Vernon Duke

George Gershwin’s own piano recording of his song, “Swanee”

The aspiring songwriter wrote a song called “Swanee” and recorded it on a piano roll. This song was a take off on Stephen Foster’s 1850s song, “Old Folks at Home” or “Way Down upon the Swanee.” It had sold hundreds of thousands of copies in its time. Gershwin’s 1919 song was written in just twelve minutes with lyricist Irving Caesar at Gershwin’s apartment where a ruckus card game was going on. Sixty young women dancing with electric lights in their shoes tapped along with the song at a Capitol Theater revue called Demi-Tasse in October of that year but it got no notice. Though Foster’s song and this one has since raised haunting racial issues, Foster’s intended meaning was no matter how far we may travel or what sadness comes to us in the world, our hearts yearn for the best memories of childhood and the security of family, parents and home. Gershwin’s song made allusions to the “old folks at home” and “down by the Swanee.” But if home is where the heart is, then perhaps there’s likely to be a life-giving river nearby too.

A few weeks after the song’s revue flop, Gershwin played the song at a piano sing along at a party and Al Jolson was there. He put it in his stage show, Sinbad, and recorded it for Columbia. The song sold a million music copies and a million records. Gershwin was just 20 years old.

And so,  though possessing a potentially negative pedigree in his early life—a first generation American, the son of two immigrants, new homes in different parts of town, a high school dropout—George Gershwin’s ascent began. He was a piano accompanist-song demonstrator on Tin Pan Alley; he wrote songs of his own; he collaborated with aspiring lyricists to bring a fuller form to his songs than simple pianistic versions; he was taken into the service of the Standard Music Roll Company and the Aeolian Company to make player piano rolls; he was a part of the technical innovations in recording when the Aeolian, Ampico, and Welte-Mignon companies introduced their unique reproducing systems; he created arrangements for two and four hands, adding all kinds of inner voices, obbligato counterpoints and codas to embellish simple songs; he became a rehearsal pianist on Broadway; he wrote the musical, La, La, Lucille, that ran for 104 nights; and we already know that other singers sang his songs, (Al Jolson).

But there was one society in which he was not popular—perhaps only because of a financial-legal agreement that prevented its coming into existence. This hugely gifted young person wanted to write an opera called The Dybbuk, based on a Yiddish play by S. Ansky which documents some of the folk beliefs and stories of Hassidic Jews. However, when Gershwin found that the rights to the play were owned by the Italian composer, Lodovico Rocca, he gave up. This echoed another situation earlier in his life in the time when he was an admirer of the music of Joseph Rumshisky, one of the main composers in the Yiddish Theater scene on Second Avenue on the Lower East Side. Boris Thomashevsky, then the biggest star of this theater, invited Gershwin and to Sholem Secunda collaborate on a Yiddish operetta. Secunda, however, refused to work with an “unproven” song-plugger.

And yet his passion for music (arranging, composing, transcribing, recording) was profound. When he held forth upon stride and ragtime styles, upon the varied harmonies Chopin and Liszt or Debussy had structured; and about what violinist Jascha Heifitz might accomplish, no doubt he created for Vernon Duke—then, a new immigrant to New York—that atmosphere of hope and ardent curiosity, spiced with sound learning that serves to spur the imagination of a young composer-pianist. So it might have been how Vernon saw him (narrator’s creation):

George was the happy of happiest men, and

I, a looker-on of this fusion of angelic and hellish New Country sounds,

An admirer, noting his ardent interest in each situation where

He and music met each other.

Musicians need such “lookers-on”; someone who discriminates from a watch-tower above the battle, who warns, who foresees. It must have been pleasurable for Duke to listen as Gershwin talked and then to cease to listen, to let the insistent, confident voice run on, while he slipped from theory to practice and improvised a few riffs of his own making in his head. But the looker-on may sit too long and hold forth too curiously and domineeringly for his own health. He may make his theories fit too tightly to accommodate the formlessness of life. So when Gershwin ceased to theorize and commandingly began to play in twenty different “American” styles, sight reading this and that, changing keys easily, instantly, there issued forth ceaseless variations of Russian, German, French, English-Irish and Latin and African musical syntaxes from all corners of the world, forging this new American musical language.

He had achieved being a song plugger as he had achieved being a songwriter and collaborator, as he had achieved being a piano roll recording artist and a Broadway composer, as he achieved, it might seem, in everything he undertook. And he had won the friendship of Vernon Duke and the undying devotion of his elder brother, Ira Gershwin.

