1. Ira Gershwin, Lyrics on Several Occasions: A Selection of Stage & Screen Lyrics Written for Sundry Situations; and Now Arranged in Arbitrary Categories. To which have been added many informative annotations & disquisitions on their why & wherefore, their whom-for, their how; and matters associative (New York, 1959; reprint, New York, 1973), xi.

2. Gershwin, Lyrics , 342-43.

3. The book was by Guy Bolton and John McGowan, with music by George Gershwin and lyrics by Ira Gershwin. Eight songs from the show were published:

"Bidin' My Time," "Boy! What Love Has Done to Me!," ''But Not For Me," "Could You Use Me?," "Embraceable You," "I Got Rhythm," "Sam and Delilah," and "Treat Me Rough." Girl Crazy , produced by Alex A. Aarons and Vinton Freedley, ran for 272 performances on Broadway, closing on 6 June 1931.

4. A recording released in 1990, George and Ira Gershwin, Girl Crazy , (Elektra Nonesuch compact disc 9 79250-2), contains an informative program book. A plot synopsis appears on pages 62-64.

5. In Gershwin, Girl Crazy (program book), 22, Miles Kreuger writes:

Theater mythology tells us that the audience first felt the impact of Merman's vocal power when she sang "I Got Rhythm." Not so. That was her second song. Throughout the entire first act, never singing a note, Merman engaged in comic banter, generally with William Kent [Slick Fothergill, Kate's husband]. There was no reason for the audience even to suspect that she was a singer. It was not until the final scene of the first act, the bluesy saloon, with gambling couples sinuously dancing to Al Siegel's on-stage, upright piano, that the Merman explosion was felt. In a saucy slit skirt and a loosely draped, low-cut blouse, she slinked out and began to sing, "Dee-li-laaaah, was a flooosey . . ." with a disarming blend of pure vocal power and yet suggestive innuendo. The effect was stunning. No sooner had she finished "Sam and Delilah" than Ethel Merman, surrounded by chorus girls, tore the house down with "I Got Rhythm."

As Merman wrote in her autobiography, during her "high C" chorus "the audience went a little crazy."

6. The DeMarcos were a dance team, Antonio and Renée DeMarco. Others featured in the original cast were William Kent and Allen Kearns.

7. Merman's performance is pitched in F rather than the published key, B-flat. In the second chorus, she sustains the C above middle C (the dominant) on the syllable "Ahh" through the first six bars of each "A" section, then sings the words "Who could ask for anything more?" to Gershwin's melody.

8. The recording, numbered Decca DXB.153 (T34), was taped for me by Arnold Jacobson of Arnold's Archives, Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1985.

9. In Gershwin, Girl Crazy (program book), 51-55, Richard M. Sudhalter discusses the jazz performers in the pit. Nichols, he writes, was "a shrewd and aggressive businessman . . . on good terms with Broadway contractors," but some musicians questioned his credentials as a jazz player. (Tenor saxophonist Bud Freeman called Nichols "a synthetic. . . [and] very mechanical player" who "copied every line he had ever learned in jazz from Bix" Beiderbecke—Bud Freeman, Crazeology: The Autobiography of a Chicago Jazzman , as told to Robert Wolf [Urbana, Ill., 1989], 20.) According to Sudhalter, Nichols's ensemble, plus trombonist Jack Teagarden but minus the Girl Crazy string section, "doubled at the Hotel New Yorker" in the evenings after the show was over (Gershwin, Girl Crazy [program book], 54). In the spring of 1931, when Benny Goodman left the ensemble, he was replaced by reedman Jimmy Dorsey (55).

Sudhalter also tells a tantalizing but inconclusive story about "I Got Rhythm" in its first incarnation. Before the show opened, Nichols and Gershwin were discussing the work of Robert Russell Bennett, who was orchestrating Girl Crazy . Sudhalter reports:

Bennett, at the time riding high among Broadway orchestrators, had little feeling for (and reportedly even less interest in) jazz. But certain of the hotter numbers, notably "I Got Rhythm," seemed to cry out for an arranger who understood swing and could write comfortably in a more rhythmic vein. [Glenn] Miller, Nichols said, would be in the new band, so why not let him do some scoring as well? Gershwin's answer is lost to history. But reports persist that Miller wrote at least the rideout chorus to "I Got Rhythm" and some of the incidental music. (52-53)

Bennett's orchestrations and Miller's possible contributions to them are heard on the Elektra Nonesuch recording. One earwitness to several 1930-31 Girl Crazy performances recalled: "During the intermissions, they'd really turn the band loose, and you should have heard the hot stuff they played. It wasn't like a regular pit band—more like an act within an act" (54).

10. Russell Sanjek, From Print to Plastic: Publishing and Promoting America's Popular Music (1900-1980 ), I.S.A.M. Monographs no. 20 (Brooklyn, 1983), 13, 15.

11. Craig H. Roell, The Piano in America, 1890-1940 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1989), documents the role of the player piano in the vast change that took place in American musical life early in the present century. See especially pages 42-46. Roell calls "the miracle of sound reproduction . . . indeed revolutionary." Before the invention of the player piano, the reproducing piano, and the phonograph, Roell writes, "the musician was human—active and creative—and the music was live. The ideology of the entire musical experience was derived from the producer culture. The revolutionary nature of the player piano changed these concepts forever, for increasingly the musician was a machine. The musical experience was becoming passive" (45).

12. Sanjek, Print to Plastic , 12-13.

13. Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four Hundred Years , vol. 3, From 1900 to 1984 (New York, 1988), explains how publisher Max Dreyfus, for whom Gershwin worked beginning in 1918, conquered "the production-music field"—the publishing of Broadway show music—for his firms of T. B. Harms and Harms, Inc. (97). Dreyfus, Sanjek writes, "was known as a prodigious gambler, ready to advance up to $15,000 for the music to a show his writers were assigned to create" (98). By 1929, with talking pictures becoming a major force in the entertainment industry, film studios were buying music publishing companies. In the summer of that year, Warner Brothers film studios bought the Harms empire for $8. 5 million. The publishing firms involved were those owned or backed by Dreyfus, including Harms, Inc., Chappell-Harms (its "repository for non-production music''), De Sylva, Brown, and Henderson, Remick Music, Green and Stept, Famous Music, T. B. Harms, "and George Gershwin's New World Music, publisher of all [Gershwin's] music" (109).

14. Sanjek, American Popular Music , vol. 3, From 1900 to 1984 , notes Max Dreyfus's dictum about show music that, "although nobody could tell if a song might become a hit, 'it would become one if you worked to sell it'" (96). Producers of Dreyfus-backed shows, according to Sanjek, "expected one or two hit songs from any production with which he was connected. An average of twenty-one songs were generally written for a musical show, many of them the ensemble and chorus numbers to fill gaps in the action or carry the plot along. Most were printed and on sale in the theater lobby" (98).

15. In Gershwin, Girl Crazy (program book), 23-24, Miles Kreuger explains that after it closed the show made no post-Broadway tour, "in part due to a sudden drop-off of Depression theater attendance, and because both Willie Howard and Ethel Merman were wooed by George White to star in his Scandals of 1931 ." A West Coast production, however, opened in San Francisco on 29 September 1931 and another in Chicago on 8 October. RKO studios filmed Girl Crazy in 1932; in 1943, MGM studios brought out another version with Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Gil Stratton, June Allyson, Nancy Walker, and Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra.

16. At this writing, the standard biography is Edward Jablonski, Gershwin (Garden City, N.Y., 1987). See also Robert Kimball and Alfred Simon, The Gershwins (New York, 1973), and Charles Schwartz, Gershwin: His Life and Music (Indianapolis, 1973) and Deena Rosenberg, Fascinating Rhythm: The Collaboration of George and Ira Gershwin (New York, 1991). For a shorter account and a complete worklist by Wayne Schneider, see my Gershwin article in Amerigrove .

17. Some of the workings of the Tin Pan Alley trade in which Gershwin got his start are shown by the facts and lore surrounding "Swanee." Gershwin and lyricist Irving Caesar wrote "Swanee" and placed it in a revue marking the opening on 24 October 1919 of the Capitol Theater, a new Broadway movie house. The song became a hit, however, only after Al Jolson, the era's chief male singing star, introduced it in his show, Sinbad . According to David Jasen, Caesar convinced "his friend" Jolson to sing it in that show. Herbert G. Goldman, on the other hand, writes that Jolson, hearing Gershwin play it at a party in late December . . . became intrigued by "Swanee" and made plans to record the song at his next session for the Columbia Gramophone Company. By the end of January, Jolson was belting "Swanee" to the rafters in performances of Sinbad , Al Goodman had his pit musicians play the number faster than it had been played by the Columbia Orchestra, and "Swanee," aided by a heavy advertising campaign, became one of the biggest hits of the season. (See Herbert G. Goldman, Jolson: The Legend Comes to Life [New York, 1988], 109-10)

