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Episode: Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy

Author: NPR
Duration: 00:48:55

Episode Shownotes

Musician Jerron Paxton is known for performing music from the 1920s and '30s. He just came out with an album of his own songs, called Things Done Changed. Paxton brought some of his instruments to his conversation with Sam Briger. Also, Terry Gross talks with author Michael Owen about Ira

Gershwin, the lyricist behind many of the most enduring songs in The Great American Songbook. TV critic David Bianculli reviews the documentary Beatles '64.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Summary

In this episode of Fresh Air, Jerron Paxton, a folk musician deeply inspired by the music of the 1920s and '30s, discusses his debut album 'Things Done Changed', featuring original songs that explore themes of love and loss. He emphasizes the importance of acoustic instruments and shares his heritage, including his great-grandfather's influence on his music. The episode also features a conversation about Ira Gershwin's legacy, highlighting his role in American musical theater alongside his brother George and the enduring impact of their work on the Great American Songbook, complemented by a review of the documentary 'Beatles '64'.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_13
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00:00:16 Speaker_04
From WHYY in Philadelphia, I'm Sam Brigger with Fresh Air Weekend. Today, folk musician Jerron Paxton brings some instruments to play for our conversation. He plays guitar, banjo, and harmonica.

00:00:28 Speaker_04
Paxton is known for performing music from the 1920s, but he just came out with an album of his own songs called Things Done Changed.

00:00:36 Speaker_18
Most of these songs, if not all these songs, came from a little bit of inspiration and also at least a little bit of pushing the pencil along the page, I think as Irving Berlin said.

00:00:47 Speaker_04
Also, Terry talks with author Michael Owen about Ira Gershwin, the lyricist behind many of the most enduring songs in the great American popular songbook.

00:00:55 Speaker_04
Songs like Fascinating Rhythm, I Got Rhythm, Swonderful, Embraceable You, Let's Call the Whole Thing Off, and They Can't Take That Away from Me. He has a new book about Gershwin.

00:01:06 Speaker_04
And TV critic David Bianculli reviews a new Beatles documentary on Disney+. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.

00:01:16 Speaker_13
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00:02:41 Speaker_04
This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Sam Brigger. Prior to his new album, Jaron Paxton has been entertaining audiences with his take on music that's mostly 100 years old or older. Some of the music dates back to the Civil War.

00:02:55 Speaker_04
He plays folk music, blues, hot jazz, ragtime, and fiddle and banjo tunes, among others. He's released several albums, but this new album, Things Done Changed, is his first, where all the tracks were written by him.

00:03:08 Speaker_04
Songs that are deeply rooted to music of the 20s and 30s and older, but reflects Paxton's contemporary feelings and observations about things like love, lost and found, gentrification, and finding yourself far from home.

00:03:22 Speaker_04
Paxton was generous enough to bring some of the instruments he plays to the studio today. If he had brought all the instruments he plays, he would have had to rent it a van.

00:03:31 Speaker_04
Guitar, fiddle, piano, harmonica, banjo, and the bones is not even a complete list. Paxton, who is 35, grew up in Los Angeles near Watts, and has called himself a throwback in a family of throwbacks. He now lives in New York.

00:03:45 Speaker_04
Let's hear the title track from the new album. This is Things Done Changed.

00:03:55 Speaker_17
And it's sad, baby, and it hurts me to my heart. Together so long, now we got to get apart. Some things have changed between you and me. Seems just like time can't be like they used to be. Have it done, feels allowed.

00:04:33 Speaker_17
Oh, things change between you and me. Seems like time can't be like they used to be.

00:04:53 Speaker_17
♪ Smiling face that sure could always be found ♪ ♪ And I seem like your smile don't want me around ♪ ♪ Seems like there ain't a change between you and me ♪ ♪ Seems just like time can't be like they used to be ♪

00:05:19 Speaker_04
That's the song, Things Done Changed, from the new album by Jaron Paxson of the same name. Jaron Paxson, welcome so much to Fresh Air.

00:05:26 Speaker_18
It's good to be here.

00:05:28 Speaker_04
So, as I said, you've released a few albums before, but this is your first album of your own compositions. Have you been writing all along, but just recently decided to release these songs?

00:05:39 Speaker_18
Yeah, songwriting is a funny part of the life of a folk musician. Most of us folk musicians tend to play our culturally inherited music, which isn't quite the same as doing covers of other people's music.

00:06:01 Speaker_18
You know, you play music that's reflective of your culture. And I've mostly done that. And every once in a while, something will inspire me and it'll stick around. And, you know, I like writing music based on inspiration.

