Paris

Gershwin made four trips to Paris, all of which contributed to his writing of An American in Paris. Few details are known about the first trip, in April 1923, with friends Jules Glaenzer and Buddy DeSylva, other than the brevity of the stay (just a few days), Gershwin’s airsickness on the flight from London, and his reported visit to a high-end, Parisian brothel.² Gershwin’s second trip, in June 1925, was a special treat he gave himself after the successful premiere of his musical comedy, Tell Me More, at the Winter Garden Theatre in London. Like countless Americans before him, Gershwin was drawn to the idea of Paris as the cultural capital of Europe. He and his cousin Harry Botkin had dreamed of visiting the City of Lights ever since they were teenagers. For them, the capital represented a necessary stop for up-and-coming artists in search of modernist inspiration. Fin-de-siècle Paris had produced an array of avant-garde painters and musicians, from Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, and George Roualt to Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Erik Satie. And in the 1920s, an alluring array of expatriate artists, from James Joyce and Ezra Pound to Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Igor Stravinsky, and Sergei Diaghilev called the city home.

Gershwin met no such luminaries during his second brief excursion. Instead, his days were filled with typical tourist activities: visits to the Eiffel Tower and Louvre, sampling French wines (a special treat for an American traveling during the Prohibition era) and walks along the Champs-Élysées.³ He traveled alone, and when homesickness set in he met up with friends from New York who were also in Paris, among them Lou and Emily Paley, Vincent Youmans, the ex-pats Robert and Mabel Schirmer, and Jules Glaenzer (who was now there on his honeymoon).

Gershwin’s third trip to Paris took place the following spring. He arrived on April 1, 1926, this time as a guest of the Schirmers. They had invited him to Paris for a week-long break before the London launch of his hit musical Lady, Be Good! Robert Schirmer described the visit in a letter to Emily and Lou Paley:

Gershwin appears to have had little interest in seeing the sites. As Schirmer explained, Gershwin preferred to relax with them at home and socialize with other Americans during the evening.

The Schirmers managed to drag him to the theater on at least one occasion to see the newest Maurice Yvain operetta, but Gershwin was reportedly unimpressed:

The fact that Gershwin spoke no French likely contributed to his lukewarm reception of the operetta. This also helps explain why, according to Schirmer, Gershwin’s preferred activity during his stay with them involved attending various sporting events, including “an evening at the Prize Fights” and “an afternoon at the Steeplechase racing in the Bois de Boulogne.”⁷

Apparently, the only influential music-related event that occurred during Gershwin’s stay with the Schirmers was a dinner they hosted in their home:

Schirmer claimed that “a pleasant evening was had by all,” but one wonders. Antheil had a habit of name dropping, and he took great pride in his position as an up-and-coming American composer. For example, in an earlier letter to Mary Curtis Bok (founder of the Curtis Institute in 1924), Antheil described a concert in the “beautiful Champ Elysees [sic.] Theatre,” where he “played to a brilliant audience,” which included:

If Antheil’s conversation with Gershwin was even half as inflated, it would have made for a tiresome evening. Neither composer appears to have taken much interest in the work of the other. In a letter written shortly after their meeting, Antheil bemoaned the fact that “a very mediocre piece ‘Rhapsodie in Blue’ [sic.] by Gershwin” had recently created “a great deal of excitement.”¹⁰ Gershwin was equally unimpressed by Antheil’s Ballet mécanique, which he categorized as “one of those compositions of the Dada school, which employ the instrumentation of electric fans or couple fifty synchronized pianos in a riot of noisy cacophony.”¹¹ Still, the competitive encounter appears to have motivated both men to commence new compositions. For Antheil, this friendly rivalry resulted in his Jazz Symphony, originally composed for Paul Whiteman but eventually premiered by W.C. Handy and his Orchestra.¹² For Gershwin, it was An American in Paris.

Gershwin left Paris for London on April 7 with the Schirmers in tow. Four days later they attended the premiere of Lady, Be Good! To mark the occasion, Gershwin presented his friends with a photo of himself seated at the piano. He inscribed the back: “For Mabel and Bob – Many thanks for a wonderful week in Paris. Love, George.” The inscription included two musical themes: the opening “Andantino” from Rhapsody in Blue; and a new, four-bar motif labeled “An American in Paris” with the description “Very Parisienne.”¹³ Although nearly two years would pass before this Parisian musical seed grew into an orchestral tone poem, Gershwin’s fascination with the city had taken root. His desire to visit again was strong.

Returning to New York, Gershwin continued to reflect on his time abroad. He sketched passages incorporating a popular dance tune he had heard in French cafés (Charles Borel-Clerc’s “La Mattchiche”) and devised a plan to incorporate the honking of Parisian taxi horns – perhaps a response to Antheil’s “boiler-factory” obbligato. But as Gershwin explained to a reporter, he struggled at first to translate his experiences into music: “As I was not a Frenchman, I knew that I had gotten about as far as I could get with it,” focusing only on the sounds of Paris.¹⁴ He wanted to include himself – his American self – in the music, and as he later explained, his travels abroad helped him see his local surroundings on the Upper West Side in a new light:

As Gershwin explained it, the memory of the melancholy he experienced in Paris when thinking about home served as a turning point in his approach to the composition. He now had a general concept of how he could expand his “little French theme” into “another serious piece.”¹⁶

According to this new scheme, the blues played a crucial role, not simply as a foil to the jocular opening theme, but as a sonic symbol of the United States – a counterweight to the original “Very Parisienne” idea. Gershwin’s continued interest in the blues as material for “another serious piece” (the earlier ones being Rhapsody in Blue and Concerto in F) is not surprising, considering that shortly after his return to New York, he received a new book, W.C. Handy’s Blues: An Anthology. Gershwin had known it was in production; before traveling abroad he had given permission to the publisher to include three of his works: “The Half of It, Dearie, Blues” from Lady, Be Good!, and excerpts from both Rhapsody in Blue and the second movement of Concerto in F. Much to Gershwin’s delight, these works received special attention in the introductory essay penned by music critic Abbe Niles.

