Despite the contributions of such entertainment veterans as Jimmy Durante, Duke Ellington and his Cotton Club Orchestra, dancer Eddie Foy, Jr., ballerina Harriet Hoctor (later to star in the Gershwin-scored film, Shall We Dance), and 42-year-old Al Jolson's 19-year-old bride, Ruby Keeler, Liza is the only surviving number of the 27 Gershwin items furnished for the hastily improvised musical, Show Girl. In mid-June 1929, Florenz Ziegfeld pressed a reluctant Gershwin to compose the score in a scant two weeks, to which Gershwin responded that he couldn't. "Mr. Ziegfeld smiled up at me and said, 'Why, sure you can—just dig down in the trunk and pull out a couple of hits.'" The upshot was more a scrappy revue than a musical which, despite a run of 111 performances, aggravated critics and lost money. During the Boston tryout, Keeler, backed up by 100 leggy chorines, launched into Liza when Jolson, from the audience, rose and sang the chorus to his visibly startled bride. This electrifying effect was replicated for the New York première, and thereafter Liza became a virtual Jolson property. As Gershwin remarked, "It caused a sensation and it gave the song a great start!" The lyrics by Ira Gershwin and Gus Kahn are pure fluff —

Liza, Liza, skies are gray,

But if you'll smile on me

All the clouds'll roll away...

— but the surgingly spurred, harmonically piquant anthem to which they are set is irresistible. Gershwin, too, apparently thought so, for it provided the pretext of the most elaborate of the 18 transcriptions he made of his melodies for the 1932 Gershwin Song-Book.

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi