Behind the Song "Summertime"

I love the song Summertime and now that my teenaged daughter has also chosen this as her favorite song to perform I thought it would be fun to share some of the history behind the song.

Gershwin wrote the song, from the Opera "Porgy and Bess" before he turned 35 years old. He had several sources for the lyrics, including the old folk song "All My Trials" from which he adapted the words

Hush lil baby, don yo cry

Hush lil baby, don yo cry

Yo mudder and fadder are born to die.

He also borrowed from the novel,  Porgy, written by DuBose Heyward and his wife, Dorothy Heyward. He was a poet and she was a playwright upon which the Opera was based. Ira Gershwin, his brother, also helped him with the lyrics.

The music also had a number of sources for its inspiration. The streets of Charleston filled his ears with rich melodies as well as the spirituals and rhythmically complex "shouting" style of the "primitive Gullah Negroes" who lived off the coast of Charleston on Folly Island. (Gershwin, A Biography, by Edward Jablonski, 1987)

I also understood that Gershwin's memory of his mother singing "Rozhinkes Mit Mandlen" a Yiddish lullabye also had an influence. The song is about a snowy white goat that goes to the market for a widow who must stay with her baby, and brings her back "raisins and almonds" the translation of the title of the song.

I can hear similar melodic patterns and rich haunting minor qualities in both songs, suggesting that the song "Summertime" also draws from the Yiddish musical genre.

Summertime has been performed by a wide variety of artists whose stellar performances you can see on YouTube. I suggest you go visit Janice Jopin, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Jill Scott with George Benson for fun and then hear Leona Lewis for "dessert."

Gershwin was gently rebuffed when he first tried to promote his opera and took it out six years later when it finally reached the public in 1935. So songwriters, have hope and never give up!