Adopting the literary language of an academic, Niles describes Blues: An Anthology as a scholarly collection of American folk culture.¹⁷ The quantity and breadth of music included in the collection, “all drawn from the memory of W.C. Handy,” was extraordinary for the time. In addition to traditional spirituals and work-songs, the volume included a wide array of vaudeville songs, contemporary commercial blues and excerpts of works commonly referred to as symphonic jazz.¹⁸ Niles’s essay covered a range of topics, from the folk-blues as verse and music and its pioneers to the modern blues and the adoption and influence of the blues on jazz, musical theater and extended works for the concert hall. It is in this last category that Gershwin’s work is discussed, along with that of John Alden Carpenter. Niles identifies Carpenter as “the first ‘serious’ American white composer to flirt with Handy’s idea” of modern blues. But he reserves for Gershwin the honor of being “the only insistent experimenter along this line whose work is unquestionably worth watching.” According to Niles, Gershwin should be singled out, for he alone “has made a serious study of the question ‘wherein blue,’” and “not content with abject imitation, he has thought out the philosophy for himself, making the old tricks his own where he uses them, and making his own point of view the flavor of his work.”¹⁹ The essay concludes with a description of Gershwin as the avant-garde representative of this distinctively American folk genre: “We find in this music [Gershwin’s Rhapsody and Concerto in F] the blues exerting, in a new field, an influence still of undiminished vitality and suggestiveness.”²⁰

Around the same time Gershwin read Handy’s anthology, he received another book that occupied his creative imagination for the next decade: DuBose Heyward’s best-selling novel, Porgy (1925) – the tale of a disabled African American beggar in turn-of-the-century Charleston and his unlikely lover Bess. Emily Paley loaned Gershwin her copy of the book, and legend has it that he read it in a single sitting, after coming home late from a rehearsal of Oh, Kay!²¹ Gershwin’s interest in the novel is unsurprising. Since the failed performances of Blue Monday (later titled 135th Street) – a blackface production labeled as “opera à la Afro-American” – in 1922 and 1925, he had been wanting to try his hand once again at writing an opera involving black characters.

One can see what drew Gershwin to Porgy’s tragic narrative. Music is evoked from the beginning, with a prologue that imitates the metered invocations of ancient bards. Here the lives of the novel’s primary characters – “Porgy, Maria, and Bess; Robbins, and Peter and Crown” – are described with musical metaphors. The “marvelous tunes” of their youth have become “demanding strange songs” played on “an instrument, terrible, new.”²² This affecting beginning is soon followed by the narrative itself, which opens, evocatively, in the manner of a folktale:

Gershwin was not the only one in the family taken with Heyward’s novel. His cousin Ben Botkin, who in 1926 had just secured a position teaching literature at the University of Oklahoma, had also read the novel, and countless other works connected to African American culture.²⁴

Ben was a poet and an intellectual, and in his letters to Ira and George he described his experiences as one of the first Jewish students admitted to Harvard University, where he earned a B.A. in English literature in 1920. After graduation, he moved to New York, where he enrolled as a graduate student at Columbia. As a friend and colleague of Botkin’s later explained: “It was no mere coincidence that [Ben] shifted his studies from Harvard to Columbia, conscious as he was of the rising fortunes in new music of cousins Ira and George.”²⁵ Ben became enamored of what he called George’s “epoch-making experiments” with jazz. He compared Rhapsody in Blue to Carl Sandburg’s poetry and predicted that it would “revolutionize the art” of “native music.”²⁶ After attending a rehearsal for Rhapsody in Blue on February 5 (a week before the premiere) he described his impressions in a letter to a friend:

This last comment is especially important. It was Ben who encouraged George to see the blues, and by extension jazz, as products of contemporary urban folk culture. As a graduate student at Columbia, Ben studied under the guidance of Franz Boas, who was receiving national attention at the time for his groundbreaking work in anthropology. Boas rejected evolutionary approaches to the study of culture. He argued that culture develops historically, rather than from biological traits. It was intersection that mattered, the interactions of groups of people and ideas across diverse geographies. Boas promoted the concept of cultural relativism, arguing that there was no such thing as an objectively superior race or culture. He proposed that humans see the world through the lens of their own culture, and judge it according to their own culturally acquired norms.²⁸ Botkin took these ideas to heart, and in the mid-1920s, while working in settlement houses and teaching English to newly arrived immigrants in New York, he began applying them to American literature, most notably the folklore of various regions and ethnic groups. By 1926, he had begun to develop and publish his own ideas about the intersections of folklore and popular culture.²⁹ Not surprisingly, some of his earliest essays touched on the blues and their place in American literature. As a colleague later noted, it was Ben, who “tutor[ed] George Gershwin in the black lore which would be reflected in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.”³⁰ And it was Ben who encouraged Gershwin to see the cultural isolationism promoted by many intellectuals as detrimental to the growth of American art. To grow as an artist, Ben often noted, one had to embrace the pluralistic culture of modern society.