00:06:17 Speaker_18
uh... more so than anything so uh... a few of these songs most of these songs if not all these songs came from a little bit of inspiration uh... and uh... at least a little bit of inspiration and also at least a little bit of pushing the pencil along the page I think as Irving Berlin said can you talk about how you approach the guitar like is there a particular guitar player that was very influential to how you play

00:06:46 Speaker_18
Well, I think, uh... My approach to music in general, not just the guitar, but to all the instruments I play is to get the most out of them I can. That's the guitar, the banjo, the harmonica, all these things.

00:07:02 Speaker_18
Everything I like about those instruments, and especially the piano, is that in the style of music I was steeped in and brought up in, which is mostly the world of country blues, there was this magical thing that would happen.

00:07:17 Speaker_18
where one musician would sit down and create this beautiful world where nothing was missing. You didn't need basses or drums or a second musician or anything.

00:07:27 Speaker_18
They just sit down with their fingers and their instruments and their voice and create this world where nothing was missing.

00:07:33 Speaker_18
So that's the approach I took to all my instruments and especially the guitar because that was the world that I was surrounded by. Just having that access to that real full sound is something I want to maintain.

00:07:48 Speaker_18
And I don't know, I think that's probably the biggest contribution why I remain one of the few soloists out there.

00:07:54 Speaker_18
There's not too many people who can hold an audience's attention for, you know, two one-hour sets with just one person on stage and their instruments. But my audience has never seemed to be disappointed.

00:08:07 Speaker_04
I was wondering if you could show us, perhaps with an instrumental, how you approach the blues. And the blues can be played lots of different ways. One of the ways that it's often played is a simple three-chord song.

00:08:20 Speaker_04
But there's a lot going on in the way you play the blues. So could you demonstrate that? I know you brought a guitar with you. And I heard when you were getting ready that this is quite an old guitar, huh?

00:08:31 Speaker_18
Oh yeah, this is the cheapest guitar that Gibson made. It cost $4.95 when it was for sale, a little Kalamazoo.

00:08:40 Speaker_04
And when you say $4.95, I think you mean $4.95. $4.95, half a week's wages. So how old is this guitar then?

00:08:44 Speaker_18
Is it about 100 years old? I think it's from 28, 29.

00:08:53 Speaker_04
So not a century yet. So you said that when you're playing a guitar solo, you want it to sound like a bunch of instruments kind of playing together. Could you show us what that's like on the guitar?

00:09:05 Speaker_18
All right. All right. I got you there. I got you there. All right. Well, when you want that nice full sound out of the guitar, you've got to have a nice little rhythm behind you. And that could be just about anything. Let's try this one.

00:09:23 Speaker_18
That's the rhythm of the song. So now you have this nice accompaniment. back up anything you want. And then you've got your voice, which you can lay on top of it, which I ain't doing nothing now but talking.

00:09:46 Speaker_18
But you also got some fingers that you can play with too. And give the guitar a nice little voice.

00:10:26 Speaker_04
That's Jerron Paxson with his guitar joining us today. He's a new album of all original compositions called Things Done Changed. Jerron, you grew up in South Los Angeles near Watts. What was your home like?

00:10:40 Speaker_18
It was a lovely place, I'd say. We didn't have too much money, but I was surrounded by the one thing you couldn't get enough of, which was love. And had a big multi-generational family. I was in the house with my mother and my grandmother.

00:10:59 Speaker_18
And for the first few years, it was my grandpa, my uncle, my aunt. So it was—with me, it was six of us in there. And my great-grandmother was across the street. And, you know, three of her children were around.

00:11:12 Speaker_18
And, you know, all the cousins would come over. at least once a week to visit her. So I grew up around lots of lovely family in a big backyard that 80% of the food I grew up eating came out of.

00:11:27 Speaker_04
Well, you've said that you're a throwback from a family of throwbacks. What does that mean?

00:11:32 Speaker_18
Well, you could probably tell that just in the music I love and my aesthetic that things at certain levels of contemporary don't quite appeal. And I tend to like, some people call it tradition, some people call it old-fashioned, you know.

00:11:48 Speaker_18
I just like things of a certain aesthetic that tend to be a little bit older than what we have now. And my grandmother was the same way. She was born in 28 and she was sort of a

00:12:00 Speaker_18
a throwback to not her mother's age, she was born in 1906, but more her father's age, and he was born in 1886. In certain ways she was like that, but in certain ways she was a very modern woman.

00:12:13 Speaker_18
So when you've got a person who's throwing back to the 1880s, you know, you've got something there. And then her father was a bit of a throwback himself. And when you're a throwback and you're born in 1886,

00:12:27 Speaker_04
You're going back pretty far.

00:12:28 Speaker_18
You're going back a long ways, you know. He played a throwback banjo, which is sort of kind of why I played this instrument. The instrument he didn't play didn't match his age, it more matched his parents' age, but that's the kind of person he was.

00:12:42 Speaker_04
It sounds like you were particularly drawn to the country blues. What do you think it was that spoke to you?