Jasen reports: "With a full-page headshot of Jolson on the cover, 'Swanee' sold over a million copies of sheet music and two million copies of his disc. It became the biggest-selling song Gershwin would have in his life" (see David A. Jasen, Tin Pan Alley — The Composers, the Songs, the Performers and Their Times: The Golden Age of American Popular Music from 1886 to 1956 [New York, 1988], 165). According to Joel Whitburn's Pop Memories 1890-1954: The History of American Popular Music (Menomonee Falls, Wisc., 1986), 233, Jolson's recording first appeared on his top-seller charts on 8 May 1920, remained there for eighteen weeks, and was the number 1 seller for nine of those weeks. Whitburn also lists successful performances by the All-Star Trio (Victor Arden, piano; F. Wheeler Wadsworth, alto sax; George Hamilton Green, xylophone; their recording made the top-seller charts in the week of 24 April 1920, when it was ranked number 11; page 22) and the Peerless Quartet (four male singers; the recording made the top-seller charts in the week of 27 November 1920, also as number 11; page 352). Jasen's claim that "Swanee" was Gershwin's largest-selling song is confirmed, insofar as recordings are concerned, by Whitburn.

18. Many accounts of this famous event have been written. One that captures its original flavor is Isaac Goldberg, George Gershwin: A Study in American Music (1931), supplemented by Edith Garson, with Foreword and Discography by Alan Dashiell (New York, 1958), 136-55. An archival recording, An Experiment in Modern Music: Paul Whiteman at Aeolian Hall (Smithsonian Collection recording, DMM 2-0518), with notes by Thornton Hagert, has been issued; see also The Birth of "Rhapsody in Blue": Paul Whiteman's Historic Aeolian Hall Concert of 1924, reconstructed and conducted by Maurice Peress (MusicMasters recording MMD 20113X/20114T, 1986).

19. Between 1919 and the end of 1924 Gershwin wrote the scores to twelve Broadway shows. From 1925 until the end of his life in 1938, he composed scores to fifteen more such works.

20. As early as 1922 Gershwin had been able to try his hand as an "opera" composer with the brief, one-act Blue Monday , presenting it as part of a revue, George White's Scandals of 1922 . Even though Blue Monday was deemed a failure and withdrawn after one performance, Gershwin, twenty-three years old and with no prior experience, had found himself in a position to write such a work and have it produced on Broadway. (Will Vodery did the orchestration.) Here is ample indication that his was to be no ordinary career for an American composer. See Jablonski, Gershwin , 49-53. See also Goldberg, George Gershwin , 120-23. Rhapsody in Blue (1924), as noted, was commissioned by Whiteman and unveiled in a "historical" event, in the full glare of public attention. The Rhapsody's success led to another commission, this one for the Concerto in F, from Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony Society (1925). Gershwin's track record by the time he composed An American in Paris (1928), his next work for orchestra, had eminent figures competing to premiere it. As Jablonski notes, Walter Damrosch told Gershwin he "would love to arrange with you to do your new work at a Philharmonic symphony this winter." Meanwhile, "even as he worked," Gershwin was approached by Russian dance impresario Sergei Diaghilev, ''who wanted to produce a ballet around it," and Leopold Stokowski of the Philadelphia Orchestra (Jablonski, Gershwin , 171). In 1929, the Metropolitan Opera commissioned Gershwin to compose a full-length opera, The Dybbuk , with a libretto by Henry Ahlsberg, for performance in 1931. He never fulfilled the commission (Jablonski, Gershwin , 194-95).

21. I am grateful to James Dapogny for this suggestion.

22. Jablonski, Gershwin , 258-59. In Jablonski's opinion, "much of the wit and charm of this work is smothered in the reorchestration by William C. Schoenfeld published in 1953" (260).

23. The song was "The Real American Folk Song (Is a Rag)," written under Ira's pseudonym "Arthur Francis," with music by George. It was interpolated into the Broadway musical comedy Ladies First , whose music was mostly by A. B. Sloane. Its refrain begins: "The real American folk song is a rag— / A mental jag— / A rhythmic tonic for the chronic blues." See Gershwin, Lyrics , 180.

24. "Fascinating Rhythm" was sung by Fred Astaire in Lady Be Good and led into a dance number. See Jablonski, Gershwin , 83.

25. The line comes from the verse of "Embraceable You," written originally for "an operetta version of East Is West " (1928), a show that was never completed, then put into Girl Crazy . See Gershwin, Lyrics , 30-31.