With these thoughts in mind, Gershwin was eager to return to Paris, and he regularly mentioned these plans to reporters, describing his next trip as an educational experience, a requisite step in his development as a composer.³¹ He solidified these plans in a letter to Mabel Schirmer in late February 1928:

This last detail was important. On this trip, Gershwin hoped to widen his interactions beyond the Anglo-American community. His ultimate goal was to find a composition teacher and make progress on his latest concert work. The “we” in his letter referred to his brother Ira, sister-in-law Leonore (Lee), and sister Frances (Frankie). While Gershwin worked, they would “travel around … and see some of the sights.”³³ For Gershwin’s siblings, this trip was their first trans-Atlantic excursion. Ira kept a rather detailed diary during their travels, making note not only of the sites and the various people (celebrities and friends) they encountered, but also of George’s activities.

When the Gershwin clan arrived at the Gare St. Lazare in Paris on March 25, Mabel and Robert Schirmer were waiting for them. Over the next few weeks, Robert took the lead in showing Ira, Lee, and Frankie the sites while Mabel accompanied George on various errands. “The most fun of all came when he went shopping for taxi horns,” she later explained. “We walked all along the Avenue of the Grand Armée, where all the automobile shops used to be. We went to every shop we could find to look for taxi horns for An American in Paris. He wanted horns that could sound certain notes.”³⁴

Mabel also accompanied George when he went to visit Nadia Boulanger at her apartment in Montmartre. He arrived with a formal letter of introduction from Maurice Ravel, whom he had befriended a few weeks earlier in New York.³⁵ In his letter, Ravel describes Gershwin as “a musician … endowed with the most brilliant, most enchanting, and perhaps the most profound talent,” whose “worldwide success no longer satisfies him, for he is aiming higher.” He explains that Gershwin “knows that he lacks the technical means to achieve his goal” but “[i]n teaching him those means, one might ruin his talent.” Admitting that he doesn’t have “the courage … to undertake this awesome responsibility,” Ravel hopes that she might. He concludes by saying: “I expect to return home [to Paris] in early May and will come to see you in order to discuss this matter. In the meantime, I send you my most cordial regards. Maurice Ravel.”³⁶

Boulanger did not wait for Ravel’s return to make her decision, declining Gershwin’s request. As she explained years later: “I had nothing to offer him. He was already quite well known when he came to my house, and I suggested that he was doing alright and should continue. I told him what I could teach him wouldn’t help much … and he agreed.”³⁷ Gershwin’s search for a teacher continued. In addition to querying Stravinsky – who is rumored to have dismissed the notion when he learned the immensity of Gershwin’s annual income – he approached Jacques Ibert.³⁸ As Ibert explained, although he was “dazzled by [Gershwin’s] prodigious technique and amazed at his melodic sense, at the boldness of his modulations, and by his audacious and often unexpected harmonic inventions,” he didn’t believe he could teach the American much in just a few weeks.³⁹

If this stream of rejections dismayed Gershwin, he did not show it. His gifts as a pianist and his fame as the composer of Rhapsody in Blue brought countless professional opportunities in Paris, and musicians and artists, both famous and aspiring, sought him out on a daily basis. Ira recorded in his travel diary his brother’s many visitors; they included Georges Auric, Sergei Diaghilev, Arthur Honegger, Vladimir Horowitz, Fritz Kreisler, Darius Milhaud, Sergei Prokofiev, Man Ray, Rhené-Baton, and Dimitri Tiomkin.⁴⁰ Musicians were eager to perform for him. For example, the violinist Rudolf Kolish and the other members of his quartet offered a private performance of works by Schubert and Schoenberg on March 27. And on June 2, Gershwin joined Ravel, Alfred Cortot, and Edgard Varèse at a private recital given by the Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona at the Salle Gaveau.⁴¹ Gershwin also encountered countless admirers, among them Mario Braggiotti, an eighteen-year-old student at the Paris Conservatory, and his friend Jacques Fray, who arrived unannounced at Gershwin’s hotel room:

By the time Gershwin left for Paris, he had already begun two drafts of what would become An American in Paris. He continued work on the composition during his travels, and, according to Ira, wrote “the entire ‘blues’ section” in his room “at the Hotel Majestic in Paris.”⁴³

When Gershwin’s plan to find a teacher fell through, he traveled to Berlin and Vienna, where he came in contact with more composers. In Berlin, he spent most of his time with Franz Lehar. He also interacted with Kurt Weill and attended a performance of Die Reise Benjamins des Dritten, a Yiddish “folk musical” with music by Ernst Toch.⁴⁴ During an interview with a reporter in Berlin, Gershwin commented on the positive reception of jazz by local audiences: “Jazz is taken much more seriously here in Germany than it is in the United States and thanks to the phonograph, jazz and other American music is much better known here than one would expect.”⁴⁵

On April 27, Gershwin traveled to Vienna, where he met with Emmerich Kálmán, Albert Szirmai, and the writers Felix Salten and Ferenc Molnár. Both George and Ira were “astonished” by Kálmán’s “knowledge of the New York stage.”⁴⁶ Although the European had never traveled to the United States, he read the Broadway trade magazine, Variety, every week, from cover to cover. These American influences surfaced in the musical productions the Gershwins attended during their stay. At the Theater an der Wien they saw Kálmán’s Die Herzogin von Chicago, a two-act operetta that addresses the impact of America and its social revolution on European culture. George and Ira also went to a performance of Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf, which places American jazz in the realm of European modernism. “It was certainly worth seeing if only for its novelty,” Ira explained: “It was put on like a revue – prodigious and picturesque. The last scene represented New York on the top of the World. I suffered from nostalgia when I saw the familiar signs of Broadway shooting from all directions on the stage.”⁴⁷

