Legend has it that Swanee was conceived in the spring of 1918 over a meal at Dinty Moore's, a popular Times Square restaurant, when Irving Caesar suggested a take-off on the contemporary song hit, Hindustan, to George Gershwin, aged 19. After working as a song-plugger for the publishing firm of Remick, rehearsal pianist to various shows and revues, composer of the rag novelty Rialto Ripples and a handful of songs (published but passing into oblivion), Gershwin had just been hired by publisher Max Dreyfus as a staff composer with the firm of T.B. Harms at $35 a week. The proximity to show business fired his already abundant ambition. While taking a bus to the Gershwin apartment on 144th Street, Caesar's notion took shape, and within a quarter hour of arrival, lyrics materialized and the tune had been worked out on the Gershwin upright over the protests of the poker players in the next room. Hindustan's fast-paced longing for native origins had been transposed to a clamorous Jazz Age nostalgia for the South, given point by a smart-alecking allusion to Stephen Foster's Old Folks at Home and the ineffable hokeyness of



The birds are singing,

It is songtime—

The banjos strummin' soft and low;

I know that you

Yearn for me too,

Swanee,

You're calling me.

(Refrain:)

Swanee,

How I love you,

How I love you....

As pianist for the Ziegfeld Follies of 1918, Gershwin seized the opportunity of airing the song for Follies director, Ned Wayburn, who promised to include it in a revue to be produced the following year as one of a spate of entertainments opening the Capitol Theater, then under construction. In the interim, Gershwin collaborated with lyricists Arthur Jackson and B.G. DeSylva, supplying ten songs for Fred Jackson's La-La-Lucille, which opened May 26, 1919, to run for a respectable 104 performances. Gershwin's score was hardly noticed, though it included Nobody but You, destined to become a standard. When the Capitol at last opened, October 24, 1919, Wayburn included Swanee in his new revue, Demi-Tasse, in an elaborately choreographed presentation by some 50 dancers accompanied by Arthur Pryor's band. Though applauded, it did not catch on.

Through DeSylva, Gershwin came to know Al Jolson, the show biz dynamo billed as "The World's Greatest Entertainer." At a party for Jolson, Gershwin took a stint at the piano—his incandescent rendition of Swanee immediately captured Jolson's attention: the man and the music had met. Jolson not only included Swanee in his touring show, Sinbad—where it indeed caught on—but made a classic recording of it on January 8, 1920, which sold in the millions and still looms as his most memorable moment. Gershwin is said to have taken $10,000 in royalties the first year. Above all, his name became prominent overnight and his career as a Broadway composer was brilliantly launched. Looking back in 1932, he included Swanee—with a tongue-in-cheek piano transcription—among the 18 numbers of George Gershwin's Song Book.

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