26. The quotation is from "Slap That Bass," another Astaire number, seen in the film Shall We Dance? See Gershwin, Lyrics , 221.

27. William Austin to Richard Crawford, 23 February 1985. My own unsystematic but fairly extensive search through song lists confirms Austin's point. "Rhythm" became a kind of catchword in the 1930s, as "syncopation" had been earlier. But the only prominent use I found before the Gershwins' "Fascinating Rhythm" (1924) is the name of a well-known white jazz group that began recording in August 1922 under the name of the Friar's Society Orchestra, changed by March 1923 to the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. A search through Brian Rust, Jazz Records, A-Z, 1897-1942 , rev. 5th ed. (n.p., [1983]), turned up no other groups that recorded between the NORK and three who began to record in 1925: the St. Louis Rhythm Kings (April), Paul Fried and His Rhythmicians (September), and the Blue Rhythm Orchestra (October). Rust's index yielded only one tune with the key word in its title that circulated before "Fascinating Rhythm" was published (December 1924): "The Rhythm Rag'' by Willard Ro-bison, recorded in September 1924 by Robison and his Deep River Orchestra. In October 1925 a tune called "Rhythm of the Day" received its first jazz recording in a performance by Ross Gorman and the Earl Carroll Orchestra. Roger Lax and Frederick Smith, The Great Song Thesaurus , 2d ed. updated and expanded (New York, 1989), list no hit with "rhythm" in its title before "Fascinating Rhythm." Other hits or "notable" songs that followed, according to the Thesaurus , are "Crazy Rhythm" (1928), "Futuristic Rhythm" (1929), "I Got Rhythm" and "Rockin' in Rhythm" (1930), "Rhythm Is Our Business" (1934), "Broadway Rhythm" and "Rhythm of the Rain" (1935), "All God's Chillun Got Rhythm" (1937), and "Lullaby in Rhythm" (1938).

28. Good News , with a score by Henderson, Brown, and DeSylva, opened in September 1927 and ran for 557 performances (Gerald Bordman, American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle [New York, 1978], 428).

29. Victor V22558. See Brian Rust, The American Dance Band Discography, 1917-1942 (New Rochelle, N.Y., 1975).

30. Brian Rust and Allen G. Debus, The Complete Entertainment Discography from 1897 to 1942 , 2d ed. (New York, 1989), 328, dates this recording (Victor 12332) 10 July 1938, New York City. It is part of a medley of "Vocal Gems" from Girl Crazy .

31. Decca 23310; the LP reissue on Decca is numbered DL 5412.

32. In his discographical supplement to Goldberg, George Gershwin , 366, Alan Dashiell criticizes the recording as evidence of "star trouble." "Miss Martin," he complains, "chose to bend the songs to her will (and style) so that there is as much Martin here as Gershwin." ''I Got Rhythm" is one song said to be marred by the singer's "coy mannerisms." Jablonski, Gershwin , 404-5, follows suit. He writes: " Girl Crazy is spoiled a little (not enough to hurt) by the mannered singing of Mary Martin who, as A Star, was assigned songs that could have been better sung by others, i.e., hear Louise Carlyle do 'Sam and Delilah' and then wish she had done the other Merman songs from the show." Jablonski identifies this record as "an album in Jay Gold's 'American Musicals' series for Time-Life Records. These are the Goddard Lieberson-produced show reconstructions of Oh, Kay ! and Girl Crazy , plus the out-of-print Capitol original cast recording of the 1952 revival of Of Thee I Sing " (Time-Life Records TL-AM00, three-record set).

33. Transcribed from original cast recording, MGM E2323. End Popup Text>

34. To sum up public response to the song "I Got Rhythm," Joel Whitburn's Pop Memories shows it as a success on record but not a major hit. Red Nichols's recording made the top-seller charts for eight weeks beginning 6 December 1930, reaching a peak position of number 5 (page 336). Recordings by Ethel Waters (one week, 17 January 1931, number 17; page 440) and Louis Armstrong (two weeks, 2 April 1932, number 17; page 33) also enjoyed some success. However, Nichols's recording of "Embraceable You," also from Girl Crazy and made the same day, outsold "I Got Rhythm" (nine weeks, 22 November 1930, number 2; page 336).

