CHAPTER 11 | THE CLASSIC AMERICAN POPULAR SONG 275
Adele. George Gershwin’s concert piece Rhapsody in Blue had pre-
miered earlier that year (see chapter 13 for a discussion of his life and
career as a composer of concert pieces), and now he and his lyricist
brother Ira were trying their hand at a Broadway show. The result
was groundbreaking. George’s mastery of an up-to-date song style
touched with jazz and blues elements was matched by Ira’s lyrics in
a fresh vernacular idiom, carefully fi tted to his brother’s music. The
American musical theater had found a fresh native idiom, and the
show delivered two standards, both marked by bluesy melodies and
harmonies: “Oh, Lady Be Good!” and “Fascinating Rhythm.”
Lady Be Good! premiered on December 1, 1924, and the very next
evening saw the premiere, a few blocks up Broadway, of The Student
Prince, a Viennese-style operetta with music by Sigmund Romberg
and lyrics by Dorothy Donnelly. Lady Be Good! ran for nine months
(330 performances), The Student Prince for a year and a half (608). The Student Prince
was revived on Broadway in the 1930s and again in the 1940s, and for decades was
a staple of amateur theater groups; Lady Be Good! never returned to Broadway, and
only in recent years have historically minded organizations mounted revivals. Yet
the Gershwins’ musical comedy produced two standards, whereas only diehard
operetta fans can whistle a tune from Romberg’s score.
Before the decade was out, the gulf between Lady Be Good! and The Student
Prince was bridged by another composer-author team in a work that blended new
elements effectively with old ones: Show Boat, which received its New York pre-
miere in 1927. The author of Show Boat’s book and lyrics, Oscar Hammerstein II,
had already scored major operetta hits in collaborations with Rudolf Friml and
Romberg. The composer, Jerome Kern, was an American who had gotten his
start in London, supplying interpolations for British musical comedies. In the
late 1910s Kern had written a series of musicals for Broadway’s Princess Theatre
that captured the contemporary tone of British shows with the added value of
Kern’s songs, which blended Viennese lyricism with the rhythmic vitality of the
new Castle-style dance music.
Based on a novel by Edna Ferber, Show Boat is set in the Midwest, spans an
era from around 1890 to the 1920s, and concerns a bittersweet romance between
Gaylord Ravenal, a Mississippi River gambler, and Magnolia, whose father is the
captain of a steamboat that travels the river presenting stage melodramas—a
showboat. From the beginning of act 1, Show Boat uses the conventions of both
operetta and musical comedy while reaching beyond both in subject matter.
Audiences for musical comedy would expect a curtain-raising chorus sung by
a bev y of beauties and their beaus, and Show Boat delivers that in crisp British
style, but only after a strikingly different opening chorus, in which black steve-
dores sing about the backbreaking work of loading cotton. Ravenal then enters
with a suave aria marking him as an operetta tenor; though he is no prince, his
manner suggests the aristocracy of the Old South. His subsequent scene of fl irta-
tion with Magnolia leads to a soaring duet for soprano and tenor, “Make Believe,”
in the purest operetta style.
The gambler departs, and Magnolia, lovestruck, asks a stevedore named Joe
(a baritone) what he thinks about Ravenal. Joe tells her to ask the river “what
he thinks.” And then Joe sings “Old Man River.” As personifi ed in this song, the
river is a mighty force, indifferent to human struggles. The sober melody and
the philosophical text, which work together in the style of a traditional NegroJerome KernShow Boat’s
blend of genresK From 1924, when they wrote
Lady Be Good! until George’s
death in 1937, the Gershwin
brothers, Ira (left) and George,
collaborated on songs for
musicals, movies, and the opera
Porgy and Bess.172028_11_254-279_r3_ko.indd 275 23/01/13 8:42 PM