Through the 1920s, George Gershwin and his lyricist brother Ira moved from apprentice work on Broadway—songs interpolated into others' shows, music for revues, and a number of their own formulaic musicals—to a place among American musical theater's dominant talents with Primrose, Lady, Be Good!, Tip-Toes, and Oh, Kay! If their books offered little beside vaudeville-laced boy-meets-girl fluff, Ira's savvy lyrics and George's alternation of jazzed pizzazz with ballads, defining the American notion of romance for generations to come, promised work of larger scope. At the beginning of 1927 they accepted George S. Kaufman's anti-war satireStrike Up the Band, which afforded a chance to create what would later be termed an "integrated" musical—an essentially dramatic conception rather than the usual zany plot helped out with, or embedded in, a musical revue. The result was an operetta in all but name, and richly indebted—both words and music—to the example of Gilbert and Sullivan. For the title march, the show's signature, George had composed no less than four tries, none of which seemed suitable, while Ira itched to have the definitive number in hand, to which he would fit the lyric. On a spring trip to Atlantic City for discussions with producer Edgar Selwyn, George emerged from his hotel bedroom very early on a Sunday morning to announce "I think I've got it." Bemused, Ira shot back, "Got what?" "Why, the march, of course. I think I've finally got it. Come on in." It had come to him in a dream. Strike Up the Band did not survive its Philadelphia tryout and would be put on hold for revisions to both text and music until 1930, when it would play on Broadway for a respectable, if hardly smash, 191 performances, though its title song became an immediate hit. When the UCLA football team asked to use Strike Up the Band as its fight song in 1936, Ira graciously rewrote the lyrics for them, earning lifetime season passes to the home games. Ira made another adaptation for use in the same-titled 1939 MGM Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney film, though the march was the only bit of Gershwiniana in Strike Up the Band. The film prompted a reissue of the sheet music, for which Ira made another revision reflecting the anxiety of a looming war—the lyric published today. With the nation at war, he penned his final revision—"Again the Hun is at the gate...."

© All Music Guide

I've Got a Crush on You

In 1928—after writing the musical Rosalie, which opened in January, and before writing the tone poem American in Paris, which premiered in December—George Gershwin wrote the musical Treasure Girl, which opened on November 8 with such songs as "Skull and Bones," "I Want to Marry a Marionette," "Dead Men Tell No Tales," and "I've Got a Crush on You." The show ran for less than a year, but George and Ira Gershwin knew "I've Got a Crush on You" could became a popular hit given the right context so they reused it in Strike Up the Band, their 1930 musical with a book by George S. Kaufmann. There in the company of "The Man I Love," "I've Got a Crush on You" became the hit that George and Ira always knew it was. As Ira well knew, the lyrics were just this side of inane—"I've got a crush on you, sweetie pie. All the day and nighttime, hear me cry"—but he knew that, with his brother's music, "the world will pardon my mush." And it has: with its longing melody, its almost-but-not- quite normal cadences, and its self-consciously adorable union of words and music, "I've Got a Crush on You" is a wonderful song of young love.

© All Music Guide

Soon

The Gershwin brothers first collaboration with writer George S. Kaufman was Strike Up the Band. The Gershwins had had hits with Lady Be Good, Tip-Toes, and Oh, Kay!, but Kaufman's book was beyond the slick tricks and deus ex machina miracles of their earlier musicals. Strike Up the Band is an anti-war tract, a political lampoon, and—as befits the author of the Marx Brothers' Coconuts—very funny. The Gershwins wrote an American Gilbert and Sullivan operetta around it and the critics loved it, but the public hated it and it closed in Philadelphia. When Morrie Ryskind had re-written Kaufman's book as a star vehicle with war relegated to a dream-sequence, the Gershwins tossed out the American operetta and tossed in a batch of great pop songs. The result opened in 1929 and played for 191 performances before it went on the road. One of the new songs was "Soon." George Gershwin took a phrase from the first Act I Finaletto and mixed it with some of the discarded song "Hoping That Someday You'd Care" and created the show's new love song. Sung in Act III by Jim and Joan, the two romantic leads as a duet, "Soon" is an intimate anthem to love with an arching longing melody moving through sighing chromatic suspensions above sly sideslips through secondary dominants. Ira Gershwin's lyrics are sentimental hokum rhyming "ended" and "blended" and "lonely" and "only." Had Kaufman been dead, he would have spun in his grave.

© All Music Guide

The Man I Love

This song has one of the most ironic histories in music theater. When Gershwin played it for Otto Kahn, who was hesitating about backing the source show, Lady, Be Good, Kahn was immediately convinced, and invested $10,000 (then enough to produce a show), gambling on the then untried composer and lyricist.

However, after the tryouts in Philadelphia, they decided that it slowed the action and was too sweet and pensive for the sparkling comedy, and so deleted it (though they later added it to two other shows, the 1927 Strike up the Band and the 1930 Rosalie). However, when Gershwin played it for socialite Lady Mountbatten, she liked it so much she asked for an autographed copy. She then gave the music to her favorite band, The Berkeley Square Orchestra, and from there it became such a hit that it traveled by word of mouth back over the Atlantic! It was firmly established in the popular music of the day when Max Dreyfus promoted it, eventually selling more than 100,000 copies, though he persuaded George and Ira Gershwin to accept royalties of only $.02 per copy rather than their customary $.03. It has stayed a favorite of jazz singers ever since.

It follows the AABA pattern that Gershwin used for many of his most popular songs, and achieves its dramatic effect, suggesting constancy in the face of all possible change, by using a steady, repeated melody over changing harmonies in the accompaniment.

© All Music Guide