Rust and Debus, Complete Entertainment Discography , besides Jane Froman's recording of "I Got Rhythm," lists ones by Kate Smith (New York, 6 November 1930), Adelaide Hall (London, 28 September 1931), Al Bowlly (London, 19 May 1932), Elizabeth Welch (London, 20 January 1938, as part of a "Gershwin Medley"), and the Merry Macs (New York, 5 September 1939). This work covers artists who are deemed neither "jazz and blues musicians" (though Hall's 1931 recording is also listed in Rust's Jazz Records A-z ) nor involved with "commercial dance bands, American and British." That leaves "the minstrel pioneers, the vaudevillians, the film stars and radio personalities, and the straight actors and actresses" who are either "artists of American birth, or of such status that they are as well-known in America as their own countries" (1).

Lax and Smith, Thesaurus , 57, lists "I Got Rhythm" as one of the "top hits" of 1930. It also lists "I Got Rhythm" and Irving Berlin's "There's No Business Like Show Business" as Ethel Merman's two theme songs (166). And it notes that, as well as film versions of Girl Crazy in 1932 and 1943 and An American in Paris (1951), the song also appeared in the film Rhapsody in Blue (1945), the "biopic" of Gershwin (265).

Alec Wilder, American Popular Song: The Great Innovators 1900-1950 , ed. James T. Maher (New York, 1972), is the richest account of the musical tradition in which Gershwin wrote his songs. In the introduction to this work James T. Maher estimates that in the United States during the first half of the century, roughly 300,000 "'popular' songs of every variety" were deposited for copyright. Wilder, a composer of both popular songs and concert music, examined some 17,000 of these, from which he cites about 300 in his book (xxxviii). While granting its wide acceptance, Wilder is no fan of "I Got Rhythm" as a song. In discussing Irving Berlin's "Back to Back'' (1939), for example, he notes that "its release slightly recalls that of 'I Got Rhythm' but is much less four-square, by which I obviously mean it's much better" (114). Later, in a somewhat dyspeptic mood, Wilder comments: "I know that 'I Got Rhythm' has been played ad nauseum by jazz groups since the time it was first heard. And if it made many players happy, I'm glad. But to be candid, my particular gratification is that, since jazz presumes improvisation, in all my hearing of the song by jazz groups, I've always heard endlessly different variations of the original. . .. As an effort by a major writer, I find it a passing fancy, enormously successful though it obviously has been" (151). Wilder also questioned the Gershwin brothers' taste in quoting themselves in the release of their song "Nice Work If You Can Get It" (1937). "I'm slightly embarrassed," he confides, by the "somewhat lordly allusion to a phrase from 'I Got Rhythm' ['Who could ask for anything more?']. No doubt the Gershwins were right: everyone did know the earlier song. But it does seem a bit like boasting" (159).

35. Rust, Jazz Records A-Z . Full discographical information can be found there. For an idea of how the recording history of "I Got Rhythm" compares with that of other tunes in the jazz repertory, see Richard Crawford and Jeffrey Magee, Jazz Standards on Record, 1900-1942: A Core Repertory , Center for Black Music Research Monographs, no. 4 (Chicago, 1992), especially v-vii and xx-xxi.

36. Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz 1930-1945 (New York, 1989), 127, outlines the "traditional way" jazz musicians harmonize "I Got Rhythm." In the A section, the harmonic progression is B Gm7|Cm7 F7|B Gm7|Cm7 F7| B B 7|E E |B F7|B [F7].

37. A comment Virgil Thomson made about Aaron Copland may apply to "I Got Rhythm," though certainly not to many other Gershwin songs. In 1932, in a discussion of his colleague's "American" side, Thomson wrote that Copland, for all his fondness for displaced accents, "never understood that sensuality of sentiment which is the force of American popular music" (quoted in Minna Lederman, The Life and Death of a Small Magazine [Modern Music, 1924-1946 ], I.S.A.M. Monographs no. 18 [Brooklyn, 1983], 22). "Sensuality of sentiment" is not a conspicuous trait of "I Got Rhythm."