00:12:49 Speaker_18
Well, the thing that spoke to me the most about the music was the tone of the instruments. And it's something, till yet, I still have a prejudice towards. I truly, in my heart of hearts, believe

00:13:06 Speaker_18
acoustic instruments have more power than any other instruments around.

00:13:12 Speaker_18
Even hearing the same acoustic music through a speaker or through headphones or anything like that does not compare with having an instrument in the same room as you and having the air that vibrates out of that instrument vibrate you and your eardrums.

00:13:29 Speaker_18
I've done it, I've experienced it as a participant and as an audience member. just the emotional power of being in the room with somebody playing the instrument quite well, it can't be beat.

00:13:43 Speaker_18
And I think I could gather that at that young age through those old scratchy records, not even knowing what it was or having no idea. You know, like I said, I was a seven, eight year old kid.

00:13:55 Speaker_18
who, you know, first heard John Hurt and Scott Dunbar and Bucka White and people like that.

00:14:00 Speaker_18
And I didn't know, you know, I didn't know that there were two kind of guitars and things like that, but that just the sonic beauty of those instruments just wrapped me up and took me away.

00:14:11 Speaker_04
And when did you start playing banjo?

00:14:14 Speaker_18
I started playing banjo before I played the guitar. I started playing banjo when I was about, oh, I think about 13 and a half, about 18 months after playing the fiddle.

00:14:25 Speaker_18
And being pretty bad at that in my early days and realizing most of the fiddle I like was surrounded by banjo music.

00:14:33 Speaker_04
And you said your grandfather played the banjo?

00:14:35 Speaker_18
He played the banjo, the guitar, and the fiddle, so I've heard. But this would be my great-grandfather.

00:14:41 Speaker_04
Your great-grandfather.

00:14:42 Speaker_18
Yeah, my grandma's daddy, who was born way back in 86. But according to Granny, they had to run off a plantation when she was about six or seven or so years old.

00:14:55 Speaker_18
and had to leave Joe's instruments behind, and so nobody too much younger than her, which she was the oldest, which, shoot, that includes everybody, nobody younger than her really remembers Joe playing any instruments, but she remembers seeing a banjo on the wall and hearing the sounds of it, and guitars and fiddles and things like that.

00:15:15 Speaker_18
I don't know how great a musician he was, but she knows he played them.

00:15:19 Speaker_04
Well, you brought a banjo with you today. It's kind of a special banjo. Can you tell us about it?

00:15:25 Speaker_18
This banjo I brought with me here is one I've been playing for a while. It's an 1848 model banjo. Stichter model banjo, as they call it. They don't know how popular these things got, but I like the way they're constructed.

00:15:42 Speaker_18
They tend to produce a mighty sound.

00:15:44 Speaker_04
On the song that you play on the album, It's All Over Now, in the liner notes you say that you play this stroke style. Can you explain what that is or demonstrate that for us?

00:15:55 Speaker_18
All right, the stroke style is what they called in books published at the time is I guess what they call claw hammer banjo now or frailing or whatever.

00:16:09 Speaker_18
And I think most of those words can be traced back to none other than the great New Yorker Pete Seeger. Pete Seeger had a big influence on banjo culture, much bigger than he's given credit for.

00:16:22 Speaker_18
which I think includes finding those words and making them ubiquitous among banjo players. But the stroke style is you stroke the string with the tops of your fingers rather than picking it like that with each individual finger.

00:16:39 Speaker_18
You hit it with the top. And you can hear, like, the difference between picking and Each one of those stroke notes have a little bit punchier sound.

00:16:51 Speaker_18
And you combine that with the way you play with your thumb, and you get a nice cross-cultural reference here.

00:17:23 Speaker_04
Ah, that's called Brand New Shoes. Jaron, that was great. Our guest today is Jaron Paxton. His new album is called Things Done Changed. We'll hear more of the interview after a short break. I'm Sam Brigger, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.

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00:18:39 Speaker_04
When you were a teenager, you started having trouble with your eyesight. What was happening?

00:18:44 Speaker_18
Well, I'd had trouble with my peripheral vision my whole life. But then I had two different eye diseases that start to mess with my central vision. And once that started to happen, the problems with my peripheral vision got to be

00:19:02 Speaker_18
pretty unavoidable and, you know, in some places got to be a little bit hazardous, you know. I don't know if you know, but people from South Central, especially during the day and time I grew up, we didn't move too much.

00:19:15 Speaker_18
And Los Angeles being a big driving culture, you sure didn't walk anyplace, you know. I left as an 18-year-old having, I think, maybe walked a mile in my neighborhood and could count the times I did that on one hand.

00:19:31 Speaker_18
So, you know, things like curbs were a bit unfamiliar to me. So, you know, imagine a pretty healthy strapping boy just kind of bumbling and falling all over the place. That's what I was up to for a little while.

