIANO IN THE HOUSE, AND ELSEWHERE

Edward Jablonski, Gershwin (New York: Doubleday, 1987; henceforth Jablonski 1987), 8, gives a more explicit and extensive memory: “I remember being particularly impressed by his left hand. I had no idea he could play and found that despite his roller-skating activities, the kid parties he attended, the many street games he participated in (with an occasional resultant bloody nose) he had found time to experiment on a player piano at the home of a friend on Seventh Street.”

24.Another reason to believe that Gershwin’s song-plugging career began in the fall rather than the spring is that, in later interviews, he refers to his stint at the Remick firm, which ended on March 17, 1917, as having lasted two and a half years, or sometimes just two, but never three or “almost three.” Also, when mentioning his age when he started, he was likely to say sixteen, or even seventeen. He turned sixteen on 26 September 1914. From that birthday to the day he left Remick’s was almost two and a half years. In 1938, the year after his death, Ira Gershwin, usually meticulous about factual accuracy, wrote that George had begun his Tin Pan Alley career at fifteen. If that and the Irving Berlin story are both true, he must have started plugging songs in late August or early September: after his return from the Catskills but before his sixteenth birthday. (See Armitage 1938, 17, for Ira’s statement.)

27.The plugging function referred to here was that of a publisher’s employee who, by singing songs in public settings, advertised them for sale. For example, in a vaudeville house, a standard ploy was for a pianist to begin a targeted number onstage, prompting a song plugger planted in the audience to rise and sing it, doing all he could to urge audience members to join in. (A sheet with the song’s words was sometimes distributed beforehand; copies of the sheet music were likely to be for sale on the premises, or nearby.) Sometimes, if he had a voice that could carry throughout the house, the singer might be the piano player himself. There are no accounts, however, of George Gershwin in either role. Whatever plugging he did seems to have been at the piano. Goldberg writes: “Remick’s, nightly, sent forth to the cafés of New York City a corps of some eight pluggers, accompanied by song-and-dance artists who would sing and hoof the new tunes into the popular ear. George was one of the fleet” (75).

CHAPTER 3. A SONGWRITER EMERGES (1917–18)

CHAPTER 4. FROM SYRACUSE TO NEW YORK (1918–19)

CHAPTER 5. SOCIETY, THE MUSIC BUSINESS, AND GEORGE WHITE’S SCANDALS (1920)

CHAPTER 6. “ARTHUR FRANCIS” AND EDWARD KILENYI

2.Goldberg, 174. When “Waiting for the Sun to Come Out” (see below) came out, the disparity in experience between the brothers was large. Before he and George wrote the new song, Ira had written lyrics for only six songs; and on two of the six, he had joined forces with more experienced hands: Lou Paley on “Beautiful Bird” (1917) and B. G. DeSylva on “Kitchenette” (1919). In contrast, by then George had written more than fifty songs before he and Ira fashioned “Waiting for the Sun to Come Out,” and twenty-three of them were published. A majority of his songs—thirty-four of the fifty-two, in fact—were written for stage productions, so the range of his experience included work as a Tin Pan Alley songsmith, a vaudeville accompanist, and both a rehearsal pianist and a composer of Broadway shows. George had by then also worked with at least a dozen different lyricists, including his brother.

5.On 9 October 1920, Billboard magazine noted that E. Ray Goetz’s production Piccadilly to Broadway was “expected to go into New York in about three weeks’ time” (26). More than a month later, the same journal carried a notice dated New York, 18 November, and announcing that the show, still on the road, was about to undergo further revision. “At the termination of its engagement at Providence, R.I., last week,” the notice read, Piccadilly to Broadway was to be “closed for reconstruction and restaging, under the direction of Ned Wayburn. Next week it will reopen at Springfield, Mass. The piece will be renamed, and, after the Springfield engagement, will go to the Majestic Theater, Boston, for a run, with a New York showing to follow.” Several new cast members were also named (26).

