movements of their own discipline, which reflect the music and
reinvent it at the same time. Song brings words into contact with
these pulsations by adding its own possibilities of repetition.
“I Got Rhythm,” from the Gershwins’ Girl Crazy(1930),
has an AABA musical structure. It is like thousands of popular
songs in this regard—AABA is the most common format. The
music of A is repeated once, then different music is heard as B,
then A is repeated again. Three times the music of A is heard,
with B serving to keep the second A apart from the third. The
words to each A strain of music call out “I got” this, “I got” that,
“I got my man, who can ask for anything more,” and since
there are three A strains of music, the “I got” phrases add up to
eight (one is missed, on “In green pastures”), three of them be-
ing the refrain “I got my man, who can ask for anything more.”
Then the refrain is repeated once more as a coda. This kind of
repetition would be intolerable in conversation, but it is nor-
mal and even enjoyable in a lyric and musical structure, that
celebrates doing things again and again.
A dull song will keep its repetitions in line with one an-
other.^2 A smart song counts on differences among its types of
repetition, so they swing against one another. Each “I got”
phrase (“music,” “rhythm,” “my man”) has the same verse me-
ter (trochaic), and this matches up to a repeated melodic me-
ter: a tied-eighth note followed by a dotted quarter in measure
1 is followed by a dotted quarter followed by a tied eighth in
measure 2.^3 That means the tied eighth and dotted quarter in
measure 3 is both mirror of measure 2 and repeat of measure 1,
and the same could be said twice over of measure 4. Yet the
verse repetitions of the “I got” phrases plug along on their one
routine until they reach their switcharound on “Who could ask
for anything more.” The systems of repetition cross over one
another. The dotted-quarter motif of the melody runs aslant
the duple beat of the musical rhythm, two meters keeping time
32 CHAPTER TWO
(^2) For a fuller account of dull tunes, see Suisman, “Cue the Pop Ballad,
Warn the Critics.”
(^3) See the analysis in Forte, The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era,
p. 20. Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity,
pp. 82–85, also gives a fuller account of this song.