Michael Owen
Appearances
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
that brought Ira to a new level where people were starting to compare him to one of his idols, Gilbert, W.S. Gilbert, with Gilbert and Sullivan fame.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
They did love writing for Fred. And there was something about Stare's voice. It wasn't necessarily the most powerful or the most evocative, but he had the rhythm. Exactly, yeah. He had the feel for what George and Ira had in mind. And so even in the years after George's death,
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
Ira wrote the songs for one of Fred's movie musicals, his reunion with Ginger Rogers in the 1940s, The Barclays at Broadway. Fred Astaire did the movie version of Funny Face in the 1950s with Audrey Hepburn. He did his own songbook, Gershwin Songbook Collection, or not a Gershwin Songbook Collection, but one that had a number of Gershwin songs on it.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
So yeah, it was – they loved writing for him and Fred was just – and Adele, his sister who was actually more of a star in the early days than Fred was because they just had a certain rhythm. If you listen to the recordings that Fred and Adele did with George Gershwin in London in the 20s, you don't hear that sort of rhythm anymore from singers. It was something special.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
very syncopated, and I think that people talk about how the interpretation, and this is going on to a different subject a little bit, but the interpretation of George Gershwin's music has become more flowing and romantic, lyrical in a way, whereas if you listen to George Gershwin playing the piano on the old recordings, it's very staccato, very syncopated, and you can really get a sense of what the 20s might have been like from listening to those songs.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
More so than if you listen to a more contemporary recording, even the ones that are excellent in their own way.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
It was actually written very quickly. When George and I came to Hollywood the second time in 1936 to write for RKO Pictures, to write for Astaire and Rogers, who were already a successful team, they came to Hollywood with a fair number of ideas already in mind. So the songs for that first of the three movies that they wound up doing in L.A. in the They all came together very quickly.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
The songs are written to fit certain sequences in the film. This was one of them and one of the best. The songs that came from this movie and the other two movies are, in most people's opinion and mine too, the top flight songs that George and I wrote.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
I think he was hard put to say what his favorite song was. He always said that it was like choosing your favorite child. I think it was one of his father's favorite songs because his father seemed to think that the line come to Papa do was about him.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
Yes. It's a love song. The way that Ira described it in his book, Lyrics on Several Occasions, is that whenever that line would come up in the song, Morris Gershwin, that's his father, would sort of beat his chest and, you know, say, you know, that's about me. That's hilarious.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
Well, everyone has their own interpretation of lyrics.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
Well, I think it goes back to George... maybe having a slightly better understanding of the popular audience, that they weren't necessarily interested in tricky rhyme schemes.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
Yeah, name checks of Russian composers and politicians and that. Largely because, as I think I said earlier, a theater audience isn't, certainly in the earlier days when amplification wasn't It was hard for people sometimes to hear the actual lyrics being sung, particularly if the band was loud, the pit band. And in some cases, it was quite loud.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
And so this idea that keeping a song simple was better was... not always a happy thing for Ira to do. In at least a couple of instances, he would be almost forced in a way to Submit lyrics that he wasn't quite happy with, but he knew that the time was up and he had to do it. That was particularly the case with something like Love Walked In, which was a big hit from the Golden Follies in 1938.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
And the song Long Ago and Far Away that he wrote with Jerome Kern in the 1940s for the movie Cover Girl. He was never overly happy with those lyrics, perhaps thinking that they were slightly too simple. But they were, conversely, two of his most financially successful songs.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
And very singable, yes. You don't have to fall over a tricky beat somewhere.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
I can try to straighten it out. It'll still probably remain slightly confusing. So George Gershwin and DuBose Hayward did not actually write together very often. Hayward was in the Carolinas and George was in New York. And there are certain songs that We know that Ira wrote himself.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
Those were generally – people have generally said the songs that were written for Sport and Life, it ain't necessarily so and there's a book that's even for New York. Whereas some of the more –
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
operatic songs, particularly in the first act, were largely the work of DuBose Hayward, and some actually were joint numbers, whether it was because Hayward happened to be in New York at that time and the three of them could work together, or Ira had taken a phrase or two from the libretto or from the novel or the play and turned it into the lyric, and so therefore he felt that this was a song that could
