Swanee
Swanee is a pop song written by George Gershwin (music) and Irving Caesar (lyrics). It was published in 1919 by TB Harms and Francis Day & Hunter, New York. The song first became popular in the version of Al Jolson , but is becoming an evergreen.
background
Gershwin and Caesar, who were around 20 years old at the time, later claimed to have roughly conceived the song within fifteen minutes of a bus ride in Manhattan in 1918 and then finished it in Gershwin's apartment. Partly it was meant as a parody of Stephen Foster's Old Folks at Home .
The song was used in a New York revue called Demi-Cup , which premiered in October 1919 at the Capitol Theater. There the song was performed by Muriel De Forrest as an elaborately produced number, with 60 chorus girls on stage. Still, sheet music sales were meager and publishers no longer believed in the song's commercial potential. But shortly afterwards Gershwin played him at a party, where Al Jolson heard him and then built him into his Sinbad show , which ran successfully at the Winter Garden Theater, and took him in January 1920 for Columbia Records . In 1920 Swanee was in the US charts for 18 weeks, nine of them at position one. One million copies of the sheet music sold and an estimated two million records.
The song was Gershwin's first hit and at the same time the most commercially successful of his career; the royalties allowed him to concentrate more on the work on the theater and film instead of continuing to write individual pop hits. Arthur Schwartz said: "It's ironic that he never again wrote a number equaling the sales of Swanee, which for all its infectiousness, doesn't match the individuality and subtlety of his later works."
Jolson recorded the song several times throughout his career and sang it in the films The Jolson Story (1946), Rhapsody in Blue (1946) and Jolson Sings Again (1949). For the performance of the song in The Jolson Story , Jolson (instead of Larry Parks ) had a cameo .
The song became known in Germany as Bubi, my favorite .
Cover versions
Swanee was covered by a number of musicians and bands in the years that followed, including Judy Garland in A Star Is Born . Rufus Wainwright presented it on his album Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall (2006). It was sung on the Muppets Show in 1979. In the field of jazz, the discographer Tom Lord records 77 versions, between 1920 and 2013 a. a. by Harry Yerkes (1920), the Picadilly Four , the Louisiana Rhythm Kings , George E. Stoll , Jean Wiener / Clement Doucet , from the 1930s also by Eddie Condon , Art Hodes , Kurt Hohenberger , Phil Napoleon , Freddy Randall , Ted Heath , Jimmy Smith , Bing Crosby , Dave Brubeck , Aretha Franklin , Woody Herman and His Orchestra , Dutch Swing College Band , Art Van Damme , Mel Tormé , Sarah Vaughan , Alex Welsh and Jessica Williams .
Swanee is not to be confused with Stephen Foster's Swanee River (actually Old Folks at Home ).
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b song portrait
- ↑ a b Swanee song lyrics . Pubdomian-Popular Public Domain Music
- ^ Al Jolson Society
- ^ Chart-Toppers of the Twenties . ASV Ltd., 1998, CD liner notes
- ^ Encyclopædia Britannica: The 100 Most Influential Musicians of All Time . The Rosen Publishing Group, October 1, 2009, p. 164 (accessed March 14, 2012).
- ↑ Swanee in the Openwriting Blog, November 5, 2014 ( Memento from July 29, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Video on YouTube
- ↑ A Berlin formation with Sascha Dickstein (from left) and / or Arno Lewitsch (from left), Fred Ross (p), Hans Savage (bj) or Michel "Mike" Ortuso (bj) and Erich Giese
- ↑ Tom Lord: The Jazz Discography . on-line; accessed August 1, 2015