13.It should be noted, too, that although Gershwin’s lessons with Kilenyi ended early in 1923 at the latest, the relationship between the two men continued throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s. More than once, when Gershwin found himself in need of specialized advice relating to a problem he faced with classical music, he sought it from Kilenyi. In the late 1920s, for example, when Gershwin was hired not only to play in a summer concert at Lewisohn Stadium in New York, but to conduct the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Society there, Kilenyi helped him to prepare for that assignment. And in Hollywood in the early 1930s, as he was completing his Second Rhapsody, his former teacher claimed to have helped him solve a problem relating to the end of that composition. Edward Kilenyi, “George Gershwin . . . as I Knew Him,” Etude 68, no. 10 (October 1950): 11–12, 64.

CHAPTER 7. SONGWRITER AND COMPOSER (1922)

8.Rayno 2003, 50, lists the following, compiled from the pages of the New York Clipper, 1921–24: Eddie Elkins and his Pavilion Royal Orchestra; Barney Rapp and his Broadwalk Orchestra; Irving Weiss’s Romance of Rhythm Orchestra; the All Star Trio—F. Wheeler Wadsworth (alto sax), Victor Arden (piano), and George Hamilton Green (xylophone); Joe Raymond and his Little Club Orchestra; Clyde Doerr and his Club Royal Orchestra; Arnold Johnson (and later Jimmy Guest) and the Vernon Country Club Orchestra; the Carlton Terrace Orchestra in Cleveland; the Hotel Sinton Orchestra in Cincinnati; the New Ocean House Orchestra in Swampscott, MA; Maurice Swerdlow and his Orchestra; the Whiteman Piano Quartette (Zez Confrey, Victor Arden, Phil Ohman, and Al Mitchell); the Whiteman Saxophone Sextette; the Russian Balalaika Orchestra, directed by Harry Mogiloff and Charles Weinberg; Charles Dornberger’s Orchestra; the Zez Confrey Orchestra; Paul Whiteman’s Collegians; The Virginians, led by Ross Gorman; Al Mitchell and his Arcadia Orchestra; Joe Gibson and the Moulin Rouge Orchestra; Eddie Davis and his Orchestra; Charles McLean and his Orchestra; Jimmy Caruso and his Orchestra; Louis Rizzo and his Orchestra; and Alex Hyde’s Orchestra.

CHAPTER 8. AMERICANS IN LONDON (1922–23)

CHAPTER 9. A RECITAL AND AN EXPERIMENT (1923–24)

CHAPTER 10. RHAPSODY IN BLUE (1924)

CHAPTER 11. ENTER IRA (1924)

CHAPTER 12. A YEAR IN THE LIFE, PART I (1924–25)

CHAPTER 13. A YEAR IN THE LIFE, PART II (CONCERTO IN F)

But according to Deems Taylor, Of Men and Music (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1937), Chapter 13, “Godfather to Polymnia,” 144–53, Walter Damrosch was also a talented and faithful servant of American music-making during the twentieth century’s first several decades.

CHAPTER 14. A YEAR IN THE LIFE, PART III

CHAPTER 15. IN ARENAS OLD AND NEW (1926)

CHAPTER 16. OH, KAY! (1926)

CHAPTER 17. UPS AND DOWNS: KAUFMAN ON THE SCENE (1927)

6.Though direct evidence is lacking, there is good reason to connect this statement to the publication of W. C. Handy’s groundbreaking Blues: An Anthology, with an introduction by Abbe Niles (New York: A. and C. Boni, 1926); Handy reviewed Gershwin’s music in the New Republic in December. The first page of Niles’s forty-page introduction states that the blues “began as a form of Afro-American folksong—a ‘form’ since they were distinguished primarily by their peculiar structure,” and that W. C. Handy “wrote the first (and many more) published blues, commencing a revolution in the popular tunes of this land comparable only to that brought about by the introduction of ragtime” (Handy, 1). Later, Niles characterizes Gershwin as “a pioneer” among composers for his use of the blues—not for its “over-and-over” twelve-bar form but as an “insistent experimenter” who found in blues music “material fit for building on a larger scale” (Handy, 21).

