The song came from the musical
Girl Crazy, which also includes two other hit songs, "
Embraceable You" and "
But Not for Me", and has been sung by many jazz singers since. It was originally written as a slow song for
Treasure Girl (1928) and found another, faster setting in
Girl Crazy.
Ethel Merman sang the song in the original
Broadway production and Broadway lore holds that
George Gershwin, after seeing her opening reviews, warned her never to take a singing lesson. Her performance of the song made her an instant star. The piece was originally penned in the key of D major. The song melody uses four notes of the five-note
pentatonic scale, first rising, then falling. A rhythmic interest in the song is that the tune keeps behind the main pulse, with the three "I got..." phrases
syncopated, appearing one beat behind in the first bar, while the fourth phase "Who could..." rushes in to the song. The song's chorus is in a 34-bar
AABA form. Its chord progression (although often reduced to a standard 32-bar structure for the sake of improvised solos) is known as the "
rhythm changes" and is the foundation for many other popular jazz tunes. The song was used as the theme in Gershwin's last concert piece for piano and orchestra,
Variations on "I Got Rhythm", written in 1934. The song has become symbolic of the Gershwins, of swing and of the 1920s. As usual, George Gershwin wrote the melody first and gave it to Ira to set, but Ira found it an unusually hard melody for which to compose lyrics. He experimented for two weeks with the rhyme scheme he felt the music called for — sets of triple rhymes — but found that the heavy rhyming "seemed at best to give a pleasant and jingly Mother Goose quality to a tune which should throw its weight around more". Finally, he began to experiment with leaving most of the lines unrhymed. "This approach felt stronger," he wrote, "and I finally arrived at the present refrain, with only 'more-door' and 'mind him-find him' the rhymes." He added that this approach "was a bit daring for me who usually depended on rhyme insurance". Ira also wrote that, although the phrase "Who could ask for anything more?" is repeated four times in the song, he decided not to make it the title because "somehow the first line of the refrain sounded more arresting and provocative". The allegation of plagiarism was summarized by Gershwin biographer Joan Peyser in 1993: "In 1987 Still's daughter, Judith Anne Still, wrote in a letter (to Paul Hoeffler, a Canadian photographer) that Gershwin stole the song from her father. 'I think that, to a certain extent, inspiration is "in the air" waiting to be plucked out by refined and spiritual individuals. Sorry, but Gershwin doesn't qualify as such a rare and special creature: my father said that Gershwin came to the Negro shows in Harlem to get his inspiration, stealing melodies wholesale from starving minority composers and then passing them off as his own.
I Got Rhythm was my father's creation, according to
Eubie Blake.' "Reconstructing the precise chronology opens up all manner of interpretation. Gershwin's
I Got Rhythm was written for
Girl Crazy, which had its first public hearing on September 29, 1930, in Philadelphia's Schubert Theater. One month later, on October 30, William Grant Still, according to
In One Lifetime by Verna Arvey, his widow, began composing the
Afro-American Symphony, a work that contains a Scherzo movement with a "brief accompanying figure" similar to the motif of
I Got Rhythm. However, in an article published in November 1969 in
Music, Arvey writes that her husband was playing oboe in the pit orchestra in Shuffle Along, the breakthrough black musical of 1921, composed by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle. Arvey writes that the players, "tired of playing the same thing over and over", improvised from time to time, and her husband's improvisation, she maintains, took the form of the particular melodic fragment that appears in Gershwin's
I Got Rhythm and Still's
Afro-American Symphony. The Gershwins, she believes, were undoubtedly there because the show drew celebrities from Broadway. "This narrative has Still creating the fragment nine years before either he or Gershwin used it. But the fragment itself can hardly be said to have been "composed". It jumps right out of the fingers of the right hand of anyone playing the black notes on a piano.
...It is only when several measures present a series of pitches, harmonies, and durations that mirror the same combination of elements in a different work that a case for plagiarism can be made. == History ==