00:19:45 Speaker_04
What's your eyesight like now?

00:19:46 Speaker_18
It's about the same. I still have big troubles with my peripheral vision, which stops me from driving. My central vision, I think it's better than what it was, but part of that is the technology has improved.

00:20:02 Speaker_18
I used to go around New York City with a little small telescope around my neck to see things like train signs and street signs and things like that.

00:20:12 Speaker_18
Now that I'm an iPhone user, which I never thought I would be, you know, I could zoom in on something 10 times and that's actually a lot more handy than this little telescope I was using.

00:20:24 Speaker_04
Well, I think because of your eyesight, you had to reconsider what you wanted to do for work. Is that correct?

00:20:29 Speaker_18
Yeah, yeah, I was going to drive trains and things like that. And, you know, I'd probably have done some of the other laboring jobs that most of the folks in my family have done.

00:20:39 Speaker_18
But when I say not being able to drive is just about the biggest disability I have, it's really true, you know.

00:20:48 Speaker_04
Since you were so interested in trains, or you were interested in being a train driver as a kid, do you particularly like train songs?

00:20:55 Speaker_18
Oh, yeah, I think so. As much as people who like rural music tend to get stereotypes as loving songs about trains and mama, you can't help it, I don't think. But if I find a good train song, I'll sit and listen to it for a good while.

00:21:14 Speaker_04
Would you mind playing one that you like particularly?

00:21:17 Speaker_18
Oh, well, my favorite is probably the Pullman Passenger Train, which I can't do here. Let's see.

00:21:24 Speaker_04
Before you play the harmonica, I just want to say that, like all the instruments you play, you seem to be able to make it sound like you're playing two different parts on the harmonica.

00:21:36 Speaker_04
So I don't know if you do that in the song, but I just wanted listeners to keep an ear out for that.

00:21:41 Speaker_18
Oh, yeah. It's not sounding like I'm playing two different parts. I am playing two different parts. Well, yeah, OK. Fair enough. Let's see. Maybe I'll start off this way. Oh, that harmonica's been set on. Hold on. Oh, that one's been set on too.

00:22:38 Speaker_07
uh uh

00:23:38 Speaker_04
Jaron, that was great. Thank you. That was our guest, Jaron Paxson, playing the harmonica. Was that hard to figure out how to do?

00:23:47 Speaker_18
In the words of Fats Waller, it's easy to do when you know how.

00:23:51 Speaker_04
Okay. Well, that couldn't be more cryptic if I'd asked it to be. Yeah, I watched a video of you playing and singing a song, Hesitation Blues. No, no, no.

00:24:08 Speaker_04
But at one point, you were singing, and then you played the harmonica with your nostril at one point.

00:24:15 Speaker_18
Hey, there's a lot of different ways to skin a cat and entertain the audience.

00:24:23 Speaker_04
Well, thank you for doing that. Cheers. Jerron Paxton, I just want to thank you so much for coming in today and bringing your instruments and playing some music for us. Thank you very much.

00:24:33 Speaker_18
Thank you, Sam.

00:24:35 Speaker_04
Jerron Paxton's new album is called Things Done Changed. Disney+, which already gave us the three-part Beatles documentary Get Back and the restored version of their Let It Be film, has another new Beatles documentary to present called Beatles 64.

00:24:57 Speaker_04
It covers a very short but significant period in the group's history. Our TV critic David Bianculli has this review.

00:25:09 Speaker_09
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Tonight, live from New York, The Ed Sullivan Show.

00:25:15 Speaker_15
60 years later, what can a new film say or show about the Beatles' first trip to America that isn't already familiar or that is presented in a significantly different fashion? as it turns out, quite a lot.

00:25:28 Speaker_15
Beatles 64, the new documentary presented by Disney Plus, works really well at exploring and explaining an intense two-week period in musical and cultural history.

00:25:40 Speaker_15
Director David Tedeschi starts his film with the group's first trip to New York, landing at the newly renamed John F. Kennedy Airport on February 7th, and ends with their return to Liverpool 15 days later.

00:25:54 Speaker_15
In between, they holed up at the Plaza Hotel, reached 73 million viewers on their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, played their first U.S.

00:26:02 Speaker_15
concert in Washington, D.C., did a second live Ed Sullivan Show from Miami, and flew back home triumphant, leaving America in the first giant wave of Beatlemania.

00:26:14 Speaker_15
Beatles 64, the film, benefits greatly from behind-the-scenes and fans-eye-view footage shot at the time by the Maysles brothers, Albert and David, who also famously shot film of early Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones at Altamont, and Little Edie and Big Edie at Grey Gardens.

