On this day in New York · December 6, 1896
Ira Gershwin Is Born on Eldridge Street
Before he was half of the sharpest songwriting duo Broadway ever had, he was just the oldest kid in a Lower East Side flat, cataloging the noise outside his window.
The facts
- Born
- December 6, 1896, at 60 Eldridge Street, Chinatown, Manhattan
- Birth name
- Israel Gershovitz
- Family
- Oldest of four children of Morris and Rose Gershovitz, Russian Jewish immigrants from Saint Petersburg who arrived in New York in 1891
- Breakthrough
- "I Got Rhythm" and "Embraceable You," written with George for Girl Crazy (1930)
Israel Gershovitz was born on December 6, 1896, at 60 Eldridge Street in Chinatown, the oldest of four children of Morris and Rose Gershovitz, Russian Jewish immigrants who had come to New York in 1891. His brother George arrived two years later, and the pair eventually turned that shared last name into a songwriting partnership, George at the piano, Ira supplying the words. Ira wrote "I Got Rhythm" and "Embraceable You" for the 1930 musical Girl Crazy, the show that also made overnight stars of Ethel Merman and Ginger Rogers. When George died suddenly of a brain tumor in 1937, Ira put down his pen for nearly three years before he could write again, then kept going for decades more with composers like Kurt Weill, Jerome Kern, and Harold Arlen.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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Heard in a day: An elevator's purr, telephone's ring, telephone's buzz, a baby's moans, a shout of delight, a screech from a 'flat wheel', hoarse honks, a hoarse voice, a tinkle, a match scratch on sandpaper, a deep resounding boom of dynamiting in the impending subway, iron hooks on the gutter.
Ira Gershwin, in a diary entry cataloging the sounds of the city
Source: Wikipedia -
somehow the first line of the refrain sounded more arresting and provocative
Ira Gershwin, in Lyrics on Several Occasions (1959), on why he titled the song "I Got Rhythm" instead of its repeated closing line
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
Gershwin's lyrics gave American musical theater a voice that was plainspoken and funny instead of operatic, and "I Got Rhythm" alone has been sung and played by everyone from Ethel Merman to jazz musicians who turned its chord changes into a standard workout. He outlived George by almost fifty years and spent them making sure the Gershwin songbook kept growing.
Sources
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