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
be jointly credited to them. And the lyrics for the opera are credited to, in the original credits, to DuBose Hayward and Ira Gershwin jointly without any indication of who wrote what in that sense.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
Correct. George arranged and orchestrated the entire opera.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
This is a song from late in the opera where Sport and Life... Who's a pimp. The pimp, yes, the drug-dealing pimp in Catfish Row, tries to bring Bess back to his side by persuading her that he can bring her to New York, she can have a happy life as a prostitute. And wear the finest fashions.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
And wear the finest fashions and take some happy dust and move away from these country folk who, you know, you're more like me, Bess. You're not one of these people. So that's basically the idea behind the song.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
More the former, I think, than the latter. By 1954, when Ira wrote what turned out to be his last two significant works, the songs for Stars Born and for the drama The Country Girl with Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly, which was also written with Harold Arlen, he wrote a few songs for that. At times, it changed. Musical theater had changed.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
Ira had had a couple of unsuccessful shows in the 40s with Kurt Weill and the composer Arthur Schwartz. So he was somewhat put off from writing for Broadway just because it seemed to him that it was too much effort at too much cost and not enough that was coming back to him. Music was changing. Obviously, we had rock and roll arriving in the 1950s and what was popular was changing.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
Although the Gershwin songs, as you've mentioned, were becoming part of the world of what we call standards now. And people like Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett and Peggy Lee and Billie Holiday were increasingly doing the songs on recordings and making for Ira quite a pleasant amount of money.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
He just wasn't interested in what was going on in the world of movie musicals and theater at that point, enough to want to work in them anymore.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
Well, Ivor died in 1983. He had been housebound for a number of years. His last real work was in the early 1960s. And so after the end of the 1960s, which was basically the last time he traveled to He increasingly stayed at his house. He had had a stroke and various other physical ailments over the years which were leaving him more incapacitated.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
He was hospitalized on a number of occasions for different things related to his heart. I will say that his final years actually were quite good ones because Among other things was the arrival of a young man by the name of Michael Feinstein, who I know you've had on your show, who was hired initially to ... to entertain Ira and wound up working on Ira's archive.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
I did some similar work to what Michael did in terms of the archive, but certainly not entertaining Ira. I wasn't around then. There was a piano that was brought up into Ira's bedroom and Michael spent a lot of time at the house. singing for Ira, some of the more obscure corners of Ira's catalog, which entertained a man who had become somewhat isolated. But it was a good life.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
It was a successful life. And it's certainly one that is well remembered by those of us who love great songs, great lyrics, and the great American songbook.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
I do. I shouldn't really give it away, but it is kind of how the book ends.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
Yes, I saw Rosemary in one of her final performances in San Francisco. Not that I truly remember what she ended that concert with, but yes, she was always a great interpreter, and she did a complete— a recording of Ira lyrics on one of her Concord records in her later years.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
Thank you, first off, for having me on. 1924 was absolutely a big year for Ira. Ira and George had brought them together for the first time as a songwriting team to write a Broadway show. And because Lady Be Good was such a success, it fostered the rest of their career together. But by the time the late 1950s came around when Ella Fitzgerald recorded the songbook, Ira's career had come to an end.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
He might not have known that at the time, but it did. We know that now. And the songbook, one of a series of songbooks that Ella Fitzgerald did of other songwriters of the period, brought a new light, a new focus on the songs that the brothers wrote. And so it was a commercial success. It was an artistic success.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
And it brought on a wealth of new recordings of those songs and others in the catalog and helped Ira financially quite well.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
They were only two years apart and they were the first and second children of Morris and Rose Gershwin. So they grew up together, even though. Their interests were very separate. George was somebody who went out and got into fights and came home with a black eye. Iroh was back in his room reading newspaper articles and magazines and books.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