00:26:32 Speaker_15
The group's first press conference at JFK has the press trying to make fun of the Beatles or treat them as novelties. But the four lads from Liverpool instantly win them over.

00:26:43 Speaker_15
When one reporter repeats the accusation that the Beatles are nothing but four Elvis Presleys, Ringo Starr wiggles his pelvis in response, and John Lennon follows, to raucous laughter from the reporters.

00:26:56 Speaker_15
From the very start, they treat the press not as something to fear, but something to play.

00:27:01 Speaker_01
Could you please sing something?

00:27:05 Speaker_09
No! There's some doubt that you can sing. No, we need money first. Our psychiatrist has briefly said there's nothing but poor Elvis Presleys. It's not true! It's not true! What do you think your music does for these people?

00:27:22 Speaker_09
Uh, well... Pleases them, I think. Well, it must do, because they're buying it. Why does it excite them so much? We don't know, really. If we knew, we'd form another group and be managers.

00:27:34 Speaker_15
Vintage interview and performance clips are collected and presented artfully. George Harrison, in an interview from the 90s, explains why The Beatles hit America and the press the way they did.

00:27:45 Speaker_12
The Beatles were very... I mean, they actually were funny. Everybody in Liverpool thinks they're a comedian. I mean, that's a well-known fact.

00:27:54 Speaker_12
And all you have to do is drive up there and go through the Mersey Tunnel and the guy on the toll booth is a comedian, you know, they all are.

00:28:03 Speaker_12
We had that kind of bred and born into us, and when you just transposed it into New York or somewhere, it was great. I mean, we were just being hard-faced, really, and they loved it.

00:28:18 Speaker_01
And do you think it was being made even stronger by the fact there were four of you bouncing off one another?

00:28:23 Speaker_12
Absolutely, yeah. You just dried up and somebody else was already there with another fab quip.

00:28:29 Speaker_15
Another wonderful vintage interview from a decade ago has singer Ronnie Spector talking about how she and the Ronettes helped the Beatles escape from the Plaza Hotel, which was surrounded by a mob of adoring teenage fans.

00:28:42 Speaker_00
I'll tell you the truth. They had to escape. They were prisoners. So I got a limousine. We went down the back stairs and went to Harlem. I said, I'm taking you to Harlem. Nobody will notice you up there. And they didn't.

00:28:52 Speaker_00
They thought they were a bunch of Spanish dorks. because it's Spanish Harlem. So they didn't pay them any mind. We went into Sherman's Barbecue, it was called, 151st in Amsterdam. They went in and they loved it because nobody recognized them.

00:29:07 Speaker_00
You know, the black guys are eating their ribs and the Spanish guys, and nobody paid them any attention. And it was great. They loved that, that nobody paid them any attention. See how sweet they were? They didn't care about stardom so much.

00:29:21 Speaker_00
Oh, we're going to be on Ed Sullivan. They said, Ronnie, who's Ed Sullivan?

00:29:25 Speaker_15
The film features new interviews as well. One of the film's producers, Martin Scorsese, conducts separate interviews with Paul McCartney and Ringo.

00:29:35 Speaker_15
McCartney is filmed at his Brooklyn photographic exhibit from earlier this year, where he points out one of his favorite photos that he took during those two wild weeks.

00:29:44 Speaker_15
The Beatles are relaxing poolside in Miami, and George is being handed a drink by a young woman.

00:29:50 Speaker_11
Liverpool guys, 15 years after World War II, and we're now here in Miami. This is the one that sums up the good life in Florida.

00:30:03 Speaker_11
He's got his shades on, he's got the sunshine, he's got his drink, and he's got the girl in the yellow bikini delivering it to him.

00:30:14 Speaker_15
Instead of emphasizing the very familiar Ed Sullivan footage, Beatles 64 instead presents complete songs from the much rarer Washington D.C. performance, which was filmed in the round in a boxing ring for a closed-circuit TV presentation.

00:30:29 Speaker_15
Giles Martin, the son of Beatles producer George Martin, remixed the music, and it sounds great. One of the young people in the audience that day was film director David Lynch, who talks about it.

00:30:41 Speaker_16
I was in high school. I lived in Alexandria, Virginia. I was into rock and roll music, mainly Elvis Presley, who brought rock and roll music to the world, to me anyway. I ended up going to this concert.

00:30:59 Speaker_16
I didn't really have any idea that it was the first concert. I don't know. I didn't have any idea how big this event was. And it was in a gigantic place where they had boxing matches. The Beatles were in the boxing ring.

00:31:16 Speaker_16
It was so loud, you can't believe.

00:31:31 Speaker_07
a soldier

00:31:37 Speaker_15
Other fresh stories come from such people as Jamie Bernstein, the daughter of Leonard Bernstein, record producer Jack Douglas, who tells a fabulous story about John Lennon, and Motown singer Smokey Robinson, who talks of the importance of the Beatles covering one of his songs.

