George Gershwin: The Man Who Gave America Its Sound

The Clarinet Wails

It begins with a clarinet — a single, low note that slides upward in a long, swooping glissando, climbing through the registers like a voice crying out across a city. When that sound first rang out at Aeolian Hall in New York on February 12, 1924, the audience had never heard anything like it. Neither had anyone else. It was the opening of Rhapsody in Blue, and it announced the arrival of something new in American music.

The man at the piano was George Gershwin (1898–1937), a twenty-five-year-old son of Russian-Jewish immigrants from Brooklyn. He was not yet famous. He would soon be the most famous composer in America. And that clarinet glissando — which the clarinetist Ross Gorman had played as a joke in rehearsal, and which Gershwin immediately recognized as genius — would become one of the most iconic sounds in twentieth-century music.

Gershwin’s achievement was extraordinary: he fused the worlds of classical music and jazz, of the concert hall and the dance hall, of European tradition and African-American innovation, into a sound that was unmistakably, exuberantly American. He did it in just thirteen years of mature composition before dying of a brain tumor at thirty-eight, leaving behind a body of work that defines the sound of a nation.

Brooklyn to Tin Pan Alley

George Gershwin was born Jacob Gershowitz on September 26, 1898, in Brooklyn, New York, to Morris and Rose Gershowitz, immigrants from Russia. The family was working-class and mobile — they moved constantly, living at over two dozen addresses in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Morris ran a series of small businesses. Rose was ambitious for her children.

George’s older brother Ira — who would become his lyricist and creative partner — was the studious one. George was the street kid, the athlete, the roller-skating daredevil. Music entered his life when the family acquired a piano for Ira, but it was George who sat down and played. He was a natural — his ear was phenomenal, his fingers quick, his instinct for melody uncanny.

At fifteen, he dropped out of school to work as a “song plugger” on Tin Pan Alley — the stretch of West 28th Street where music publishers clustered. He sat in a tiny cubicle at the Jerome H. Remick Company, playing songs for potential buyers ten hours a day. It was musical boot camp. He absorbed everything — ragtime, popular song, blues, Broadway — and began writing his own material.

The Jewish-Black Musical Fusion

Gershwin’s genius lay in synthesis. He grew up in a world where Jewish and Black musical traditions were neighbors. The Lower East Side and Harlem were not far apart, geographically or musically. The wailing of the cantor and the wailing of the blues singer shared common emotional territory — the cry of outsiders, the expression of longing, the transformation of suffering into art.

The blue notes that define American jazz — the flattened thirds and sevenths — are strikingly similar to the intervals used in Jewish liturgical modes. Gershwin absorbed both traditions and welded them together. His melodies sound simultaneously Jewish and African-American, classical and vernacular, sophisticated and visceral. This was not appropriation — it was genuine cultural exchange, rooted in shared experience and mutual influence.

By the early 1920s, Gershwin was Broadway’s hottest young composer, writing hit shows with his brother Ira as lyricist. Songs like “Swanee,” “Fascinating Rhythm,” “‘S Wonderful,” and “I Got Rhythm” became standards. But Gershwin wanted more. He wanted to prove that American popular music could stand alongside European classical music — that jazz was not a lesser form but a legitimate artistic language.

Rhapsody in Blue and the Concert Hall

Rhapsody in Blue (1924) was Gershwin’s declaration of independence. Composed in just three weeks for Paul Whiteman’s orchestra, it fused jazz rhythms with classical structure, creating a piece that belonged in neither the dance hall nor the concert hall — and in both. The premiere was a sensation. The audience included Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, and Fritz Kreisler. They were stunned.

The Concerto in F (1925) and An American in Paris (1928) followed, cementing Gershwin’s reputation as a serious composer. Critics were divided — some dismissed him as a Tin Pan Alley tunesmith playing at being a classical composer, while others recognized that he was doing something genuinely new. He studied with the finest teachers (he famously sought lessons from Ravel, who supposedly told him: “Why should you be a second-rate Ravel when you’re already a first-rate Gershwin?”).

Porgy and Bess

Gershwin’s masterpiece — and his most ambitious work — was Porgy and Bess (1935), which he called a “folk opera.” Based on DuBose Heyward’s novel about Black life in a Charleston fishing community, the opera features some of the most beautiful melodies ever written: “Summertime,” “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’,” “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”

To prepare, Gershwin spent weeks in the Gullah communities of South Carolina, absorbing the music, the rhythms of speech, the spirituals and work songs. He composed every note himself — insisting, against Broadway convention, that no dialogue be spoken; everything would be sung.

The opera’s reception was mixed. It ran for only 124 performances on Broadway. Critics couldn’t decide if it was opera or musical theater. The Black community was divided — some embraced it, while others resented a white Jewish composer telling Black stories. Duke Ellington, whom Gershwin deeply admired, was notably cool.

Thirty-Eight Years

In early 1937, Gershwin began experiencing headaches, dizziness, and coordination problems while working on films in Hollywood. Doctors initially attributed the symptoms to stress. On July 9, he collapsed and fell into a coma. Emergency surgery revealed a brain tumor (glioblastoma). He died on July 11, 1937, at the age of thirty-eight.

The shock was immense. John O’Hara wrote: “George Gershwin died on July 11, 1937, but I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to.” Arnold Schoenberg said: “Music was to him not a matter of ability. It was the air he breathed, the dream he dreamed.”

Legacy

Gershwin left behind a body of work that defines American music. His songs are sung in every jazz club and concert hall in the world. Porgy and Bess is now recognized as one of the great operas of the twentieth century. Rhapsody in Blue is the American musical equivalent of the Statue of Liberty — a symbol of the country itself.

He was — like so many Jewish artists in America — an immigrant’s son who took the traditions of the old world and the energy of the new world and forged something that belonged to everyone. The clarinet still wails, and America still recognizes its own voice in that sound.