Songs & Stories with Harvey Granat: George Gershwin

Streamed under the aegis of the 92Y

Harvey Granat: producer, educator, performer Special Guests: Robert Kimball, historian, author, teacher, Artistic Advisor to the Ira and Lenore Gershwin Trusts and Multiple award winning vocalist Natalie Douglas

Unique in his talent to produce important orchestral/classical compositions as timeless as his popular songs, George Gershwin made a profound difference in the culture and heritage of American life.

Jacob Bruskin Gershowitz (1898 –1937) was born in Brooklyn, the second of four children. When his parents bought older brother and eventual collaborator Ira a piano, George commandeered the instrument going on to legitimate study. His first influence was likely Yiddish music emanating from the tenement neighborhood in which he grew up. Leaving school at 15, Gershwin became a song plugger.

Two years later, he published his first effort, “When You Want ‘Em, You Can’t Get ‘Em, When You’ve Got ‘Em, You Don’t Want ‘Em” Lyric-Murray Roth. “Music publishers were the all important conduit for getting songs to the public,” Kimball notes.

While working as a rehearsal pianist in Cleveland, Gershwin wrote a five page letter to his friend Maxie. Granat quotes from it: “I can’t believe the fun that everyone’s having and that you can make a living out of this!…In spite of what Jerome Kern told me, I think I can be a success.” Our host wonders aloud whether Kern discouraged his peer. Kimball thinks it unlikely.

Apparently an enthusiastic party guest, Gershwin could always be found at the piano. One night, he performed a new song written with Irving Caesar. Granat shares that the elderly Caesar personally told him “Swanee” had been written in 45 minutes. Our host then sings it to music so quiet, it seems a capella. “Everybody join me!” “How is it that two New York boys wrote about the south?” he asked the lyricist. “Me and Georgie saw Irving Berlin made money on songs about the south, so we decided to do our own,” came the response. Granat does a good gruff imitation of Caesar.

Of Gershwin’s party performances, S. N. Behrman wrote, “the room became freshly oxygenated; everybody felt it.” Fortuitously attending, Al Jolson liked the song and inserted it into his show, Sinbad. “Most productions were so loosely put together that it was common for songs to be interpolated,” Kimball explains. “Wasn’t ‘Swanee’” his biggest hit? Granat asks. Kimball concurs. “It’s extraordinary, when you think of all the songs,” our host muses. Next the composer was hired to write for The George White Scandals.

Granat reminds us that many Gershwin songs were introduced by the great Fred Astaire, a favorite interpreter of the era’s best writers. “What was it about him…?” Granat asks. “He was a natural phraser with conversational manner,” Kimball responds.

After several minor shows with another lyricist, Ira teamed with George for their first Broadway score. Lady Be Good starred Fred and Adele Astaire. Granat shows us a video of young Mel Tormé  performing a swinging version of “Fascinating Rhythm.” Vocalist Natalie Douglas then performs a lovely understated version of 1926’s “Someone To Watch Over Me.” (From Oh Kay!)

Between 1927 and 1932, in addition to popular song output, Gershwin produced a sizeable amount of classical music held in extremely high esteem. “Referring to Gershwin, Irving Berlin once said to me, the rest of us are just songwriters,” Kimball recalls.

In 1930, Girl Crazy opened on Broadway starring Ginger Rogers. It featured the debut of Ethel Merman, an asset because her voice could reach the second balcony. “The show’s `I Got Rhythm’ became one of Merman’s signature songs, and this is one of my favorites,” Granat says introducing a tender rendition of “Embraceable You,” his shoulders rising and falling like sighs. “Ninety years later it’s as beautiful and popular as it was then.” Also from that show, we then see a video of Ella Fitzgerald performing a swaying “But Not For Me.”

“American folk opera, Porgy and Bess was five years in the making,” we’re told. “Gershwin even went down to Charleston to do research. The entire cast was made up of African Americans, very daring at the time. In fact, when The Metropolitan Opera wanted to include it in their repertory stipulating white vocalists, Gershwin refused.” “It’s a work that has transcended its time,” Kimball adds. Irving Berlin called Gershwin “the only songwriter I know who became a composer.”

“Lyrics for Porgy and Bess were written perhaps fifty- fifty by Dubose Heyward and Ira Gershwin, weren’t they?” Granat asks his guest. “Yes. Heyward had no real experience writing for the theater, but an incredible poetic sense,” Kimball answers. The two men agree that Broadway’s most recent iteration of the show was less than successful for its modernization.  Natalie Douglas then gives us a languid rendition of “Summertime.” And the cotton is high…- she nods as if to someone present. Selective slip/side shows terrific control.

Porgy and Bess was not a commercial success, sending the composer into depression. Hollywood had been making overtures towards the Gershwins for some time. Ira convinced his brother it was an opportune time to go. Their first film was Damsel in Distress with Fred Astaire and Joan Fontaine. (My note: Watch the scene where they walk in the woods in which camera work pointedly obscures the non-dancer’s footwork.) “There are wonderful songs in that film, including this one,” Grant says, easing into “A Foggy Day.”

Our host is also a collector of popular song memorabilia. He regales us with anecdotes about discovering and acquiring several important Gershwin pieces. One, sold by the daughter of Chico Marx, is the original manuscript of “They Can’t Take That away From Me.” Apparently The Library of Congress owns every sheet of the annotated score except the one in Granat’s possession.

Unbelievably, this was the only Gershwin song ever nominated for an Academy Award. It lost to – wait for it- “Sweet Leilani” sung by Bing Crosby in Waikiki Wedding. Granat’s parlando is, he comments, “in the style and manner of Astaire.”

The collaborators’ final project was The Goldwyn Follies. “He wrote this melody, but Ira didn’t add lyrics until after George’s tragic death at 39,” our host says. “It was written not from a man to a woman but Ira’s love song to his brother.” We watch a clip of young Frank Sinatra performing a bouncy “Our Love Is Here to Stay.”

Granat closes today’s program with a Sammy Cahn lyric he feels appropriate to the times:

Look to your heart, when there are words to say
And never leave your love unspoken.
Day by day, we go our thoughtless way, and only when we pray
Do we remember those we love. “Look To Your Heart”

Opening Photos of Harvey Granat and Robert Kimball Courtesy of the Y Photo of Natalie Douglas: Bill Westmoreland

Coming Up in May- Live Streaming of: “Rogers and Hart,”“Rogers and Hammerstein,” “Lerner and Lowe”

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