38. Jazz being a music in which the status of players and singers rests upon the judgment of their peers, the literature is full of stories of performers having to prove themselves. One tells of Charlie Parker, as a youngster of sixteen, being derided on the bandstand at a Kansas City jam session (Robert George Reisner, Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker [New York, 1962], 185-86). Edward Kennedy Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (Garden City, N.Y., 1973), tells of challenges offered by other musicians. Ellington's drummer, Sonny Greer, for example, recalls that when Ellington was "just a yearling" filling in for the regular piano player in a Washington, D.C., night spot, "Bill Jones used to be drummin', and he'd catch him out there in those three-four, five-four switches, and scare him stiff. But he'd hang on, and as I said he had a pretty good left hand, and he'd hold the solid deuce till Bill let him off the hook" (446). In answer to the question "what does America mean to you?" Ellington replied that the music world in the United States ''has been an extremely competitive scene, and that in itself incites drive. Without competition you wouldn't have it" (464). Ellington describes jam sessions as a very tough environment, a "cutting contest" in which "you defended your honor with your instrument" (466). In his judgment that was as it should be, as contrasted with a situation in which jazz is subsidized. "The minute you start subsidizing it," he warned, "you are going to get yourself a bastard product. It started as a competitive thing, and if you take away the competition, where a guy must fight to eat, it's going to become something else" (471).

By 1937, "I Got Rhythm" was standard cutting-contest fare. Frank Buchmann-Møller, You Just Fight for Your Life: The Story of Lester Young (New York, 1990), 71, reports Billie Holiday's taking Lester Young around New York shortly after he joined Count Basie's band in 1936. At a New York jam session early in 1937, Young "met Leon 'Chu' Berry, who was considered to be the greatest tenor saxophone player next to Coleman Hawkins. Berry did not have his saxophone with him, but when a duel between him and Lester was in the offing Benny Carter went and fetched it. Berry suggested that they start with 'I Got Rhythm,' which was grist to Lester's mill. 'He blew at least fifteen choruses, none of them the same, and each one prettier than the last,' Billie recalls. 'When the fifteenth one was down, Chu Berry was finished.'"

39. Miller's performance is reissued in Big Band Jazz: From the Beginnings to the Fifties , selected and annotated by Gunther Schuller and Martin Williams (Smithsonian Recordings, 1983). Cf. Merman's "high C chorus," which reduces the same six bars of the A section of "I Got Rhythm" to nothing but a high-energy single note. One wonders if hearing Merman belt her "high C" at this place, night after night in Girl Crazy , left its mark on Miller's idea of the tune to the point that, seven years later, he found a way to create a similar effect in his arrangement.

40. First issued on Commodore Records, Byas and Stewart's performance is included in the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz , edited and annotated by Martin Williams, revised ed. (Smithsonian Recordings, 1987). Like the blues, "I Got Rhythm" was a tune on which jazz performers often improvised many choruses in succession, shaping musical statements that built in intensity from chorus to chorus. Tenor saxophonist Bud Freeman tells a story about a performance he gave as a member of a Special Service company of the United States armed forces stationed in Alaska during World War II. The point of Freeman's recollection was to expose commercial gimmicks that in his view pandered to the audience. But, considering the tradition of extended performance already established for Gershwin's song, it was no coincidence that "I Got Rhythm" was the piece on which he tried his clownishly satirical ploy.

It was in Alaska that I found out an interesting thing about being commercial. I discovered that people don't listen as much as they look. We were doing a show on one of the little islands on the [Aleutian] chain. We were playing in the mess hall, and we were doing our best playing but it didn't seem to be going over so well. These were a lot of bitter men who had been stuck up there a long time and they just defied us to entertain them. Now we were dressed in heavy Arctic equipment and looked like a bunch of Eskimos. It wasn't that it was so terribly cold there, but this was our way of dressing. You could fall down and not get hurt because the clothing was so thickly padded. I used to play a solo, about ten improvised choruses, on "I Got Rhythm," and suddenly during my solo the idea came to me just to fall back and not break the motion of the play[ing], just to fall back. So I fell on my back with my feet up in the air and some of the men jumped up. They were completely out of their minds. "This is the greatest fuckin' saxophone player in the world," they were screaming. (Freeman, Crazeology , 59)

41. Martin Williams, The Jazz Tradition , new and revised ed. (Oxford, 1983), 94-95, puts it in a somewhat different way. "Art Tatum's capacities for melodic invention were limited," Williams writes. " He was basically an artist of the arabesque, true, but he also functioned in that middle ground which André Hodier has called paraphrase, where fragments of the original theme take their place beside invented phrases, to form allusive structures in variation. . .. Tatum's best harmonic and melodic adornments help us discover what is potentially beautiful in a popular song; his invented, passing phrases subdue what is not." By that standard, Tatum found little that was beautiful in the melody of "I Got Rhythm."

42. On 30 June 1932, Don Redman and His Orchestra made the first wholly instrumental recording of "I Got Rhythm"—an early example of many black musicians' tendency to omit Ira Gershwin's lyrics.

