Who recorded the first version of George Gershwin’s song ‘Summertime’?
There’s a reason why the George Gershwin song ‘Summertime’ is one of the most beloved pieces of popular music—and one of the most covered. Only Beatles standards ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Michelle’ can compare with its thousands of recorded versions over the course of almost a century.
Gershwin’s piece hits that sweet spot that only the very best pop songs manage: between melancholy and ecstasy, hope and fear, comfort and longing. Novelist DuBose Heyward, along with Gershwin’s brother Ira, added lyrics worthy of the song’s emotionally charged melody.
The piece is written from the perspective of an African-American mother singing to her baby in the poverty-stricken streets of Charleston, South Carolina. It’s supposed to reflect a traditional slave-era spiritual from the cotton fields which has been passed down through generations of black families in the area. And it becomes a haunting leitmotif in Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess, when its role as a reassuring lullaby about the baby’s “Mommy and Daddy there, standing by” undercut by the tragic events of the story.
We hear Gershwin’s genius in his unerring ability to empathise with the struggles of African Americans in the southern United States during the era of Jim Crow. He mixes the make-believe aspirations and hopeless realities of South Carolina’s black population, demonstrating an inimitable command of harmonic pathos.
It’s unsurprising that within a year of the song’s publication, it became a hit for the woman who’d soon become the musical conscience of the civil rights movement in the US, Billie Holiday. And it went on to be covered by countless other stars on both sides of the Atlantic, from Ella Fitzgerald to the Zombies, Janis Joplin and, more recently, Lana Del Rey. Yet Holiday’s wasn’t the very first version of ‘Summertime’ to be recorded.
So, who sang it first?
Gershwin himself had a rendition of the song put down on record, as part of the LP accompanying his opera’s premiere run on Broadway. The composer conducted the orchestration on the track and played the piano.
But it was the opera singer playing Clara, the ill-fated mother who sings to her crying baby, in the stage performance of Porgy and Bess, that sang on the initial recording. Abbie Mitchell was 50 years old at the time she became the first singer to record ‘Summertime’. She was a native New Yorker of African-American and Jewish heritage from a poor neighbourhood in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, whose parents died when she was a child.
Surely, no one in the song’s 89-year history would have sung it with more feeling than Mitchell, whose three and a half decades in musical theatre had been leading up to that moment. She was made for the part, and the legend of ‘Summertime’ owes nearly as much to her as it does to Gershwin.