Moreover, the last seven pieces in the anthology, grouped together by Niles under the heading “The White Viewpoint” (Handy, 38), include complete blues songs by Cliff Hess, Irving Berlin, and Jerome Kern, followed by an excerpt from John Alden Carpenter’s jazz ballet Krazy Kat, and then three Gershwin selections: the song “The Half of It Dearie Blues” from Lady, Be Good!; the first page of the Rhapsody in Blue in a solo piano version; and three pages of a short-score arrangement of the Concerto in F, second movement. In Cincinnati, Gershwin told his lunch companions that in the Concerto in F, “the ‘blue’ or sad melody” in the second movement “is different from the ordinary ‘blues’ in that for the first time I have given it a distinctly nocturnal atmosphere.”

An admirer of the song, or at least of the refrain’s harmonic plan, was Duke Ellington, who based a 1941 instrumental flagwaver he named “The Giddybug Gallop” on Gershwin’s chord progressions for “Strike Up the Band.”

CHAPTER 18. FROM AARONS TO ZIEGFELD (1927)

6.John Anderson, “The Play: The Alvin Theatre Opens with the Astaires in ‘Funny Face,’ ” New York Evening Post, 23 Nov. 1927. A much later summary gives a fuller idea of the plot, while leaving Act II to the imagination. This one takes the jewel robbery as the show’s central event. “Jimmy Reeve [Fred Astaire] has three wards: Frankie [Adele Astaire], June [Gertrude McDonald], and Dora [Betty Compton]. When Jimmy takes Frankie’s diary (she has been filling it with nasty lies about him), Frankie enlists a pilot she worships (Peter [Allen Kearns]) and Dora’s boyfriend (Dugsie [William Kent]) to steal it back. But while Peter and Dugsie are carrying out their mission, two real crooks—Chester [Victor Moore] and Herbert [Earl Hampton]—break into Jimmy’s home to purloin the family jewels. The diary and the jewels (both kept in blue envelopes) get switched; second-act mayhem is the result.” Tommy Krasker and Robert Kimball, Catalog of the American Musical ([New York:] National Institute for Opera and Musical Theater, 1988), 115.

CHAPTER 19. AMERICANS IN EUROPE (1928)

CHAPTER 20. BACK IN THE U.S.A.: AN AMERICAN IN PARIS (1928)

Having read many reviews of “An American in Paris,” Chotzinoff, striking a good-humored tone, takes issue with what he finds an unwarranted dismissal of what Gershwin had accomplished. His response? To devise an experiment involving audience members.

“At the second performance of ‘An American in Paris,’ ” he explains, “I placed myself at one of the exits of Carnegie Hall and stopped every sixth subscriber with the query: ‘Did you think Mr. Gershwin’s piece meaningless twaddle?’ ” The answers he got revealed that those who had heard twaddle were offended less by Gershwin’s music than by what that music was said to signify. A number of naysayers deemed the score unworthy of respect, he discovered, because the story told in the program was undignified for a Philharmonic crowd. How could such an audience possibly care about an American who, according to Mr. Taylor, sets out deliberately to partake of the grosser pleasures and aspects of the French? In other words, the notion that the traveler depicted in Gershwin’s new composition was a drinker of alcohol, and may have crossed paths with prostitutes in Paris, was beyond the pale for a respectable concertgoer.

Tongue in cheek, Chotzinoff goes on to propose a counterstory far removed from the one suggested by Gershwin, then written and polished by Deems Taylor. In his Plan B, the protagonist, an American in the mold of Walt Whitman, revels in the human vitality afoot in Paris, and his day ends in Montmartre, where he regales the city’s demimonde with tales of kindred spirits who are alive and well in America.

CHAPTER 21. IN MIDCAREER (1929)

7.In fact, Al Jolson and Ruby Keeler were married in September 1928. At the first performance of Show Girl in the Boston tryout on 25 June 1929, “Liza” was introduced with unusual elaboration. As described in Herbert Goldman, Jolson: A Legend Comes to Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990; first published 1988), 191–92, a male singer, Frank McHugh, delivered the song’s scene-setting verse, which then gave way to Ruby Keeler’s softshoe-style dance to the serene, lyrical refrain of “Liza,” to be followed by her singing of that melody. In the debut performance, however, as McHugh’s verse came to an end, Jolson, seated in the second row of the audience, rose to his feet and, “at the top of his lungs,” sang the refrain. His unexpected gesture drew an encore from the opening-night crowd. (See Katharine Lyons’s review of Show Girl in the Boston Traveler, 26 June 1929.)