00:31:54 Speaker_15
A year or so later, he'd return the favor on national television by singing Yesterday with the Miracles.

00:32:01 Speaker_14
They were the first white group that I had ever heard in my life. the first white artist ever of their magnitude that I ever heard in my life say, yeah, we grew up listening to black music. We love Motown. We listen to black music.

00:32:15 Speaker_14
We don't love this person. No other white artist had ever said that. Not in any one of magnitude until the Beatles said that.

00:32:24 Speaker_15
By collecting the footage, gathering the stories, and presenting very generous samples of the songs, Beatles 64 makes it clear why the Beatles made such an impact. and why the group and its music continue to not only be remembered, but revered.

00:32:42 Speaker_04
David Bianculli is professor of television studies at Rowan University. He's at work on a book about the visual artistry of the Beatles. He reviewed Beatles 64, now streaming on Disney+.

00:32:55 Speaker_04
Coming up, Terry talks with author Michael Owen about Ira Gershwin, the lyricist behind some of the most enduring songs in the great American popular songbook. We'll hear plenty of great Gershwin music. I'm Sam Brigger, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.

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00:34:21 Speaker_04
Our next guest, author Michael Owen, talks with Terry about the life and enduring lyrics of Ira Gershwin. His new book is called Ira Gershwin, A Life in Words. Here's Terry.

00:34:33 Speaker_10
The classic songs, Lady Be Good, Embraceable You, Swonderful, Love Is Here to Stay, Let's Call the Whole Thing Off, Fascinating Rhythm, I Got Rhythm, I've Got a Crush on You, My Ship, The Man That Got Away, Long Ago and Far Away, I Could Go On, they all have lyrics by Ira Gershwin.

00:34:50 Speaker_10
Most of his best known songs were written with his younger brother, the pianist and composer George Gershwin, but Ira also wrote with Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, and Kurt Weill.

00:35:00 Speaker_10
My guest Michael Owen is the author of the new book, Ira Gershwin, A Life in Words. Owen was the archivist for the Ira and Leonard Gershwin Trusts until those papers were given to the Library of Congress.

00:35:12 Speaker_10
Owen now works with the Trusts as a consulting archivist and historian. He's also the author of a book about the singer Julie London.

00:35:20 Speaker_10
Let's start with Ella Fitzgerald singing Lady, Be Good from her 1959 album, Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Songbook. It's the title song from an early Gershwin musical.

00:35:32 Speaker_08
Oh, sweet and lovely Lady, be good. Oh, Lady, be good. I am so awfully misunderstood Please have some pity I'm all alone in this big city I tell you I

00:36:56 Speaker_10
Michael Owen, welcome to Fresh Air. I love the Gershwin's music so it's a pleasure to be able to talk with you about it.

00:37:01 Speaker_10
I opened with Lady Be Good because I think it ties together the early part of Ira Gershwin's career with the part in the 1950s when he wasn't really writing much and his career, his songs, like needed a boost and Ella Fitzgerald's Gershwin songbook really helped give him that.

00:37:23 Speaker_10
So, can you talk a little bit about the importance of both of those ends, you know, the Lady Be Good musical and the Ella Fitzgerald Gershwin songbook?

00:37:34 Speaker_02
Thank you, first off, for having me on. 1924 was absolutely a big year for Ira. Ira and George had brought them together for the first time as a songwriting team to write a Broadway show.

00:37:47 Speaker_02
And because Lady Be Good was such a success, it fostered the rest of their career together. But by the time the late 1950s came around when Ella Fitzgerald recorded the songbook, Ira's career had come to an end.

00:37:59 Speaker_02
He might not have known that at the time, but it did. We know that now. And the songbook, one of a series of songbooks that Ella Fitzgerald did of other songwriters of the period, brought a new light, a new focus on the songs that the brothers wrote.

00:38:14 Speaker_02
And so it was a commercial success. It was an artistic success. And it brought on a wealth of new recordings of those songs and others in the catalog and helped Ira financially quite well.

00:38:31 Speaker_10
George and Ira had very different interests and personalities. George was more extroverted. Ira was more shy or wanted to stay more in the background. And George was very musical. Ira was immersed in words. He read a lot. He kept a record of what he read.

00:38:51 Speaker_10
He started writing light verse that was published in the college magazine or newspaper and other places. Were they close as children being so different from each other?

00:39:04 Speaker_02
They were only two years apart and they were the first and second children of Morris and Rose Gershwin. So they grew up together even though Their interests were very separate.

00:39:16 Speaker_02
George was somebody who went out and got into fights and came home with a black eye. Iroh was back in his room reading newspaper articles and magazines and books.

00:39:29 Speaker_02
So his life became more one of observation rather than activity, whereas George's life would have been a 180-degree difference from that.