So his life became more one of observation rather than activity, whereas George's life would have been a 180-degree difference from that.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
Well, all three of the writers who were friends, Harold Arlen, the composer, and Yip Harburg and Ira, who had been classmates and writing partners together before, when Arlen and Harburg had been hired to write the score at MGM for Wizard of Oz, they played the tune, Arlen's tune, that became Over the Rainbow for Ira because he was a sounding board. And
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
I must say that that was the way it was with all these writers of that period. They were all generally friendly to each other. I don't think there was a lot of competition. I mean, there was competition, obviously, but there wasn't angry competition.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
So when the song was finished, or at least when Harburg and Ireland thought the song was finished, they came over to Ira's house and Ireland sat down at the piano and played the tune and Harburg sang the song. And Ira liked it a lot, but he felt like that there was something missing at the end, a coda
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
And so Ira was the one who came up with the line about bluebirds flying at the end, which is one of the more famous lines from the song.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
Right. And I think that sums up the song in many ways. It sums up the film. It sums up Dorothy's journey. But I think he just was helping out his friends, and whether he got credit for that or not didn't really make that much difference to him.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
Well, Banant for me was one of the songs that was written for the 1930 musical Girl Crazy, which featured a very young Ginger Rogers. That was a song that Ginger Rogers sang in the show Ballad that she sang. And it was also the show that brought Ethel Merman to everybody's attention. So
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
I got rhythm as in the same show and it was perhaps the height of the Gershwin's silly shows by 1930 before they went into some of the political shows of the few years after and then Porgy and Bess. But Not For Me is, it's a very romantic ballad and you can take it that way.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
But if you listen to the lyrics closely, you can hear both Ivor's influences because, as you say, he read a lot and he had a huge library. But also his tricky rhymes about wedding knots and being that that was not for me.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
Absolutely correct. And I think that one of the things that Ira complained about sometimes was that in a theater – Most people were never going to get that sense of the song. They were going to hear the two words and the two sounds, not and not, and they'd think they were the same thing.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
And it was only the people who actually studied the sheet music or who sang the song professionally who might pick it up. But he did this on purpose.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
Because he always wanted to have some fun with the lyrics. I don't think he ever thought of lyric writing, particularly in his early years, as a job so much as it was his way of making his thoughts about love and art known to the world of musical theater and film music and popular songs and Whether people got that or not, that certainly wasn't up to him, but he was very protective of his lyrics.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
When singers would sing songs not in the way that he wrote them, singing, I've got rhythm instead of I got rhythm, he was somewhat offended by that in a humorous way.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
Yes, Lee Wiley, she's generally a forgotten name in the world of popular song these days, but she was one of the first performers to do what we now call songbook albums.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
It did. Ira jokingly would usually say that what came first was the contract.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
Yeah. Yes. In the early days, and I would say that it would have been from the 20s into the mid-1930s, it was usually George's melodic ideas that started the ball rolling for a song. And it might just have been a fragment of a melody. And Ira had a very good memory for melodies, even though he couldn't really play the piano.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
But he did remember them in a certain way that kept them in his mind and could bring them back and try to remind his brother of something that might have been brought up a few months earlier. And it was a very unique relationship. I mean, I know that every songwriter worked in a different way. Songwriting partnerships worked in different ways. But
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
Typically, over the years, Ira would be at a little card table next to George at the And he would have his big sheets of paper with him, and he would just scribble out ideas.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
And if you looked at some of the archival material that I used in writing this book and went through Ira's papers as I did, you can see the vast amount of changes and ideas that flowed through his head as his brother was elaborating on these melodies.
Fresh Air
Canonical Lyricist Ira Gershwin Gets His Due
But eventually, over the years, it became more of a joint partnership that it wasn't always the music that came first, particularly as they got into the so-called political musicals of the 30s of the I Sing and things like that, where the lyrics came more to the forefront of the show rather than the music. Memorable music, though it is, but it's the lyrics, the satirical nature of those lyrics.