CHAPTER 22. A BREAKUP AND A REDO (1929–30)

The summer of 1929 saw the beginning of George’s connection with Isaac Goldberg, who was already gathering information for the biography he would publish in 1931. Here is what Goldberg wrote about the end of the Show Girl venture: “Ziegfeld retired to his chambers, and wrote plethoric epistles, sent long telegrams to Gershwin, less than a mile away. There were disputes,—the sort that Ziggy habitually has with his composers. The Gershwins were compelled to sue for royalties. Show Girl, from the first, had had no show. It was too bad, for McEvoy’s book had the makings of a good take-off on the modern sweetie and modern salesmanship. The music, amid the general mix-up, went unnoticed” (Goldberg, 246).

8.A column signed “Mephisto” in Musical America, 25 Dec. 1929, took strong exception to this opinion. “Lest there be any doubt about it, let me say that I am second to none in my admiration for what amounts to little short of genius in the case of Mr. Berlin,” the writer explains. “I think he has written popular songs for a decade and a half which have an extraordinarily strong appeal, and I count ‘Say It with Music,’ ‘Blue Skies,’ ‘Tell Her in the Springtime,’ ‘How About Me?’ and ‘The Song Is Ended’ among the outstanding tunes of their kind. But to confuse a pronounced gift for this kind of music with a prodigious genius like that of Franz Schubert is not only to mislead innocent readers of one’s opinion but to indict oneself as a musician without critical standards. Surely the very talented composer of the ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ now that he has entered the concert halls, would not have us think that about him. How about it, George? Asks your / Mephisto.”

In later years Ewen published two biographies of Gershwin. But in 1973, Lawrence D. Stewart, coauthor of The Gershwin Years (1958; 1973), omitted these titles from his bibliographic essay in the latter edition, on the grounds that the quality of Ewen’s research was less than “serious.” See p. 391.

CHAPTER 23. BOYFRIEND, SONGWRITER, MUSICAL CITIZEN

CHAPTER 24. GIRL CRAZY (1930)

On how Gershwin’s song fit into the jazz repertory of its day, see Richard Crawford and Jeffrey Magee, Jazz Standards on Record, 1900–1942: A Core Repertory, CBMR Monographs, No. 4 (Chicago: Columbia College, Center for Black Music Research, 1992). See also “George Gershwin’s ‘I Got Rhythm’ ” (1930), Chapter 6 in Richard Crawford, The American Musical Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 217–35, 336–44.

CHAPTER 25. HOLLYWOOD AND THE SECOND RHAPSODY (1930–31)

6.In the shooting script dated December 1930, Heather’s dream continues in a more elaborate direction, and in midtown Manhattan. The key she has been given is used to open the door to “the great Cathedral on Fifth Avenue.” Suddenly aware that she is dressed in a bridal gown, Heather realizes too that “in formation around the Cathedral are crowds of Indians, cowboys,” and “girl graduates in cap and gown . . . singing the counter melody to ‘Delicious.’ ” A solemn ceremony is afoot: a wedding, in fact, that involves her. But who is the groom? Now she realizes that there are two of them: Larry and Sascha. Meeting her at the altar, each pledges his love for her with a ring, one for each hand. When the rings are in place, the minister announces: “I pronounce you men and wife,” whereupon Larry and Sascha serenade her with “Delishious.”

8.Here and there in the shooting script, and occasionally in Janet Gaynor’s pronunciation, evidence can be found that Scottish dialect—a distinctive mode of pronunciation known as the Scottish “brogue”—was attempted. To the ear of an author whose paternal grandparents were Scottish Lowlanders, and whose father often used the brogue he inherited from them to humorous effect, the attempt was realized with only modest consistency. On the other hand, Gaynor did employ what might be called a Scottish cadence: a rise and fall of the voice, and a rhythm of speech, that distinguishes her from the other characters, whose ways of speaking English include several different dialects. In this cinematic tale of immigration, the native Russian speakers include Sascha, his sister Olga, and his brothers Toscha, Yascha, and Mischa, who is married to Mamushka. Jansen’s accent is Swedish. O’Flynn was born an Irishman.