When George was later asked about his impressions of Vienna, he responded: “One of the high spots of my visit was my meeting with Alban Berg, an Austrian ultramodernist composer almost unknown in this country.”⁴⁸ The pair met twice, on May 3 and 5. The second meeting was at the home of Rudolf Kolish and featured a performance of Berg’s Lyric Suite for string quartet. As a friendly memento of the afternoon, Berg gave Gershwin an inscribed copy of the score and an autographed photo. Gershwin treasured both and later described the Lyric Suite as “dissonant to the extent of proving disagreeable to the average music-lover’s consonant trained ear,” even though “its conception and treatment are thoroughly modern in the best sense of the word.”⁴⁹ After some encouragement from Berg, Gershwin performed Rhapsody in Blue. Later that evening, Ira noted in his diary: “George big hit with Berg.”⁵⁰

When Gershwin returned to Paris, he reconnected with his cousin, Harry, who was now living in the city. Harry had last seen Gershwin the year before, during a vacation in Ossining, New York, where he had introduced George to the art of painting. By that time, Harry had completed his studies at the Massachusetts School of Art in Boston and the Art Students League in New York and was working as an illustrator for the Saturday Evening Post and Harper’s.⁵¹ But like Gershwin, Harry was drawn to Paris, and with his cousin’s financial help he moved to the capital in 1927, shortly before his first European exhibition at the Billiet Gallery.

Harry lived in a studio residence in the Montparnasse neighborhood, where his neighbors included André Derain, Georges Braque, Jean Lurçat, and Marcel Gromaire.⁵² During his 1928 visit, Gershwin took a keen interest in contemporary art, and under Harry’s guidance began collecting in earnest in 1931.⁵³ Over the next few years, Gershwin purchased nearly 200 works with Harry as his agent, many by world-famous artists, including Degas, Derain, Matisse, Modigliani, Picasso, and Roualt.⁵⁴ Gershwin found an affinity between the works of these artists and what he was trying to do with music. As he once explained: “The new music and the new art are similar in rhythm; they share a somber power and fine sentiment.”⁵⁵ In addition to “paintings in oil by the [Modernist] masters,” Gershwin collected works by American regionalist artists like Thomas Hart Benton and Maurice Stern. Harry encouraged Gershwin’s interest in folk art. As he later explained, Gershwin “gathered a most varied group of important examples of Negro [African] sculpture, together with drawings, rare watercolors and lithographs. He never confined himself to the paintings of any one group or country, but was always interested in the various movements and schools of art.”⁵⁶ Gershwin was especially drawn to the folk-like imagery of Chagall and Roualt, and he spent his last few weeks in Paris exploring the city’s galleries. Although he had told various reporters he would finish An American in Paris in time for a Parisian premiere in May, this deadline came and went without a completed composition. Gershwin was still working on the piece when he returned to New York. The draft for solo piano remained incomplete until August 1, 1928 – roughly six weeks after arriving home.

On November 18, Gershwin finished the orchestration for An American in Paris, which was premiered on December 13 at Carnegie Hall, with Walter Damrosch conducting the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. To celebrate, Harry gave his cousin a large, sectional screen for his bedroom (George had recently moved into a spacious penthouse apartment at 33 Riverside Drive), on which he had painted scenes as imagined from An American in Paris.⁵⁷ The imagery on the screen evoked the narrative program, penned by Deems Taylor, distributed to audience members at the premiere. Although most commentators found the program helpful when writing their reviews of An American in Paris, Abbe Niles, the critic who had previously praised Gershwin’s use of the blues, found the inclusion of such a program distracting:

Niles praised Gershwin’s music for its “immense gusto for life,” which he predicted would “not quickly fade” and which would “continue to arouse pleased surprise in the minds of intelligent hearers, including serious if not solemn musicians.”⁵⁹

This assessment likely appealed to Gershwin. He had recently noted how his time abroad had not only exposed him to the work of European avant-garde composers, but also instilled in him a newfound appreciation for his own distinctive approach to composition:

For Gershwin, this “originality of musical material” was a reference to the “American” sound, created in his own works and in the works of others (namely Kálmán and Krenek) through the implementation of jazz and blues characteristics. For Gershwin’s cousin Ben, the increasing popularity for such displays of “originality” served as confirmation of his developing theories concerning the “unifying and enlarging voice” folklore could provide contemporary artists. In a series of book reviews penned by Ben Botkin in 1927 and 1928, he encouraged readers to look more closely at the plurality of cultures surrounding them.⁶¹ He was especially taken with the contributions of African American writers, as displayed in his review of Countee Cullen’s Color and his article, “Self-Portraiture and Social Criticism in Negro Folk Song,” which appeared in Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life.⁶²

In 1928 Ben Botkin was elected president of the Oklahoma Folklore Society, and it was around this time that he began to pay more attention to folksong, which he said was linked to his interest in “restoring the oral popular tradition to poetry.”⁶³ Between 1929 and 1932, he published a series of four anthologies titled Folk-Say: A Regional Miscellany. “Folk-Say” was a term he had coined the year before, and as he explained, it “was not a substitute or synonym for folklore … but an extension of the older term to include literature about the folk as well as of the folk and to center attention on the oral, story-telling phases of living lore conceived as literary material.”⁶⁴ This conceptual move paralleled the newfound focus on the blues in contemporary concert music. As Ben Botkin explained, his fascination with the concept of folk was tied to a “profound interest in culture in the broader sense” and “folk culture in particular.” Regarding the relationship between lore and art, he presented two guiding theories. First, in every age art moves on two levels: that of the folk and that of “culture.” Second, in America “there is not one folk but many folk groups – as many folk groups as there are regional cultures or racial or occupational groups within a region.”⁶⁵ Botkin’s interest lay in folklore’s contemporaneity. In his Folk-Say anthologies, he included works he described as “lore in the making” that demonstrated “the interplay between folk and popular influences.”⁶⁶

The inaugural volume of Folk-Say was published in June 1929. Ben sent copies of the book to friends and family, including his brother Harry and his cousins Ira and George.⁶⁷ Included in the volume was a scholarly essay by Botkin presenting his theories about regional cultures in the United States and their influence on contemporary society. According to Botkin, the role of contemporary artists was to create works that strengthen understanding of the country’s diverse populations, an enterprise that would link the disparate parts of a fragmented society.⁶⁸ He was committed to bringing together the past, present and future under the capacious umbrella of folk culture. The customs and creative practices of America’s many disparate cultures deserved the attention.