Fresh Air
Al Pacino Looks Back On A Legendary Career
The Corleone family wants to buy you out. The Corleone family wants to buy me out. No, I buy you out. You don't buy me out. Your casino loses money. Maybe we can do better. You think I'm skimming off the top, Mike? You're unlucky.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
The classic songs, Lady Be Good, Embraceable You, It's Wonderful, Love Is Here to Stay, Let's Call the Whole Thing Off, Fascinating Rhythm, I Got Rhythm, I've Got a Crush on You, My Ship, The Man That Got Away, Long Ago and Far Away, I Could Go On. They all have lyrics by Ira Gershwin.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Most of his best-known songs were written with his younger brother, the pianist and composer George Gershwin, but Ira also wrote with Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, and Kurt Weill. Thank you for having me. Let's start with Ella Fitzgerald singing Lady Be Good from her 1959 album Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Songbook. It's the title song from an early Gershwin musical.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Michael Owen, welcome to Fresh Air. I love the Gershwin's music, so it's a pleasure to be able to talk with you about it. I opened with Lady Be Good because I think it ties together the early part of Ira Gershwin's career with the part in the 1950s when he wasn't really writing much. And his career, his songs, like, needed a boost.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
And Ella Fitzgerald's Gershwin Songbook really helped give him that boost. So can you talk a little bit about the importance of both of those ends, you know, the Lady Be Good musical and the Ella Fitzgerald Gershwin songbook?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Thank you, first off, for having me on. 1924 was absolutely a big year for Ira. Ira and George had brought them together for the first time as a songwriting team to write a Broadway show. And because Lady Be Good was such a success, it fostered the rest of their career together. But by the time the late 1950s came around when Ella Fitzgerald recorded the songbook, Ira's career had come to an end.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
He might not have known that at the time, but it did. We know that now. And the songbook, one of a series of songbooks that Ella Fitzgerald did of other songwriters of the period, brought a new light, a new focus on the songs that the brothers wrote. And so it was a commercial success. It was an artistic success.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
And it brought on a wealth of new recordings of those songs and others in the catalog and helped Ira financially quite well.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
George and Ira had very different interests and personalities. George was more extroverted. Ira was more shy or wanted to stay more in the background. And George was very musical. Ira was immersed in words. He read a lot. He kept a record of what happened. He read, he started writing light verse that was published in the college magazine or newspaper and other places.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Were they close as children being so different from each other?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
They were only two years apart and they were the first and second children of Morris and Rose Gershwin. So they grew up together, even though. Their interests were very separate. George was somebody who went out and got into fights and came home with a black eye. Iroh was back in his room reading newspaper articles and magazines and books.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
So his life became more one of observation rather than activity, whereas George's life would have been a 180-degree difference from that.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
When Ira was young, either in high school or college, he became friends with Yip Harburg, the lyricist probably most famous for writing the lyrics for The Wizard of Oz. And he also wrote the very famous lyric, Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? And not only were they friends and they often like talked about not only poetry and light verse, but also lyrics together.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Ira actually contributed a couple of lines to Over the Rainbow from The Wizard of Oz. What was Ira's contribution?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Well, all three of the writers who were friends, Harold Arlen, the composer, and Yip Harburg and Ira, who had been classmates and writing partners together before, when Arlen and Harburg had been hired to write the score at MGM for Wizard of Oz, they played the tune, Arlen's tune, that became Over the Rainbow for Ira because he was a sounding board.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
I must say that that was the way it was with all these writers of that period. They were all generally friendly to each other. I don't think there was a lot of competition. I mean, there was competition, obviously, but there wasn't angry competition.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
So when the song was finished, or at least when Harburg and Arlen thought the song was finished, they came over to Ira's house and Arlen sat down at the piano and played the tune and Harburg sang the song. And Ira liked it a lot, but he felt like that there was something missing at the end, a coda
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
And so Ira was the one who came up with the line about bluebirds flying at the end, which is one of the more famous lines from the song.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow, why oh why can't I?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Right. And I think that sums up the song in many ways. It sums up the film. It sums up Dorothy's journey. But I think he just was helping out his friends, and whether he got credit for that or not didn't really make that much difference to him.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
And he did not get credit as a... He did not get credit, no, no. Why don't we just hear that coda, just hear the end of the song.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
That was the end of Somewhere Over the Rainbow from The Wizard of Oz, and we heard those last couple of lines, which were actually written by Ira Gershwin. Ira read so many books and wrote light verse, and some of the lyrics have really fun, funny literary references in them. An example for that is But Not For Me, which is a beautiful song.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
And it has a line, I found more skies of gray than any Russian play can guarantee. One of his famous lines. Can you talk a little bit about that song and how it originated?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Well, Banant for me was one of the songs that was written for the 1930 musical Girl Crazy, which featured a very young Ginger Rogers. That was a song that Ginger Rogers sang in the show Ballad that she sang. And it was also the show that brought Ethel Merman to everybody's attention. So I got rhythm as in the same show.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
