George Gershwin

George Gershwin was born Jacob Gershwine on September 26, 1898, in Brooklyn, New York, the second of four children of Morris and Rose Gershovitz, Jewish immigrants from St. Petersburg, Russia ^[1]. His father drifted through a long string of small businesses, and the family moved frequently around Brooklyn and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Nothing in the household suggested a musical future. George spent his early boyhood on the streets, roller skating and playing ball, and by his own later account regarded music as something for sissies ^[2].

That changed around 1910, when the family bought an upright piano intended for his older brother Ira. George, then about twelve, sat down and astonished the family by picking out tunes he had absorbed from player pianos and neighborhood performances ^[1]. The piano became his. After brief instruction from local teachers, he began studying with Charles Hambitzer, a serious musician who introduced him to Chopin, Liszt, and Debussy and refused payment because he believed in the boy's gift ^[2]. Hambitzer's death in 1918 cut the relationship short, but Gershwin later credited him as the first major influence on his musical life.

Formal schooling held little appeal. At fifteen Gershwin left the High School of Commerce to take a job as a song plugger for the Jerome H. Remick publishing house on Tin Pan Alley, pounding out new songs for performers at fifteen dollars a week ^[3]. He was reportedly the youngest plugger in the district. The job gave him an education no conservatory could match: thousands of hours at the keyboard, daily contact with the machinery of popular song, and a growing itch to write his own.

Gershwin published his first song in 1916 and left Remick the following year to work as a rehearsal pianist and cut piano rolls under his own name and several pseudonyms ^[3]. The breakthrough arrived in 1919 on two fronts. His first complete Broadway score, La La Lucille, opened that spring, and his song Swanee, written with lyricist Irving Caesar, caught the attention of Al Jolson. Jolson interpolated it into his show Sinbad, and the song sold in enormous quantities of sheet music and records, making the twenty-one-year-old composer suddenly wealthy and famous ^[1].

Through the early 1920s Gershwin wrote the annual scores for George White's Scandals, a revue series that ran from 1920 to 1924, producing songs such as I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise and Somebody Loves Me ^[2]. During these years he began working regularly with his brother Ira Gershwin, whose wry, conversational lyrics fit George's rhythmic melodies so naturally that the two became one of the defining songwriting partnerships in American theater. Their first full collaboration on a Broadway score, Lady, Be Good!, opened in 1924 with Fred and Adele Astaire and included Fascinating Rhythm and the song Oh, Lady Be Good ^[3].

The event that separated Gershwin from every other Broadway composer took place on February 12, 1924, at Aeolian Hall in Manhattan. Bandleader Paul Whiteman had asked him for a concert work blending jazz and classical elements for a program billed as An Experiment in Modern Music. Written in a matter of weeks and orchestrated by Ferde Grofé, Rhapsody in Blue opened with a now famous clarinet glissando and made Gershwin, who played the piano part himself, a national figure overnight ^[4]. Critics argued about the piece, but audiences embraced it immediately, and it earned him a level of attention no American composer of concert music had previously enjoyed.

Any honest account of George Gershwin achievements has to run on two parallel tracks, popular and symphonic, because he refused to choose between them. On Broadway, he and Ira turned out a run of successful musicals: Oh, Kay! in 1926, Funny Face in 1927, Girl Crazy in 1930, which introduced both Ethel Merman and the songs I Got Rhythm and Embraceable You ^[3]. Their political satire Of Thee I Sing opened in 1931 and became the first musical awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, though the prize named the writers of the book and lyrics rather than the composer ^[1].

On the concert side, the New York Symphony Society commissioned a piano concerto after the success of the Rhapsody. Gershwin, determined to prove he could orchestrate his own music, taught himself what he needed and completed the Concerto in F in 1925, premiering it at Carnegie Hall under Walter Damrosch with himself at the piano ^[4]. A 1928 trip to Europe, where he met Ravel, Prokofiev, and other leading composers, fed directly into the tone poem An American in Paris, which used actual taxi horns in its orchestration and premiered at Carnegie Hall that December ^[2].

His largest and most disputed work came last. Drawn to DuBose Heyward's novel Porgy, about a disabled Black beggar in Charleston, South Carolina, Gershwin spent years securing the rights and months living on Folly Island near Charleston absorbing Gullah music and worship ^[5]. The result, Porgy and Bess, opened in Boston and then New York in 1935 with a cast of classically trained Black singers. Gershwin called it a folk opera. Its initial run of 124 performances lost money, and debates over its portrayal of Black life have continued ever since, yet the score, containing Summertime, It Ain't Necessarily So, and Bess, You Is My Woman Now, is now widely regarded as a landmark of American opera and entered the repertory of major houses, including the Metropolitan Opera in 1985 ^[5].