00:39:41 Speaker_10
When Ira was young, either in high school or college, he became friends with the Yip Harburg, the lyricist probably most famous for writing the lyrics for The Wizard of Oz. And he also wrote the very famous lyric, Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

00:39:57 Speaker_10
And not only were they friends, and they often talked about not only poetry in light verse, but also lyrics together. Ira actually contributed a couple of lines to Over the Rainbow from The Wizard of Oz. What was Ira's contribution?

00:40:17 Speaker_02
Well, all three of the writers who were friends, Harold Arlen, the composer, and Yup Harburg, and Ira, who had been classmates and writing partners together before, when Arlen and Harburg had been hired to write the score at MGM for The Wizard of Oz, they played the tune, Arlen's tune that became Over the Rainbow for Ira because he was a sounding board.

00:40:42 Speaker_02
I must say that that was the way it was with all these writers of that period. They were all generally friendly to each other. I don't think there was a lot of competition. I mean there was competition obviously but there wasn't angry competition.

00:40:54 Speaker_02
So when the song was finished or at least when Harburg and Arlen thought the song was finished, they came over to Ira's house and Arlen sat down at the piano and played the tune and Harburg sang the song.

00:41:05 Speaker_02
And Ira liked it a lot but he felt like that there was something missing at the end, a to the song and so Ira was the one who came up with the line about blue birds flying at the end which is one of the more famous lines from the song.

00:41:23 Speaker_10
If happy little blue birds fly beyond the rainbow, why oh why can't I?

00:41:28 Speaker_02
Right and I think that sums up the song in many ways, it sums up the film, it sums up Dorothy's journey. But I think he just was helping out his friends and whether he got credit for that or not didn't really make that much difference to him.

00:41:45 Speaker_10
AMT And he did not get credit. TG When we just hear that coda, just hear the end of the song.

00:41:57 Speaker_05
If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow

00:42:16 Speaker_10
That was the end of Somewhere Over the Rainbow from The Wizard of Oz. And we heard those last couple of lines, which were actually written by Ira Gershwin. Ira read so many books and, you know, wrote light verse.

00:42:31 Speaker_10
And some of the lyrics have really fun, funny literary references in them. And an example for that is But Not For Me, which is a beautiful song. And it has a line, I found more skies of gray than any Russian play can guarantee. One of his famous lines.

00:42:50 Speaker_10
Can you talk a little bit about that song and how it originated?

00:42:54 Speaker_02
Well, Banomp for me was one of the songs that was written for the 1930 musical Girl Crazy, which featured a very young Ginger Rogers. That was a song that Ginger Rogers sang in the show Ballad that she sang.

00:43:08 Speaker_02
And it was also the show that brought Ethel Merman to everybody's attention. I Got Rhythm is in the same show.

00:43:15 Speaker_02
And it was perhaps the height of the Gershwin's silly shows by 1930 before they went into some of the political shows of the few years after and then Porgy and Bess. But Not For Me is, it's a very romantic ballad and you can take it that way.

00:43:38 Speaker_02
But if you listen to the lyrics closely, you can hear both Ivor's influences, because as you say, he read a lot and he had a huge library, but also his tricky rhymes about wedding knots and being—that that was not for me.

00:43:57 Speaker_10
part of the lyric, and it's the end of the lyric, goes, when every happy plot ends with a marriage knot, and there's no knot for me. So a clever play on words.

00:44:09 Speaker_02
Absolutely correct. And I think that one of the things that Ira complained about sometimes was that in a theater Most people were never going to get that sense of the song.

00:44:21 Speaker_02
They were going to hear the two words and the two sounds, not and not, and they'd think they were the same thing.

00:44:27 Speaker_02
It was only the people who actually studied the sheet music or who sang the song professionally who might pick it up, but he did this on purpose.

00:44:38 Speaker_10
Why?

00:44:39 Speaker_02
Because he always wanted to have some fun with the lyrics.

00:44:43 Speaker_02
I don't think he ever thought of lyric writing, particularly in his early years, as a job so much as it was his way of making his thoughts about love and art known to the world of musical theater and film music and popular songs.

00:45:07 Speaker_02
Whether people got that or not, that certainly wasn't up to him, but he was very protective of his lyrics.

00:45:15 Speaker_02
When singers would sing songs not in the way that he wrote them, singing, I've got rhythm instead of I got rhythm, he was somewhat offended by that in a humorous way.

00:45:30 Speaker_10
It was the same with Swonderful. If somebody sang It's Wonderful, he'd get pretty upset. And I was listening to the Leigh Wiley. She did a whole set of Gershwin songs. And she sings It's Wonderful, as opposed to Swonderful. But she's such a great singer.

00:45:45 Speaker_10
Anyhow, let's not get too distracted and hear Let's Hear But Not For Me. Should we hear Leigh Wiley singing it?

