Gene Kelly’s 114th birthday is tomorrow.
He has certainly sung his share of songs from the Great American Songbook. Everyone knows Singin’ in the Rain, but he also did Almost Like Being In Love, Grand Old Flag, It’s Wonderful, All I Do Is Dream of You, and so many more. Today, I chose one of my favorites from the Songbook – I Got Rhythm.
The song was written by George Gershwin and his brother Ira wrote for the musical Girl Crazy. In the musical, Ethel Merman sang it in the role of Kate Fothergill at the end of the first act.
The song gave Ira a bit of a problem. Wiki says: 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”.
From songfacts.com: While Ira was struggling with the rhyming problem, George had a solution: skip the rhymes. Pianist/singer Michael Feinstein, who once worked as an archivist for Ira Gershwin, explained in an NPR Fresh Air interview: “George felt that the use of rhymes with that tune sounded too cloying, so then he started experimenting with words that did not rhyme, which was absolutely taboo … and he finally decided to create a lyric that had no rhymes … except for the bridge, which is how it stood.”
Our birthday boy (tomorrow), Gene Kelly sang it in 1951′ An American in Paris:
In 1943, Judy Garland did it with Tommy Dorsey and Mickey Rooney:
Gotta include Ella Fitzgerald:
Here is Tony Bennett and Diana Krall
The legendary Charlie “Bird” Parker’s birthday is on the 29th of this month. He swings his version:
One of my favorite versions is from Bobby Darin:
Various Ramblings of a Nostalgic Italian 