Gershwin never married. His longest romantic attachment was with Kay Swift, herself a gifted composer and songwriter, whom he met in 1925; their relationship lasted a decade, and after his death she helped Ira assemble and complete unpublished Gershwin material ^[6]. He was linked at various times with other women, including, in his final Hollywood years, the actress Paulette Goddard, but he remained a bachelor living at the center of a large, close, noisy family in which Ira was both collaborator and anchor ^[2].

He was famously social and famously fond of his own piano playing. At Manhattan and Hollywood parties he would sit at the keyboard for hours, improvising on his songs while guests gathered around, behavior friends found irresistible and a few found exhausting ^[1]. Away from music he painted seriously, producing accomplished portraits including one of Arnold Schoenberg, and he built a significant collection of modern art with works by Picasso, Chagall, and Rouault ^[6]. He was also an eager athlete, playing tennis and golf, and for several years he underwent psychoanalysis, a fashionable pursuit in his circle.

His appetite for study never faded. Even at the height of his fame he sought lessons from composers and theorists, including Henry Cowell and the mathematician-musician Joseph Schillinger, whose systematic methods Gershwin drew on during the composition of Porgy and Bess ^[2]. The oft repeated stories of established composers declining to teach him, with the punchline that he was already first-rate at being Gershwin, exist in several versions and are impossible to verify precisely, but they capture how his contemporaries saw him.

After the commercial disappointment of Porgy and Bess and of the brothers' later satirical shows, George and Ira accepted a contract from RKO and moved to Beverly Hills in August 1936 ^[3]. Hollywood paid handsomely and the work went quickly. For the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers picture Shall We Dance (1937) they wrote Let's Call the Whole Thing Off and They Can't Take That Away from Me; for A Damsel in Distress, released the same year, they produced A Foggy Day and Nice Work If You Can Get It ^[1]. Gershwin also kept up his concert appearances, performing his works with West Coast orchestras.

In early 1937 he began suffering headaches, dizzy spells, and a recurring impression of smelling burning rubber. During a February performance of the Concerto in F with the Los Angeles Philharmonic he suffered a brief blackout at the keyboard ^[6]. Physicians examined him repeatedly through the spring and, finding nothing physical, several suggested his troubles were emotional in origin. His condition worsened sharply in early July. On July 9 he collapsed into a coma, and doctors at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles discovered a malignant brain tumor, a glioblastoma. Emergency surgery in the early hours of July 11 could not save him, and he died that morning at the age of 38 ^[7].

The news stunned the country. Radio programs paid tribute within hours, and memorial services in Hollywood and New York drew enormous crowds of colleagues and admirers ^[7]. He was buried at Westchester Hills Cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. At his death he left sketches and unpublished songs that Ira, working with Kay Swift and others, later shaped into material for films such as The Shocking Miss Pilgrim in 1947.

Few American musicians have had an afterlife like Gershwin's. Rhapsody in Blue became a kind of national soundtrack, performed constantly in concert halls, adopted by United Airlines as an advertising theme, and featured in films from Woody Allen's Manhattan to Disney's Fantasia 2000 ^[4]. Porgy and Bess traveled the world in a celebrated 1950s international tour that included performances in Moscow during the Cold War, and productions at Glyndebourne, the Metropolitan Opera, and on Broadway have kept it before the public ^[5]. The songs he wrote with Ira, among them Someone to Watch Over Me, But Not for Me, and Our Love Is Here to Stay, form part of the core of the Great American Songbook and have been recorded by Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, and countless jazz musicians who use I Got Rhythm's chord changes as a standard improvising framework ^[2].

Institutional recognition accumulated steadily. Congress awarded George and Ira a special Congressional Gold Medal in 1985, and in 2007 the Library of Congress created the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, its highest award for a popular musician, first given to Paul Simon ^[8]. The George and Ira Gershwin Collection at the Library of Congress preserves manuscripts, letters, and memorabilia for scholars. A posthumous Pulitzer citation honoring George's centennial was issued in 1998.

Among the plainest George Gershwin facts is this: he compressed an entire career's worth of invention into roughly two decades of work. Composers as different as Schoenberg, who played tennis with him weekly in Hollywood, and later generations of film and theater writers have acknowledged what he opened up, a way of writing that treated jazz rhythm and blues harmony as materials fit for any musical purpose ^[6]. Every survey of American music and every serious George Gershwin biography returns to the same point: he erased a boundary between popular and serious music that has never fully been rebuilt.