43. Williams, Jazz Tradition , 49, identifies Bechet's "Shag" as "the first non-thematic use on records of the 'I Got Rhythm' chord progression." "Shag" is attributed to Bechet on the record label, but I was unable to find in the Library of Congress copyright records any evidence that it was published or even copyrighted.

44. "Yeah, Man," a song with words by Noble Sissle and music by J. Russel Robinson, was copyrighted as a published item on 27 May 1932 (entry no. 30349) and published by DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson, Inc. Joel Shaw made the first jazz recording in October of that year, just after Bechet and the New Orleans Feetwarmers recorded "Shag." "Stomp It Off," with a melody attributed to Sy Oliver and Jimmy Lunceford, was copyrighted as an unpublished piece on 1 April 1936 (entry no. 121547) by Denton and Haskins Music Co. Lunceford had recorded it in October 1934.

45. "Don't Be That Way," attributed to E. M. [Edgar] Sampson, was copyrighted as an unpublished piece on 16 May 1935 (entry no. 104261). Webb had recorded it on 19 November 1934. As table 6 indicates, it seems to have had the most active independent life of all "I Got Rhythm" contrafacts during the swing era.

46. Schuller, Swing Era , 24, attributes Goodman's arrangement to Edgar Sampson and calls it "one of the band's most popular successes." He also finds Webb's 1934 recording far superior to Goodman's two versions of 1938. Both use Sampson's arrangement, reworked in 1938 to accommodate lengthy solo spots for Goodman and [the] famous pre- In The Mood fade-away ending. Comparison of both bands' versions affords us a dramatic lesson in how interpretation is everything in jazz. The same arrangement, the same notes can be exciting or vapid, depending on their execution. The gulf here between Webb and Goodman was a wide one, the former delivering these pieces with a raw excitement, rhythmic drive (faster tempos, too) and heated sonority; the latter with a neatly packaged cooled-off sound, bouncing along in a safe inoffensive manner. (296)

47. Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie , as told to Albert Murray (New York, 1985), 239, confirms that "Blow Top," recorded by Basie and his orchestra on 31 May 1940, was composed and arranged by Tab Smith. I have not checked the Library of Congress copyright records for this item. "Apple Honey," attributed to Woody Herman, was recorded by Herman's orchestra on 10 August 1944. Its tune was copyrighted in unpublished form on 25 October 1944 (entry no. 395490) and as a published piece on 18 July 1945 (entry no. 133874) by Charling Music Corp.

48. Ellington first recorded "Cotton Tail" on 4 May 1940. On 20 July 1940, it was copyrighted as an unpublished piece (entry no. 225831) by Robbins Music Corp. A copyrighted orchestration arranged by Will Hudson was published on 21 June 1944, also by Robbins.

49. Ellington's composed variations on Gershwin's tune are striking. But Schuller, Swing Era , points out another distinctive property of "Cotton Tail"— one that surely can be traced to the tradition of performance already established for "I Got Rhythm." Taking his cue from Ben Webster's two-chorus solo, Schuller writes:

Never before had Ellington opened up a piece for out-and-out blowing on a record date as he did for Webster and "Cotton Tail." The occasional showcase pieces and "concertos" were considerably more pre-planned and determined by Ellington as composer. . . . [But] "Cotton Tail" and Webster's solo loosened, ever so slightly, the compositional harness that Ellington had been constructing for over a decade and more. "Cotton Taxi,'' particularly in its execution, let in a gust of spontaneity, of freshness, of flexibility, which the Ellington band was never to lose again and which offered a whole new way of integrating composition and improvisation. (129-30)

50. Quoted from Dizzy Gillespie with Al Fraser, To Be, or Not . . . to Bop: Memoirs (Garden City, N.Y., 1979), 207. Roach expanded his discussion of the economic roots of contrafacts as follows:

When the music moved from uptown to downtown, downtown meaning whites were now the clientele, a few more pennies were being made than when we were uptown. . .. Downtown, people wanted to hear something they were familiar with, like "How High the Moon," "What Is This Thing Called Love?" Can you play that? So in playing these things, the black musicians recognized that the royalties were going back to these people, like ASCAP, the Jerome Kerns, the Gershwins. So one revolutionary thing that happened, they began to write parodies on the harmonic structure. (209)

Roach's comments suggest that bebop musicians were the first to write new themes on old chord changes, a notion contradicted by the history of "I Got Rhythm" and, more generally, in Martin Williams, Jazz in Its Time (New York, 1989), 27-30.