CHAPTER 26. OF THEE I SING (1931)

CHAPTER 27. MORE DOWNS AND UPS AND DOWNS (1932)

In the 1970s his close friend Emil Mosbacher recalled that Gershwin had “great admiration” for Kay Swift, “and both talked to me about marriage—separately, mind you—and I had one answer to both of them. I said that I wasn’t going to open my mouth, I wasn’t that crazy. From George I’d get it every day. He was nuts about her.” Kimball and Simon, 151.

CHAPTER 28. THE LAST MUSICAL COMEDY (1933)

CHAPTER 29. A TURN IN THE ROAD (1933–34)

5.Heyward’s mother, Jane Screven (“Janie”) Heyward, an energetic researcher into local customs and lore, had made the Gullah Negroes, whose culture she grew to admire, a focus of her interest and a presence in the family’s everyday life. By the 1920s, she was appearing as a dialect recitalist. Her stories sometimes focused on the emotional and cultural kinship between white and black women across the racial divide. Therefore, the “aristocratic white” background that DuBose Heyward brought to his poetry and fiction after World War I was grounded in a long, sympathetic, and multifaceted engagement with local African American culture. See James M. Hutchisson, DuBose Heyward: A Charleston Gentleman and the World of Porgy and Bess (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 6–9, which supports Janie Heyward’s involvement in Gullah culture, DuBose’s experience with local black folks, and his artistic decision to write about them.

22.Jablonski and Stewart 1973, 208–09. The authors elaborate on what they learned from Mueller: “Many stops for the orchestra were sponsored by local music clubs or other culture groups, whose membership was largely made up of women, who made a point of meeting the train upon arrival. In St. Paul, for example, a mob of women met them at the station. As Paul and James Melton had left the train before George, they led the way through the crowd with George trailing diffidently behind. Paul carried the practice keyboard. Soon he and Melton were surrounded. A woman threw her arms around Melton, kissed him, then turned to Paul, saying ‘Welcome to St. Paul, Mr. Gershwin!’ and planted a kiss on his cheek.” “This was generally the tenor of the tour. In Kansas City the concert was held in the Armory and backstage Paul encountered a dowager who announced, ‘I’m looking for my niece, have you seen her?’ No, he had not, but she was soon discovered in Melton’s dressing room—and forcibly, but gently, evicted.” For more on Melton, see Pollack, 563–65, 648.

CHAPTER 30. MUSIC BY GERSHWIN AND PORGY AND BESS, ACT I (1935–36)

CHAPTER 31. PORGY AND BESS, ACT II

CHAPTER 32. PORGY AND BESS, ACT III

CHAPTER 33. PERFORMING PORGY AND BESS

CHAPTER 34. JUDGING PORGY AND BESS

CHAPTER 35. COMPOSER OF PORGY AND BESS

CHAPTER 36. HOLLYWOOD SONGWRITER I: SHALL WE DANCE (1936–37)

CHAPTER 37. HOLLYWOOD SONGWRITER II: A DAMSEL IN DISTRESS (1937)

CHAPTER 38. GONNA RISE UP SINGING

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In several measures (mm. 1–2, 8) the composer added a second voice to the melody line, signaling a harmonic choice he deems essential to his new song’s character at that moment. Another bar (m. 7) suggests that, before deciding to end his second phrase with a whole-note A, he toyed with the idea of continuing the melodic figure in the preceding measure (m. 6). Finally, in bar 9 he considers anticipating the second beat with a tied eighth note before deciding to place the second note directly on that beat. Gershwin’s “start” points to the form his refrain will take. The last three notes in m. 8, leading into a new section, signal that the melody he has in mind will be structured in two halves: in abac form, in fact, whose last section begins with a reference to b music and ends with the title-line sung to new cadential material.