In the first volume of Folk-Say, George no doubt found many items of interest. For example, in his introductory essay Ben Botkin acknowledged the distinction between “folk literature” and “culture literature,”⁶⁹ but insisted that the distinction reflected “a difference in form, not in content.”⁷⁰ An essay titled “Songs of Yesterday and To-day” brings together songs from “the oil fields … harvest fields … and a factory outside Chicago” that “illustrate a certain speeding or ‘jazzing’ up in the tempo” of American folk song.⁷¹ Among the poems were some identified as “Blues.” Included in a series of “folk-motifs” were “three sketches” for an “Oklahoma opera” concerning the prejudice faced by African Americans. The final sketch, titled “Holy Roller Elders,” describes the services of a group of “shouting Methodists” and “jumping Baptists” who cause dismay in the community when they establish a local meeting-house in a well-to-do section of town.⁷²

The second volume of Folk-Say appeared in December 1930. Larger and more ornate in appearance, this volume included scholarly articles discussing the current state of folklore. “There is a point where collection and classification … break down and creative interpretation must begin,” argued Botkin. The crucial question is “not what is the folk and what is folklore but what can they do for our culture.”⁷³ One of the artist’s primary tasks, he noted, was to serve as an interpreter among disparate cultures. Consequently, he included black authors and poems and short stories about black life. Botkin was particularly interested in the relationship between folklore and modern technology. Accordingly, he included works highlighting the relationship between contemporary black folklore and the phonograph and film. Botkin did not see technology as a destructive force when it came to folklore. Instead, he embraced technology as an effective means for the creation and dissemination of folklore. Since a goal of the second volume was to flesh out, as Botkin put it, “the dangers, limitations and problems besetting the artist who tries … to convert folk materials into art,” Botkin’s publisher, the University of Oklahoma Press, engaged George Gershwin in its marketing campaign.⁷⁴ Consequently, the volume sold well and received numerous reviews in newspapers, magazines and scholarly journals.

Volumes Three and Four, published respectively in 1931 and 1932, dropped the scholarly essays and opened instead with poetic inscriptions. “The emphasis,” as Botkin later explained, “was on cultural, racial and class conflicts” in contemporary society. “The forms were experimental rather than traditional.”⁷⁵ By 1932, Ben Botkin was fully engaged in discovering new talent and promoting free expression. He called for a new generation of artists and intellectuals who refused to accept a culture that promoted “economic or cultural bondage.” The question regarding folklore, was no longer “Where did we come from?” but rather “Where do we go from here?”⁷⁶

It was ideas such as these that Gershwin recalled when he first encountered Havana’s Afro-Cuban music culture during a two-week holiday in February 1932.

Havana

Gershwin once described his first trip to Cuba as “two hysterical weeks in Havana, where no sleep was to be had, but the quality and quantity of fun made up for that.”⁷⁷ He went with a group of wealthy golfing friends: Everett Jacobs, Bennett Cerf, Daniel Silberberg, and Emil Mosbacher.⁷⁸ Their stay in Havana coincided with Carnival season. Although Gershwin did not go to Cuba looking for musical inspiration, once there, he witnessed firsthand the realization of his cousin Ben’s theories concerning folk culture in modern society.

Gershwin and his friends rented two adjoining suites at the elegant Almendares Hotel and Golf Club, where the resident musical ensemble was the Palau Brothers Hollywood Orchestra. The most famous dance band in Cuba, the Palau Brothers had made their mark in Los Angeles with Ernesto Lecuona playing Moisés Simons’s “The Peanut Vendor” (El manisero) in the film Cuban Love Song (1931). The Havana Post, an English-language newspaper for tourists, reported that “Mr. Gershwin was much interested in the Cuban music” they played.⁷⁹ In Havana, the Palau Brothers performed a wide range of music, from American jazz to Afro-Cuban dance tunes, serving, like other ensembles, as a bridge between Cuban and American popular music traditions. The Castro Brothers Orchestra, another such bridge, had the honor of being hired by Gershwin to play at a party he hosted at his hotel. On this occasion “the Cuban son and American jazz vied for popularity” as the Castro Brothers “demonstrated their unique interpretation of the Cuban native music, incidentally giving their visiting musician lessons in the use of the maracas.”⁸⁰

A gala at the Gran Casino Nacional, celebrating Cuba’s national holiday, known as Grito de Baire, offered another encounter with Cuban music played by a large dance band.⁸¹ Once again, the highlight was Moisés Simons’s “El manisero.” “Peanut Vendor” marionettes were handed out to a lucky few. Additional souvenirs included “maracas, guiros, claves and bongos,” and lessons in the proper way to play them.⁸² Gershwin collected a full set of these instruments, which he took home with him to New York. Each of these bands combined Cuban and American elements. The ensembles were relatively large – American jazz bands with Afro-Cuban percussion instruments added. As Gershwin discovered, there was more to Havana’s music scene than the large dance orchestras employed by the hotels. Smaller ensembles, playing to locals in waterside nightclubs, called fritas, offered another style of Cuban “folk” culture, one that showed fewer signs of American influences. According to the Havana Post, Gershwin encountered such an ensemble his third night in Cuba, when he was unexpectedly serenaded outside his hotel room by “a group of itinerant musicians from Havana’s popular ‘fritas.’”⁸³ The next evening, Gershwin was treated to more music of this sort at a gathering in Miramar. According to the Havana Post, the party was a “typically Cuban gala” that included “various interpretations of the rumba by professional dancers, and instrumental music by the Habanero Sextet, the orchestra which first introduced the son several years ago.”⁸⁴ The Habanero Sextet was a well-established group, formed in 1920. The instrumentation consisted of two singers playing maracas and claves, a bongo player, and three string players on guitar, bass and tres (a guitar-like instrument with three double strings).

