George Gershwins I Got Rhythm (1930) Thanks to Ira Gershwin, we know something about the making of the song I Got Rhythm. The year was 1930, and the Gershwin brothers were at work on the score of Girl Crazy , their next Broadway show. George had presented Ira with the music for the new song, leaving it to him to come up with lyrics. (Ira once wrote about his craft that since most of his lyrics were arrived at by fitting words mosaically to music already composed, any resemblance to actual poetry, living or dead, is highly improbable.)The chorus of the song George gave Ira, based on a syncopated four-note figure, was cast in standard thirty-two-bar AABA form with a two-bar tag. Ira struggled with the lyric. Filling in the seventy-three syllables of the refrain wasnt as simple as it sounds, he later recalled. For over two weeks I kept fooling around with . . . sets of double rhymes for the trios of short two-foot lines, that is, with the rhyme scheme aaab/cccb. Heres Iras illustration of the kinds of rhymes he first tried to write: Roly-Poly, Eating solely Ravioli, Better watch your diet or bust. Lunch or dinner, Youre a sinner. Please get thinner. Losing all that fat is a must. Yet, no matter what series of double rhymes . . . I tried, the results were not quite satisfactory; they . . . [gave a] jingly Mother Goose quality to a tune which should throw its weight around more. Ira solved his problem only after he began to try non rhyming lines. This approach felt stronger, he recalled, and finally I arrived at the present refrain (the rhymed verse came later), with only more—door and mind him—find him [as] the rhymes. Though there is nothing remarkable about all this, it was a bit daring for me who usually depended on rhyme insurance. Ira also explained that he did not write Ive got rhythm but borrowed the verbs most colloquial form,the one used for the present tense instead of have, and the one going back to my childhood: e.g., I got a toothache didnt mean I had a toothache, but only I have one. . .. Obviously, Ive got nothing against Ive got since the verse ends with Look at what Ive got. [But] . . . the musically less assertive and regularly rhymed verse seems to require the more conventional phrasing. In the finished song, Ira used the four-note figure to list lifes valued possessions The part of Frisco Kate Fothergill, was given to a newcomer, the twenty-one-year-old Ethel Merman, and it was she who introduced I Got Rhythm to the public. The projection and energy of Ethel Mermans performance was not the only reason I Got Rhythm proved a show-stopper in Girl Crazy . For in the Broadway theater of that day, it was customary to turn the pit orchestra loose with hot ride-out choruses at the ends of peppy, up-tempo numbers like this one. Among the members of the band that played at the Alvin Theater during the shows run were musicians who must have waited eagerly for such moments and made the most of them when they arrived. The band had been formed by Red Nichols, a twenty-five-year-old cornetist who had already gained a reputation in jazz circles for recordings with the group Red Nichols and His Five Pennies. It also included several others who were soon to make their mark in the world of swing: reedman Benny Goodman (age twenty-one), drummer Gene Krupa (twenty-one), trombonist Glenn Miller (twenty-six), and trumpeter Charlie Teagarden (seventeen). Because Goodman, Krupa, and Merman (twenty-two) stayed before the public for many years, they may now be remembered as grandparently figures. Its well to recall how young and close to the beginnings of their careers they were when they first performed I Got Rhythm—a fresh new tune by a songwriter not much older than they were (32 years). From the time of the eighteenth century, with a composer like Alexander Reinagle, through the nineteenth, with Foster, Root, and others, and on into the early twentieth, American popular music circulated chiefly as sheet music designed for home performers. But in 1920 a printers strike and a paper shortage caused production costs to triple,and almost overnight the phonograph recording replaced sheet music as the chief means of popular musics circulation.Numbers tell the story. During one seventy-five-week period beginning in 1922, a song by Irving Berlin, Say It with Music, sold 375,000 printed copies—a healthy amount but barely a tenth as large as the 3.5 million sold by Ray Egan and Richard Whitings Till We Meet Again in just a few months of 1918. Berlins Say It with Music was nevertheless a hit. By what measure? By its sale during the same seventy-five weeks of x million records and 100,000 piano rolls.In 1930, Broadway shows, with their capacity for plugging songs during long runs in New York and through traveling companies, were one of the sheet-music industrys chief moneymaking properties, with publishers investing in shows to obtain the copyrights of their songs.A Broadway show like Girl Crazy thus aimed at success on two fronts: as an evenings entertainment for an audience in a theater and as a source of songs that could be published, recorded, and marketed individually, regardless of the shows fate.Thus, as with other Broadway shows of the time, the music publishing and recording industries hovered over the beginning of Girl Crazy in hopes of finding new Gershwin songs they could turn into gold.
Posted on: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 00:09:40 +0000
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