Michael Kantor: Help to embed American slang in the language or reflect the, how did the new American vocabulary show up in the songs and how did that help embed it back in the culture?
Michael Strunsky: Well, Ira was a great listener. That was, besides being a fine lyricist, that was his other talent. And he listened both to the people who surrounded him and he listened to America at large. And as a result, he was able to include in his song lyrics many of the expressions of the day. And many times when he included an expression of the day, it became even more popular.
Michael Kantor: So give me some of the, tell me the story about how your family figured in that great all-American tomato-tomato controversy.
Michael Strunsky: Sure. In the mid-1930s, my father owned a small tomato products processing plant in New Jersey. And he used to buy tomatoes from the farmers and make tomato juice and ketchup and chili sauce for commercial purposes. And he was discussing it with his brother-in-law, Ira Gershwin, one day. And Ira mentioned that my father’s sister called them tomatoes and my dad made it very clear that if he called them tomatos, the farmers that he did business with wouldn’t know what he was talking about. That rattled around in Ira’s head and eventually came out in the 1930s song, Let’s Call whole thing off, which starts, you say tomato and I say tomato. I think that’s an expression that we’ve all used and continue to use. People use it without any realization that it was high-risk creation.
Michael Kantor: Great, just hit me with a couple of those other slangy phrases. It ain’t necessarily so wonderful. This is a time where American culture is forging its identity. And song smiths, wordsmiths, Ira in particular, are right at the center.
Michael Strunsky: The Broadway musical was a center of American culture more so than it is today back in the 1920s and 30s. It was the source of a much larger percentage of popular music than it today. And Ira, with his ear to the ground for what the American population was saying and his ability to incorporate that into songs. Wrote songs with lyrics that said, it ain’t necessarily so, lyrics that say, let’s call the whole thing off, lyrics that says, who could ask for anything more? And those phrases, although originally came from, I won’t say necessarily the street, but the population at large, then became embedded in these songs, which became so popular. And became even more important.
Michael Kantor: Within, you know, this amazing music.
Michael Strunsky: Let me just caution you that this is not my area of expertise, it is much more Bob Kimball’s area of expertize.
Michael Kantor: Well, describe George and I were working together. Right. We’re very different kind of people.
Michael Strunsky: Yep.
Michael Kantor: Here we go.
Michael Strunsky: George and Ira worked together in a very unique manner, usually late at night, and what would happen would be that they would come home from whatever social event they were attending or maybe just upstairs from the dining room in their own house, which they always shared or almost always shared, and Ira would put a card table next to the piano, and George would play through a melody. And Ira would make some comments about the pacing or rhythmic structure of the melody. And then Ira would start to apply the words to it, usually because they had a particular slot in a show to fill. So the song, although not quite to the extent that songs are today. Was intended to move the plot along. Very often after a couple of hours of this, George would go off and either go to bed or go somewhere else and Ira would spend the rest of the night very often into the early hours of the morning tapping his pencil on the table to simulate the rhythm that George had left in his head and working on the lyrics. Ira became known for the preciseness of his lyrics and the title that went around about Ira was that he was the jeweler.
Michael Kantor: We’re rolling?
Michael Strunsky: One of the things that’s most interesting about the Gershwin brothers who who created this this wonderful catalog of American music a catalog which I’m privileged to help to maintain Through through to the next generation was the Amazing difference between them. They were brothers. Ira was older than George by a couple of years and At the same time, they were about as different as people can be. George was, growing up, what must be termed by any stretch of the imagination, is a street kid. He was out, he was roller skating around town because that was the thing that kids did in those days. He was an athlete. Ira was contemplative, an observer. Very much interested in the literary items of the times. He read the columns in the daily newspapers and emulated it in some prose writing that he did. And yet these two men, as they matured, were able to sit down together, focus together, always organized by George. George was the one who would always say, Let’s go to work, Ira, and Wood. Would drag Ira to his card table and produce this fabulous American music.
Michael Kantor: Last question, which is, I were working with other people, Kurt Fowl, or is there any sort of story that bubbled up from any of those other collaborations where either it was so hard to do that, or he found freedom?
Michael Strunsky: When George died really unexpectedly in 1937 at the age of 38, Ira was stunned. He loved his brother dearly and he found it very difficult for a while to resume his profession as a lyricist. Ira worked with many other composers. A few before George’s death in 1937, Vernon Duke, who changed his name from Vladimir Dukhelsky, wrote Ziegfeld Follies of 1936 with Ira, which starred Bob Hope and Fanny Brice, out of which came the great song, I Can’t Get Started. After George’s death in 1940, Ira wrote Lady in the Dark with Kurt Weill and Moss Hart. And later, the film A Star is Born with Harold Arlen. So Ira continued to be productive until he stopped writing in the late 1960s.
Michael Kantor: Great, one last thing about Arthur Francis. He started off, tell us about that.
Michael Strunsky: George had written some songs in, such as Swanee in 1917, and so he had gained some personal notoriety. When Ira presented some lyrics to George and George wanted to continue writing with Ira, Ira felt that using his own name was… Might be an embarrassment to George. So the earliest Ira Gershwin songs were written under the pseudonym Arthur Francis, Arthur and Francis being George and Ira’s brother and sister.