51. Like "I Got Rhythm," tunes based on its chord changes are virtually all in B-flat. Art Pepper's "Brown Gold," written in E-flat, is an exception.

52. Note also that none of Parker's versions use the two-bar extension at the end of Gershwin's tune.

53. Gillespie, To Be , 143.

54. Examples include the following, whose dates are the earliest date of copyright deposit. Copyright entry numbers are designated EU for unpublished pieces and EP for published ones. All but three (Tadd Dameron, Bud Powell, and Sonny Stitt) have been verified in the Library of Congress copyright records:

Clifford Brown, "Brownie Speaks" (27 December 1956, EU453249)

Al Cohn, "The Goof and I" (26 March 1948, EU122626)

Tadd Dameron, "Delirium" (copyright information not looked for)

Miles Davis, "The Theme" (28 March 1966, EU918852; unattributed in some other sources)

Dizzy Gillespie, "Anthropology" with C. Parker (10 December 1947, EU107329), "Dizzy Atmosphere" (10 June 1944, EU378389), "Oo Bop

Shabam" with Gil Fuller and Jay Roberts (12 May 1948, EP25545), "Ow" (18 April 1958, EU521399), "Salt Peanuts" with Kenny Clarke (13 October 1941, EU272651; published 1 September 1943, EP116206), and ''Shaw 'Nuff" with C. Parker (22 November 1948, EP32267)

Hampton Hawes, "Hamp's Paws" (30 January 1956, EU424351)

Thelonious Monk, "Fifty-Second Street Theme" (29 March 1948, EP24775), and "Rhythm-A-Ning" from Brilliant Comers Suite (29 May 1958, EU516975)

Fats Navarro, "Eb-Pob" with Leo Parker (16 May 1947, EU75756)

Art Pepper, "Brown Gold" (19 March 1957, EU472263)

Bud Powell, "Bud's Bubble" (copyright information not looked for; recorded on Roost Records RLP 401)

Sonny Rollins, "No Moe" (31 March 1965, EU885064), and "Oleo" (13 June 1963, EU8777119)

Sonny Stitt, "Sonny Side" (copyright information not looked for; attribution not established; recorded on Prestige NJLPo-103 by Stitt and Bud Powell)

George Wallington, "Lemon Drop" (25 May 1949, EP37174)

Kai Winding, "O-Go-Mo" (18 February 1947, EU63539)

55. Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen, Jazz Records, 1942-[1969]: A Discography , 8 vols. (Copenhagen, 1963-70), lists the following recordings of "Anthropology" (chronologically):

Dizzy Gillespie's Orchestra (22 February 1946; vol. 4a:307)

Claude Thornhill's Orchestra (4 September 1947; 8:48)

Tadd Dameron's Sextet (29 August 1948; 3:107), his septet (16 October 1948; 6 November 1948; 3:108)

Charlie Parker's All Stars (5 March 1949; 6:66), Parker and the Swedish All-Stars (22 November 1950; 6:69; and 24 November 1950; 6:70)

The Parker-Gillespie Quintet (31 March 1951; 6:71)

Poul Hindberg (28 July 1955; 4b:296)

Clifford Jordan (10 November 1957; 4c:240)

The Embers Quintet (29 August 1959; 4a:12)

The Barry Harris Quintet (28 September 1961; 4b:178)

The Vi Redd Sextet (21/22 May 1962; 6:237)

The Don Byas Quartet (14/15 July 1964; 2:214)

The Elvin Jones Quartet (23 February 1965; 4c:199)

The Bengt Hallberg Trio (14 May 1968; 4b:117)

56. There are many more "I Got Rhythm" contrafacts than the ones on which I have gathered information here. But to provide a statistical summary of the ones I've dealt with: Between 1930 and 1968, a total of 280 jazz recordings of "I Got Rhythm" and 45 of its contrafacts have been traced. Of that number, 160 (57 percent) were contrafacts. The count is based on pieces listed in Rust and Jepson's discographies. The contrafacts, in alphabetical order by title, are

57. See chapter 2, p. 65.

58. Ella Fitzgerald, The George and Ira Gershwin Songbook (Verve recording VE-2-2525).

59. As I hear it, a melodic quotation follows the semitone hike after bar 8. Bars 9-10, plus the first three notes of bar 11, sound to me like a reference to "The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers" by Léon Jessel, first published in Germany in 1905 (James Fuld, The Book of World-Famous Music: Classical, Popular and Folk , rev. ed. [New York, 1971], 421).