Music: Death of Gershwin

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Gershwin was only 20 when he wrote his first musicomedy, La La Lucille. The same year he brought out his first hit song Swanee which sold 2,250,000 Victrola records. From 1920 to 1924 he wrote the music for George White's Scandals. The Astaires danced to his Our Nell, Sweet Little Devil, Lady Be Good! From hit shows like Stop Flirting, Primrose, Rainbow, Oh Kay, Funny Face, Strike Up the Band and Girl Crazy, Gershwin became a rich man, filled his penthouse with expensive furniture, African sculpture, a Mustel pipe organ, a fine collection of French moderns. George Gershwin had time and inclination for serious work. In 1923 he wrote his Rhapsody in Blue for Paul Whiteman's jazz-concert played in highbrow Aeolian Hall. The enthusiastic reception it got is now historic. Thereafter Gershwin wrote for a double audience. Some 18,000 people packed Manhattan's Lewisohn Stadium when he played his works there. Walter Damrosch conducted Gershwin's Jazz Concerto in sanctified Carnegie Hall. The dazzling harmonics and crisp, slangy rhythms of his American in Paris pleased critics at home and abroad, as well as ballet troupes (see below).

If songs like Somebody Loves Me, I Got Rhythm, Embraceable You, Let's Call the Whole Thing Off were ephemeral, Gershwin at least had the satisfaction of hearing a nation sing them. In the Pulitzer Prize musicomedy Of Thee I Sing, nothing was more memorable than his fantastic song, Of Thee I Sing, Baby. Raffish tunes from his Negro opera Porgy and Bess (I Got Plenty of No thin', A Woman Is a Sometime Thing, It Ain't Necessarily So), stole into the fanciest record albums in the U. S. Fox paid Gershwin $100,000 to write music for the cinema Delicious. He wrote the score for the Astaire-Ginger Rogers picture, Shall We Dance (TIME, May 10). He was working on the sixth of nine songs for the Goldwyn Follies when he died.