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The story behind… “Lady, be good!” Lyrics by Ira Gershwin, music by George Gershwin

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“Wouldn’t it be fun,” George Gershwin said to Fred Astaire when they were
teenagers, “if I could write the score of a Broadway musical and you could star
in it?” At the time, Astaire was dancing in vaudeville with his sister Adele, as
he had been since he was five years old. Gershwin was the youngest “piano
plugger” on Tin Pan Alley, pounding out the latest songs from Remick Music
all day long. When he offered his own compositions to the publisher, he was
told “You’re here to play songs, Gershwin, not write them.”

However, in a few years, both men and their siblings were working
on Broadway. George and Ira Gershwin were collaborating on their first
Broadway musical, and the Astaires were set to star in it. George Gershwin
saw the show, originally entitled Black-Eyed Susan, as an opportunity
to infuse jazz into the Broadway musical. Initially, the script worried the
Astaires with its hackneyed plot, but when Astaire heard the Gershwins’
first song for Black-Eyed Susan, “Oh, Lady Be Good,” his doubts were
assuaged. Ira Gershwin had wedded his brother’s plaintive, bluesy melodic
line to a 1920s catchphrase that implicitly asked a lady to be not good but
bad. The song was so enchanting that the show’s title was changed to Lady,
Be Good!

The biggest hit to emerge from the show was “Fascinating Rhythm,”
which refl ected the energetic pace of this quintessential Jazz Age musical.
The music was part of a composition George had written as “Syncopated
City,” inspired by the dynamic energy of New York. When he played it
for his brother, however, Ira was befuddled by the intricate and irregular
melody, its brief rhythmic phrases between sudden, unexpected rests.
“What kind of lyric can I write for that?” he asked, then added, “still, it
is a fascinating rhythm.”

Suddenly he had a title, but it was excruciating work to complete the rest of the lyric. The brothers argued over verbal and musical accents, but Ira managed to find such everyday catchphrases as “What a mess you’re making” and “Won’t you take a day off ,” as well as clever rhymes (“I’m all a-quiver” / “shaking like a flivver”) that perfectly
matched his brother’s tricky melody. He always said “Fascinating Rhythm” was “the hardest song I ever had to fit words to.”

Another song, a ballad, was cut from the score in tryouts because audience reaction suggested it slowed the show’s all-important rhythmic pace. It had started out as the verse for a different song, but both brothers decided it was “a definite and insistent melody” that deserved to be a song in itself. Ira’s ability to hear the emotional meaning in an abstract musical melody is nowhere more apparent than in his realization that his
brother’s melody was about yearning. His lyric describes a young woman’s
longing to find the man of her dreams, but the character Ira created is no
love-struck ingénue. She is a pugnacious woman who is so sure of herself
that she speaks of him in the present rather than future tense: “Someday
he’ll come along” but he’s already “the man I love.” The melody is one of
George Gershwin’s most passionately insistent, employing his characteristic
way of beginning a phrase on a rest to give it more ardency.

Ira’s lyric underscores that ardency with subtle internal rhymes (“Some day
he’ll come along”) and rich long vowels: “Maybe Tuesday will be my good
news day.”

After it was cut from Lady, Be Good!, “The Man I Love” was placed
in another show, only to be cut again. Then it was used in a third
show, which never made it to Broadway. “The Man I Love” might have
remained at the bottom of the Gershwin trunk of unused songs had not
Lady Edwina Mountbatten heard George play it at a party and asked for
the sheet music. London orchestras picked it up, the song passed to black
jazz bands in Paris, and it quickly became so popular in Europe that it
was published in America. “The Man I Love” was the only hit by the Gershwin
brothers that did not emerge from the score of a Broadway show
or Hollywood musical.