But you may say, we asked you to speak about Vernon Duke’s, “I Can’t Get Started”—what has that got to do with Tin Pan Alley’s sheet music sales, pianolas, song pluggers and early Yiddish musical theater? I will try to explain. I am going to do what I can to show you how I arrived at this opinion and about that certain kind of exchange between one who knows and one who does not, otherwise known as the teacher and the student. Here, this interdependent relationship is represented by George Gershwin and Vernon Duke.

These two men were both composers, pianists and song-writers of Russian heritage. Their paths crossed in New York City in the year 1921 when George Gershwin was twenty-three years old, shortly after the huge success of his song, “Swanee.” Vernon Duke, just eighteen, had also played piano in Constantinople cafes though he had studied piano and composition at the Kiev Conservatory under Reinhold Gliere. George encouraged “Vladimir Dukelsky” to continue writing classical music but to explore popular songs in the American style, saying, “Don’t be scared about going low-brow” and to change his name to “Vernon Duke.”

But how, we ask, as we type “George Gershwin” and “Vernon Duke” into the search field at YouTube, can we even hope to come to grips with these early Broadway-Follies composers? And then opening, downloading, fast forwarding and scanning the videos, something emerges from the grainy moving images—the outline of a man, the shadowy portrait of somebody who is not “Tin Pan Alley” or “Ragtime” or “not quite classical,” but an interesting, complex and individual human being. We know him through his brother, Ira, who refused a new piano. We see him hanging on Max Rosen’s coattails at the player piano, learning piano roll versions of perhaps, “The Old Folks at Home” and “After the Ball.” We watch his parents sending him off to be trained in European classical music with Charles Hambitzer. We observe with irony as he spends one year in high school studying accounting in order to help with the family’s restaurant business only to drop out and go to work as the youngest ever song plugger at Jerome H. Remick and Company, one of Tin Pan Alley’s sheet music publishers. Here he earns $15 a week, the average salary of Americans at the time.

The song plugger is sitting in a booth at a piano and playing Remick’s own songs for the vaudeville performers that come in looking for new material. Sometimes he is out bantering with singers, orchestra leaders, dancers and comedians to use the songs. (It is even said that the “v” in “Gershvin” became “Gershwin” at this point because he had been so impressed by comedian Ed Wynn.) Soon he is recording piano rolls because Mr. Remick wants the recordings to help the sales of the sheet music. This 16 year old George Gershwin is in the right place at the right time.

George Gershwin would go on to record one hundred and forty player piano rolls over a ten year period. Below is a video of a piano roll recording of his first instrumental published composition, “Rialto Ripples Rag.”

Gershwin recorded “Rialto Ripples Rag” on a piano roll for player piano

What, we ask, was the life of an ordinary man or woman in the time of Ira and George Gershwin? Of Vernon Duke? To answer such questions as well as those raised last week in this web log, perhaps we might parse an answer by examining the lyrics of Ira Gershwin himself. Perhaps the first clue lies in the opening lyrics of Ira Gershwin’s “I Can’t Get Started”:

I’ve been around the world in a plane /
Settled revolutions ….

All three of these young men had been affected by a series of military conflicts in Russia. The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia forced Vladmir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke), educated at the Kiev Conservatory as a music student of Reinhold Gliere and Marian Dombrovsky, to flee to Istanbul, Turkey. In 1921, he and his mother arrived in New York where he became a protégé of—George Gershwin. An earlier revolution in Russia which began with the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 led to the birth of these two Gershwin brothers in Brooklyn, New York, 1896 and 1898 respectively. And too, all three Russia descendents, now Americans, George and Ira Gershwin and Vernon Duke, were masters of song and lyric which console sadness and return torment for joy.

But since Ira and George were first to arrive in the Lower East Side, how did it all really begin, way back in the old country? With a love story, it seems.

Jacob and Israel Gershovitz’s parents had dated in St. Petersburg, Russia in the late 19th century. Their mother, Rose Bruskin, was the daughter of a furrier and their father, Moishe Gershovitz, was the son of Yakov Gershovitz, an inventor who had completed his twenty-five years of compulsory military service. About Yakov, George is thought to have said, “The only creative ancestry that I have seems to have been my father’s father who, he tells me, was an inventor. His ingenuity had something to do with Czar’s guns.” They met when Rose was 15 and Moishe, 19. But shortly after they met, Rose’s father decided to move his furrier business to New York.

