Michael Owen
speaker
246 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 26 Nov
Michael Owen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.
Appearances
Fresh Air · Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy · 6 Dec 2024
podcast
Why?
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.
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.
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?
Absolutely. Let's hear Lee Wiley.
And this is on her recording from the 1930s, right?
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.
So let's hear Lee Wiley's recording from the 1930s of George and Ira Gershwin's But Not For Me.
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.
It did. Ira jokingly would usually say that what came first was the contract.
Sammy Cahn used to say that, too. Yes, I think they all said that. I think they all said that.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
How did Ira Gershwin's life end?
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.
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.
Showing 161–180 of 246 · page 9 of 13
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