Another traditional Afro-Cuban group Gershwin encountered during his stay was the Septeto Nacional, formed by Ignacio Piñeiro in 1927. Piñeiro lived in Pueblo Nuevo, the black quarter of the city. As a child, Piñeiro had sung in choirs and played drums with the Afro-Cuban cabildos. His group had the same instrumentation as the Habanero Sextet, but with a trumpet added to the mix. They performed regularly on Cuban radio during Gershwin’s visit. He reportedly made a special trip to Havana’s CMCJ radio station to meet the musicians and witness one of their performances in person.⁸⁵

During Gershwin’s stay in Havana, he discovered that the term “rumba” (or rhumba) could refer to a variety of things: a musical genre, a dance, or even the event where the music and dancing take place. Rumba was linked to both traditional folk music and cross-cultural tunes like “The Peanut Vendor.” Associated in Cuba “with manual laborers, particularly dockworkers” its register – when it came to class – resembled that of the blues in the United States.⁸⁶ Gershwin discovered all of these things during his visits to Havana’s fritas, and by the time he returned to New York, he envisioned the “Rhumba” as a symbol of Cuban folk culture, past and present.

Shortly after his trip to Havana, Gershwin reflected on his experiences in a letter to George Pallay: “Cuba was most interesting to me, especially for its small dance orchestras, who play [the] most intricate rhythms most naturally.”⁸⁷ These rhythms, and the concept of the rumba as he experienced it in Havana’s local fritas, served as the inspiration for a new work. Around this time, Gershwin began composition lessons with Joseph Schillinger, under whose guidance Gershwin composed his Cuban piece.⁸⁸ Gershwin returned to Havana briefly in June (this time with Ira and Lee) and in July finished the piano score and began work on the orchestration. The completed composition was premiered, under the title Rhumba, on August 16, 1932, at an all-Gershwin concert at Lewisohn Stadium in New York. To accentuate the importance of the Afro-Cuban percussion instruments in the overall character of the composition, Gershwin noted (in the score) that the musicians playing the maracas, bongos, claves, and guiro should stand at the front of the stage, right next to the conductor’s podium.

Rhumba was greeted favorably by critics. Still, Gershwin seemed dismayed by their tendency to view the work as another narrative tone poem, a sequel to An American in Paris. Consequently, when Gershwin conducted a performance of the piece three months later, at a benefit concert at the Metropolitan Opera, he renamed it Cuban Overture. This new title provided “a more just idea of the character and intent of the music.”⁸⁹ American audiences, whose familiarity with Cuban music was filtered through the lens of Hollywood, did not fully understand the context of Gershwin’s original title. So, to distance his music from the Latin-tinged jazz of Hollywood and the novelty songs he had composed in his youth, Gershwin wrote his own program note for the second concert, wherein he highlighted the “Cuban Rhythms” he had encountered in Havana and his interest in “combining them” with his “own thematic material.”⁹⁰ The result was a formal symphonic overture influenced by his recent studies with Schillinger.

While in Cuba, Gershwin had witnessed, firsthand, the transformational experience of encountering a rich folk culture drastically different from his own. As an artist, he followed his cousin Ben’s advice and created a new work that interpreted Cuba’s Afro-Cuban traditions through the lens of his own culture. Gershwin recognized in the rumba a distinctive folk characteristic that influenced a wide array of popular Cuban music and dance, just as the blues had done in the United States. More importantly, in Cuba Gershwin witnessed the collision of different regional styles, absorbing the way that sort of encounter could transform a culture. In the years that followed, the influence of Ben Botkin’s theories on Gershwin’s approach to composition grew increasingly stronger, as revealed in Porgy and Bess.

Charleston

Gershwin first experienced Charleston through DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy, wherein music plays a decisive role in describing the city’s soundscape. Take, for example, this description of an African American band parading through the streets of Charleston:

When Porgy was transformed into a play in 1927, this memorable scene was brought to life by the Jenkins’ Orphanage Band, a black youth ensemble from Charleston known for their rag-infused marches. Spirituals were incorporated as well, promoted as “authentic” expressions of Charleston’s “Gullah” culture. These performances, which Gershwin heard when he attended the play, added a soundtrack to his early conception of Charleston.

Scholars have noted the contrast between the ending of Porgy the play (and consequently the opera) and the conclusion of Heyward’s original novel. There is a restlessness to the Porgy found in DuBose and Dorothy Heyward’s play that is absent from the novel. Ben Botkin once reflected on this particular type of restlessness, which he found in the works of Countee Cullen and other African American writers, describing it as “akin to that of another ‘man without a country,’ the Jew.”⁹² Botkin linked this connection to musical sources. One cannot help but wonder if, while watching the play, Gershwin was reminded of his cousin’s theory:

Both the novel and the play were doubtless in Gershwin’s mind as he planned his first trip to Charleston in 1933. Gershwin visited in December, en route to a golf vacation in Florida. In preparation for the trip, he wrote to Heyward about what he hoped to accomplish: “I would like to see the town and hear some spirituals and perhaps go to a colored café or two if there are any.”⁹⁴

Gershwin stayed in Charleston for three days on his way down to Florida, and an additional day on his way back to New York. As his letters to friends and interviews with reporters reveal, he was generally impressed with the city he encountered during these brief, early visits. But as his host, DuBose Heyward, quickly realized, Gershwin’s first impressions of Charleston may have been misleading. The image of the city presented to him had been carefully crafted, over the course of two decades, for tourists.