And it was perhaps the height of the Gershwin's silly shows by 1930 before they went into some of the political shows of the few years after and then Porgy and Bess. But not for me is it's a very romantic ballad and you can take it that way. But if you listen to the lyrics closely, you can hear both Ivor's influences because, as you say, he read a lot and he had a huge library.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
But also his tricky rhymes about wedding knots and being that that was not for me.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Part of the lyric, and it's the end of the lyric, goes, when every happy plot ends with a marriage knot, and there's no knot for me. So it's a clever play on words.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Absolutely correct. And I think that one of the things that Ira complained about sometimes was that in a theater, Most people were never going to get that sense of the song. They were going to hear the two words and the two sounds, not and not, and they'd think they were the same thing.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
And it was only the people who actually studied the sheet music or who sang the song professionally who might pick it up. But he did this on purpose, right?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Because he always wanted to have some fun with the lyrics. I don't think he ever thought of lyric writing, particularly in his early years, as a job so much as it was his way of making his thoughts about love and art known to the world of musical theater and film music and popular songs and Whether people got that or not, that certainly wasn't up to him. But he was very protective of his lyrics.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
And when singers would sing songs not in the way that he wrote them, singing I've got rhythm instead of I got rhythm, he was somewhat offended by that in a humorous way.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
It was the same with S'Wonderful. Oh, absolutely. If somebody sang It's Wonderful, you'd get pretty upset. And I was listening to the Lee Wiley. She did a whole set of Gershwin songs. And she sings It's Wonderful. It's supposed to be S'Wonderful. But she's such a great singer. Anyhow, let's not get too distracted and let's hear But Not For Me. Should we hear Lee Wiley singing it?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Absolutely. Let's hear Lee Wiley.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
And this is on her recording from the 1930s, right?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Yes, Lee Wiley, she's generally a forgotten name in the world of popular song these days, but she was one of the first performers to do what we now call songbook albums.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
So let's hear Lee Wiley's recording from the 1930s of George and Ira Gershwin's But Not For Me.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
That was Lee Wiley, recorded in the 1930s, singing the Gershwin song, But Not For Me. My guest, Michael Owen, is the author of a new book called Ira Gershwin, A Life in Words. What was their approach to writing together? Everybody wants to know what came first, the words or the music. And their approach to writing together changed over the years.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
It did. Ira jokingly would usually say that what came first was the contract.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Sammy Cahn used to say that, too. Yes, I think they all said that. I think they all said that.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Yes, in the early days, and I would say that it would have been from the 20s into the mid-1930s, it was usually George's melodic ideas that started the ball rolling for a song. And it might just have been a fragment of a melody. And Ira had a very good memory for melodies, even though he couldn't really play the piano.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
But he did remember them in a certain way that kept them in his mind and could bring them back and try to remind his brother of something that might have been brought up a few months earlier. And it was a very unique relationship. I mean, I know that Every songwriter worked in a different way. Songwriting partnerships worked in different ways.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
But typically over the years, Ira would be at a little card table next to George at the piano. And he would have his big sheets of paper with him, and he would just gribble out ideas.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
And if you looked at some of the archival material that I used in writing this book and went through Ira's papers as I did, you can see the vast amount of changes and ideas that flowed through his head as his brother was elaborating on these melodies.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
But eventually, over the years, it became more of a joint partnership that it wasn't always the music that came first, particularly as they got into the so-called political musicals of the 30s of the I Sing and things like that, where the lyrics came more to the forefront of the show rather than the music. Memorable music, though it is, but it's the lyrics, the satirical nature of those lyrics.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
that brought Ira to a new level where people were starting to compare him to one of his idols, Gilbert, W.S. Gilbert, with Gilbert and Sullivan fame.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
How did Ira Gershwin's life end?
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Well, Ira died in 1983. He had been... housebound for a number of years. His last real work was in the early 1960s. After the end of the 1960s, which was basically the last time he traveled, he increasingly stayed at his house. He had had a stroke and various other physical ailments over the years, which were leaving him more incapacitated.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
But I will say that his final years actually were quite good ones because, among other things, was the arrival of a young man by the name of Michael Feinstein, who I know you've had on your show, who was hired initially to sort of entertain Ira and wound up working on Ira's archive. I did some similar work to what Michael did in terms of the archive, but certainly not entertaining Ira.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
I wasn't around then. There was a piano that was brought up into Ira's bedroom, and Michael spent a lot of time at the house singing for Ira, some of the more obscure corners of Ira's catalog. which entertained a man who had become somewhat isolated. But it was a good life. It was a successful life.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
And it's certainly one that is well remembered by those of us who love great songs, great lyrics, and the great American songbook.
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Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Michael Owen, thank you so much for talking with us.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Thank you, Terry. It's been a pleasure.