00:45:54 Speaker_02
Absolutely. Let's hear Leigh Wiley.

00:45:56 Speaker_10
And this is on her recording from the 1930s, right?

00:45:59 Speaker_02
Yes, Leigh Wiley, she's generally a forgotten name in the world of popular song these days, but she was one of the first performers to do what we now call songbook albums.

00:46:12 Speaker_10
So let's hear Leigh Wiley's recording from the 1930s of George and Ira Gershwin's But Not For Me.

00:46:20 Speaker_06
They're writing songs of love But not for me The lucky stars above But not for me With love to lead the way I've found more clouds of gray than any Russian plane could guarantee. I was a fool to fall

00:47:09 Speaker_06
Can't get that way I owe a lot And oh, so lackadaisical Although I can't dismiss The memory of your kiss I guess is not for me

00:47:51 Speaker_10
I was Lee Wiley, recruited in the 1930s, singing the Gershwin song, But Not for Me. My guest, Michael Owen, is the author of a new book called Ira Gershwin, A Life in Words. What was their approach to writing together?

00:48:04 Speaker_10
Everybody wants to know what came first, the words or the music. And their approach to writing together changed over the years.

00:48:12 Speaker_02
It did. I jokingly would usually say that what came first was the contract.

00:48:18 Speaker_10
Sammy Cahn used to say that too.

00:48:21 Speaker_02
I think they all said that. Yes, in the early days, and I would say that it would have been from the 20s into the mid 1930s, it was usually George's melodic ideas that started the ball rolling for a song. It might just have been a fragment of a melody.

00:48:40 Speaker_02
And Ira had a very good memory for melodies, even though he couldn't really play the piano.

00:48:45 Speaker_02
But he did remember them in a certain way that kept them in his mind and could bring them back and try to remind his brother of something that might have been brought up a few months earlier. And it was a very unique relationship. I mean, I know that

00:49:01 Speaker_02
Every songwriter worked in a different way. Songwriting partnerships worked in different ways. But typically, over the years, Ira would be at a little card table next to George at the piano.

00:49:16 Speaker_02
And he would have his big sheets of paper with him and he would just gribble out ideas.

00:49:23 Speaker_02
And if you looked at some of the archival material that I used in writing this book and went through Ira's papers as I did, you can see the vast amount of changes and ideas that flowed through his head as his brother was elaborating on these melodies.

00:49:40 Speaker_02
But eventually, over the years, it became more of a joint partnership that it wasn't always the music that came first, particularly as they got into the so-called political musicals of the 30s, of the I Sing, and things like that, where the lyrics came more to the forefront of the show rather than the music.

00:50:04 Speaker_02
Memorable music, though it is, but it's the lyrics, the satirical nature of those lyrics. that brought Ira to a new level where people were starting to compare him to one of his idols, W.S. Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan fame.

00:50:19 Speaker_10
How did Ira Gershwin's life end?

00:50:23 Speaker_02
Well, Ira died in 1983. He had been housebound for a number of years. His last real work was in the early 1960s. After the end of the 1960s, which was basically the last time he traveled, he increasingly stayed at his house.

00:50:47 Speaker_02
He had had a stroke and various other physical ailments over the years, which were leaving him more incapacitated. But I will say that his final years actually were quite good ones because

00:51:03 Speaker_02
Among other things was the arrival of a young man by the name of Michael Feinstein, who I know you've had on your show, who was hired initially to sort of entertain Ira and wound up working on Ira's archive.

00:51:20 Speaker_02
I did some similar work to what Michael did in terms of the archive, but certainly not entertaining Ira. I wasn't around then. And there was a piano that was brought up into Ira's bedroom.

00:51:32 Speaker_02
And Michael spent a lot of time at the house singing for Ira, some of the more obscure corners of Ira's catalog, which entertained a man who had become somewhat isolated. But it was a good life. It was a successful life.

00:51:49 Speaker_02
And it's certainly one that is well remembered by those of us who love great songs, great lyrics, and the Great American Songbook.

00:52:00 Speaker_10
Michael Owen, thank you so much for talking with us.

00:52:03 Speaker_02
Thank you, Terry. It's been a pleasure.

00:52:06 Speaker_04
Michael Owen's new book is Ira Gershwin, A Life in Words. Fresh Air Weekend is produced today by Thea Chaloner. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham.

00:52:27 Speaker_04
Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Theresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Susan Ikundi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producers are Molly C.V. Nesper and Sabrina Seward.

00:52:42 Speaker_04
For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Sam Brigger.

00:52:47 Speaker_13
This message comes from NPR sponsor Merrill. Whatever your financial goals are, you want a straightforward path there. But the real world doesn't usually work that way. Merrill understands that.

00:52:58 Speaker_13
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