Around World War I, Charleston began to experience a cultural Renaissance. This effort was formalized in 1924, when Charleston’s mayor, Thomas P. Stoney, noted in the Yearbook of the City of Charleston: “We have to sell the City of Charleston to the outside world.”⁹⁵ Cultural leaders promoted the city through a range of creative endeavors, including the Society for the Preservation of Old Spirituals, the Charleston Etchers Club, the Jenkins’ Orphanage Band, the Poetry Society of South Carolina, various artist renditions of the city and most notably James P. Johnson’s “The Charleston,” penned in 1923 for the Broadway show Runnin’ Wild.⁹⁶ Descriptions of the city’s gradual transformation, from a rundown, economically distraught, provincial town to a gem of high Southern culture, appeared in newspapers across the country. These reports drew artists and writers in search of unmarred, seemingly pure Americana. For example, in 1928, a reporter for the Chicago Evening Post noted: “Everywhere one turns there appears the inexhaustible picturesqueness of Charleston, and on every side an artist has set up an easel in his devotion.”⁹⁷ Among the many visual artists who ventured to Charleston before Gershwin arrived were Edward Hopper, Childe Hassam, George Biddle, Palmer Schoppe, and the photographer Walker Evans.

The images these men created, along with Heyward’s novel Porgy, influenced Gershwin’s perceptions of the city before he arrived and continued to color his image of Charleston during his first visit. One of the highlights of his first encounter with the city was his witnessing of an “experience service” at the Macedonia Church and hearing performances by the Society for the Preservation of Old Spirituals (an organization in which Heyward’s mother participated). As Gershwin explained to a reporter shortly after his return to New York, these encounters had turned him into “an eager student of Negro music.”⁹⁸ Gershwin claimed to be equally charmed by the city’s overall character. “The artistry of the architecture, the warmth of the coloring on the stones of the old buildings … Everything [in Charleston] combines to give the place a beauty only found perhaps in some Old World city such as Paris.”⁹⁹

Such a description concerned Heyward. After many years of planning and negotiating, work was finally beginning on the Porgy opera. The endeavor would be doomed if Gershwin envisioned the action taking place in a quaint, European-inspired setting. Gershwin’s comments made it abundantly clear to Heyward that his friend from up North had little understanding of the regional culture that had originally inspired Porgy. The “Negro culture” of Harlem and Paris was a far cry from the black “Gullah” traditions of the Southern Low Country. As Heyward wrote to Gershwin on February 6, 1934: “You really haven’t scratched the surface of the native material yet.”¹⁰⁰ Another trip was necessary.

Gershwin agreed, and on June 16, 1934 he boarded a train at New York’s Penn Station bound for Charleston. Accompanying him was his cousin Harry, who had recently returned to New York after seven years in Paris. Upon arrival, the pair was met by Gershwin’s valet, Paul Mueller, who had driven down in Gershwin’s Buick with the luggage, art supplies, and George’s music. From Charleston, they drove ten miles out to a ferry, which took them to Folly Island, a rustic beach resort where the Heywards owned a summer house called “Follywood.” Gershwin and his companions spent the next five weeks in a four-room, clapboard cottage thirty feet from the shore. True, there was no electricity nor running water. But there was an upright piano, rented from Siegling’s Music Store in Charleston, and a pair of domestic servants to haul water and take care of the cooking and cleaning. In a letter to his mother a few days after his arrival, Gershwin gave a vivid description of his new abode. Paris was long forgotten:

In a letter to Ben, Harry offered a similar description:

Gershwin found it difficult, at first, to work on Folly Island. “I have never lived in such a back to nature place,” he admitted to a local reporter named Frank Gilbreth Jr., who interviewed Gershwin a few days after his arrival. In his article, Gilbreth recalled the moment he first laid eyes on the composer: “Seated at his piano, Mr. Gershwin, tanned, muscular, dark, wearing a light palm beach coat and an orange tie, was playing jazz as it had never been played at Folly before.”¹⁰³ Two weeks later, when Gilbreth returned, he discovered a composer more acclimated to his surroundings:

Abe Dumas, a local teenager Gershwin befriended during his stay, corroborated this description of Gershwin’s transformation: “His trousers had been cut down to short pants and it looked as though he had done the job himself – with a pair of scissors.”¹⁰⁵ Dumas also noted a few “Northern” habits that Gershwin had maintained: he reportedly enjoyed hitting golf balls into the waves and driving his Buick convertible on the beach at low tide.

Gershwin did not isolate himself completely during his stay. Local papers reported regularly on his outings to Charleston, where he visited the homes of the city’s elite and played golf at the country club. He even served as judge at a local beauty contest. Heyward functioned as Gershwin’s guide, steering the composer away from the city whenever possible and out to the barrier islands, where the region’s African American inhabitants lived in partial isolation. According to Heyward, “James Island, with its large population of primitive Gullah Negroes lay adjacent [to Folly Island], and furnished us with a laboratory in which to test our theories, as well as an inexhaustible source of folk material.”¹⁰⁶ During one of these visits, Gershwin encountered the musical practice called “shouting” that he had read about in Ben’s first Folk-Say volume. As Heyward explained it, this practice involved “a complicated rhythmic pattern beaten out by feet and hands, as an accompaniment to the spirituals.” Heyward was startled by Gershwin’s reaction to the music:

Gershwin remembered this evening. He later told Anne Brown (the first Bess) that an elderly member of the congregation had told him: “By God, you sure can beat out them rhythms, boy. I’m over seventy years old, and I ain’t never seen no po’ little white man take off and fly like you. You could be my own son.”¹⁰⁸

Gershwin was not the first white outsider to visit the Gullah community – such excursions had become popular with adventurous tourists in the 1930s. But Gershwin undoubtedly was one of the first – if not the first – to transition consciously from an observer of Gullah performance to an active participant. Like his cousin Ben, Gershwin did not see the Gullah culture as a remnant of the past. Instead, it served as an example of America’s multicultural present. His actions on James Island revealed his shared belief with his cousin that, to come to a deeper understanding of an unfamiliar folk practice, one had to embrace it, and at least for one evening, become a part of it.