Rose’s father was one of many thousands of Russian emigrants to the United States somewhere around the late 1880s. In 1881, the assassination was blamed on the Russian Jewish population and so began a series of massacres, known as “pograms” in Russia, meaning “to demolish violently.” Immigration records show that between 1820 and 1920, over 3,250,000 emigrated from Russian to the United States. And too, Moishe Gershovitz, required by law to serve in the military for twenty-five years, left St. Petersburg in 1892 to propose to Rose.

As soon as Moishe arrived, he began searching for Rose Bruskin, already somewhere in New York City. But first he had to find his uncle, a tailor named Greenstein. He knew where Rose was. Moishe, now “Morris,” not only found Rose, but he married her on July 21, 1895. They lived above Simpson’s Pawnshop at the corner of Hester Street and Eldrige Street when they had their first child, Israel Gershovitz, (Ira Gershwin) on December 6, 1896. Two years later, Jacob Gershovitz or George Gershovitz was born. To seem more American, they changed their Russian last name from Gershovitz to Gershwin.

And if we ask why we go further back in this particular period of Early Broadway and Blues/Jazz Music than in any other, the answer is no doubt that Tin Pan Alley-Follies-Vaudeville-Broadway play narratives, for all their beauty and glamour, were a very imperfect medium, an over-idealized medium from our view now. It is true that they were almost perfectly capable of fulfilling one of the chief offices of the lyric which is to make people sing, simply and naturally, about ordinary daily life. And yes, Ira Gershwin’s lyrics to “I Can’t Get Started” dramatize the age old girl-doesn’t-want-boy even though boy is the perfect boy (Oxford grad., very well off, well connected, etc.). Even more, our narrator lists, in classical list form, flying a plane, conquering Spain, surveying the North pole, starring in Metro-Goldwyn, out-golfing any pro, mingling with all the movie idols of the day as well as political figures—as we will see—Clarke Gable, Greta Garbo, Count Basie, Robert Taylor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Martin Luther King and Leontyne Price. And though the lyrics are fabulously easy to sing in the shower, we know s/he still doesn’t get the girl/boy. And why does Vernon Duke’s music make him/her seem so upbeat about it? So almost, well, elated?

One question spawns many more: Wasn’t Ira Gershwin, THE George Gershwin’s brother? Why was Vernon Duke composing music with Ira Gershwin? Who was Vernon Duke anyway? How did he meet Ira Gershwin? And just what were these Follies, Ziegfeld and Goldwyn?

The first title for this blog was “Letters to the Line Between Fiction, Non-Fiction, Neither and Both.” Today it is called “A Common Listener.” One title falls somewhere between Rilke and the other Virginia Woolf. Maybe next time it will be a three letter abbreviation CGS.com for “Can’t Get Started.” Anyway, it is all an attempt to begin a stream of thoughts about some of the music from some of the Americas, mostly in the English language but not always.

Thinking it possible to go back seventy-five to one hundred or so years and become in our imagination one of the Ziegfeld Follies, or a singer or composer in Tin Pan Alley could be a fun thing, a funny thing. That such imaginations are only imaginations, that “becoming a Tin Pan Alley-ist”, performing decades old music and poetry as we play our own now is an illusion, is true. “Our own” here is now used for anything past Billie Holiday and the great divide in jazz past the black and the white. Very likely the Early Broadway-ist would find our pronunciation of their language unintelligible (Jeanne Lee): our idealized picture of what we might call the life in Tin Pan Alley would make them laugh. Still, the urge that demands we return to them (“we—Billie Holiday, Paul Bley, Ran Blake, Jeanne Lee, Hankus Netsky and the narrator here; “them”—Vernon Duke, Ira Gershwin, George Gershwin, Bob Hope, Eve Arden, Peter Solari,) is so strong and the haunting light-heartedness that blows through the old recordings (and films) are so tantalizing that we willingly run the risk of being laughed at, of being a fuddy-duddy, an old fart.

Rosa asked who was Vernon Duke since there was no link to his name that appeared in the last post’s title. And still not knowing the ropes or the dashboard or the wp content folder in the hosting server, the thought came that in order to get something up, go to Vernon and answer her kind curiosity. The history stretches all the way from Russia to Jordan Hall at the New England Conservatory in Boston, Massachusetts in the 1980s to somewhere near the South Pole in Brazil. (The local beer is called “Antartica.”)

The composer who wrote “April in Paris,” and “Taking a Chance on Love” is the same Vernon Duke of “I Can’t Get Started with You.” If the hope to get a plug-in for audio in the near future can be fulfilled, then we might fly around the world as common listeners.