Toward the end of his stay, Gershwin penned a letter to Emily Paley – the close friend who had first introduced him to Porgy – and reflected on his time in Charleston:

Gershwin embraced the culture he encountered in South Carolina but never fully felt a part of it. His summer on Folly Island changed him, but not completely. A sense of restlessness pervaded his visit – a loneliness and longing that eventually found their way into Porgy and Bess.

On their way home from Charleston, Gershwin and Harry visited Heyward at his permanent home in Henderson, NC. Continuing their exploration of African American culture, they accompanied Heyward to a local meeting house known for its “Holy Roller” services. Henderson was not a tourist destination. Gershwin quickly discovered that visiting a black church in Henderson differed markedly from what he had experienced in Charleston. As Heyward later explained, Gershwin stopped suddenly as they entered the building, grabbing tightly onto Heyward’s arm:

Dorothy Heyward also remembered this encounter. She later described it in an unpublished memoir. She suggested that Gershwin became alarmed by the attendees’ “frenzied movements and speaking in tongues” and soon left the church, “afraid for his safety.”¹¹¹ Disconcerting as this encounter might have been for Gershwin, it nonetheless left its mark on Porgy and Bess. Gershwin evoked the “voices” he had heard “raised in loud rhythmic prayer” when composing the terrifying invocation to God at the beginning of the Hurricane scene. But it should be noted that the music Gershwin composed was not a transcription of what he heard when visiting black communities, but rather an evocation of the cultural encounter. Gershwin’s approach to composing Porgy and Bess did not involve the creation of precise transcriptions. He did not directly incorporate the specific music he heard in Charleston and Henderson into Porgy and Bess. Instead, Gershwin inserted into his score what he interpreted as the most distinctive characteristics of the African American music he heard. This process of interpreting the music through the filter of his own tastes and experiences led to the creation of what his cousin Ben would have described as contemporary folk music; that is, original music drawing on an encounter with a culture or “folk” other than one’s own.

There is a famous promotional photograph of Gershwin from 1934 that serves as a visual example of this process (Figure. 9.1). Gershwin is shown in his New York apartment, sitting at the piano supposedly working on Porgy and Bess. On the wall behind him is a portrait of a young African American girl he painted in the early 1930s. Note that the image of American black culture that is supposedly inspiring him is not a photograph depicting the girl as she actually is, but a painting by Gershwin reflecting how he envisions her. It shows his interpretation of who she is, painted in response to his encounter with her. This cross-cultural imperative similarly inflects all the music in Porgy and Bess. Even the Jenkins’ Orphanage Band, who performed in the opera as they had in the play, were asked to refrain from playing their regular repertoire in Porgy and Bess, performing instead new music composed by Gershwin specifically for the opera.

Figure 9.1 George Gershwin works on a score at the piano in his 72nd Street apartment, New York, New York, 1934.

Photo by PhotoQuest/Getty Images

Ben Botkin’s theories played a decisive role in the development of Gershwin’s concept of folk culture, especially with regards to the effects, both positive and negative, that folklore could have on contemporary society. As Ben later explained in his forward to A Treasury of American Folklore:

“Folklore, like life itself,” Botkin wrote, “is animal in its origins and spiritual in its possible fruit.” Even lore reflecting prejudice must be acknowledged: “Such stories stick because they have the tang of life and are historical comment.” The purpose of their retelling, however, is “not to perpetuate but to reveal and correct the errors and evil they narrate. With this perspective the whole of folklore may become an instrument for understanding and good will.”¹¹³ According to Botkin, the job of artists, like Gershwin, was to create the good in culture.

Gershwin’s approach to depicting African Americans in Porgy and Bess emerges with more clarity when viewed through the lens of Ben Botkin’s theories. Botkin’s hitherto hidden contribution also helps explain why Gershwin defined his work as a “folk opera” when describing it to reporters:

Gershwin didn’t define Porgy and Bess as a specifically African American opera. To him it represented more than the experiences of a single race. “It’s an American opera,” he explained to a reporter, “striving to depict an American scene in a purely American way.” Asked to clarify this statement, Gershwin continued:

Asked if he had “any other themes in mind” for an opera, Gershwin offered a response that echoed his cousin Ben’s theories about regional folklore:

Travel enabled Gershwin to explore new worlds as a composer, and his experiences as an “outsider” in Paris, Havana, and Charleston loomed large in his imagination. As a cultural tourist, Gershwin’s exploration of “foreign” locales during the height of his career pushed him in new directions artistically. His cousin Harry said it best: “Art is a collision of new truths and awakened sensibilities; it is a serious understanding of the untried and unexpected.”¹¹⁷

When Porgy and Bess premiered in New York on October 10, 1935 at the Alvin Theatre, reviews were numerous and mixed in their opinions. But of all the commentators, Brooks Atkinson came closest to the truth: “Although Mr. Heyward is the author of the libretto and shares with Ira Gershwin the credit for the lyrics … the evening is unmistakably George Gershwin’s personal holiday.”¹¹⁸