George & Ira Gershwin: The Partnership the Pulitzer Couldn't Quite Credit

In 1932, the musical Of Thee I Sing became the first musical ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The award went to Ira Gershwin, lyricist, and to book writers George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind. It did not go to George Gershwin, who wrote every note of the score. The Pulitzer committee ruled that the prize was a literary award, and George's contribution was music, not words, so he wasn't eligible. There was no Pulitzer for music yet. It wouldn't exist for another eleven years, six years after George had died.

It's a strange, telling footnote to sit with before anything else about this partnership: even at the moment their collaboration hit its most prestigious peak, the institutions built to recognize great work weren't built to recognize half of what actually made it great. Ira got the credit that existed. George's half of the same song had nowhere to go.

Two brothers, one piano

George and Ira were born four years apart in New York to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, Ira in 1896 and George in 1898. The piano that started everything was bought for Ira, who was expected to be the musical one. George, not Ira, was the one who sat down and started playing it fluently within weeks. Ira went on to City College and wrote light verse for fun; George left high school at sixteen to work as a song plugger on Tin Pan Alley, pounding out other publishers' tunes on demand for whoever walked in wanting to hear them.

For a long stretch, the brothers' careers ran in parallel rather than together. George had his first hit, "Swanee," in 1919, with lyrics by Irving Caesar, not Ira. Ira wrote lyrics under the pen name Arthur Francis for a few years, partly to avoid trading on his brother's rising name, partly because the two of them hadn't yet decided to make it official.

Lady, Be Good!, and the moment it became official

That changed in 1924 with Lady, Be Good!, the first Broadway show to carry both their names as a team. From then until George's death in 1937, they worked almost exclusively with each other, turning out a run of scores that includes Oh, Kay!, Funny Face, Girl Crazy, and Of Thee I Sing, along with film work for Hollywood in the mid-1930s. It's a short partnership by the standards of some of the other duos in this era, thirteen years, but it produced an outsized share of the songs that still define the Great American Songbook: "Fascinating Rhythm," "Someone to Watch Over Me," "'S Wonderful," "I Got Rhythm," "Embraceable You."

If you've ever wondered whether a sibling collaboration can outrun the sibling part and become a genuine creative partnership, the Gershwins are close to the clearest case there is. They weren't just family who happened to work together. They built a body of work neither of them approached alone.

A song cut from three different shows

Not everything landed the first time, and one of their best-loved songs is a good reminder that a strong song surviving multiple rejections isn't a modern phenomenon. "The Man I Love" was written for Lady, Be Good! in 1924, cut before opening, tried again in the 1927 show Strike Up the Band, cut again, tried a third time in the 1928 Ziegfeld production Rosalie, and cut a third time. It never successfully premiered in a Broadway show at all.

It survived because people outside the theater world kept passing it around anyway. Lady Mountbatten reportedly carried a copy back to England and asked her favorite dance orchestras to play it; it caught on in London and Paris as a standalone song before it ever became a fixture at home. That's the version of the song's history worth remembering when something you've written keeps getting cut from the thing it was written for: the song wasn't wrong. The show around it was.

Writing toward an opera, not just a hit

By the mid-1930s George had classical ambitions that went beyond Broadway pop songs, evident already in "Rhapsody in Blue" (1924) and "An American in Paris" (1928). Porgy and Bess, which opened in 1935, was the fullest expression of that reach: a full-length opera, not a musical, built around DuBose Heyward's novel Porgy, with Ira and Heyward sharing lyric-writing duties. "Summertime," "I Got Plenty o' Nuttin'," and "It Ain't Necessarily So" all came out of that score, and the piece straddled Broadway and the opera house so completely that both worlds have spent the decades since arguing over which one it really belongs to.

It's worth noting that George pushed for this while he was still, by any measure, one of the most commercially successful songwriters alive. He didn't need the risk. He wanted to see what else the form could hold.

The smell of burning rubber

George Gershwin died on July 11, 1937, at thirty-eight, from a brain tumor that had gone undiagnosed for months. The earliest symptom, in February of that year, was a seizure that came with the smell of burnt rubber, a hallucination his doctors initially dismissed. He collapsed again in April in a Beverly Hills barbershop, then went through a stretch of headaches, dizziness, and depression before finally losing consciousness on July 9. Surgery two days later couldn't save him.

He was in the middle of Hollywood film work at the time, including songs for Shall We Dance and A Damsel in Distress, with "They Can't Take That Away From Me" among the last songs the brothers finished together. Ira was thirty-eight himself when it happened, twenty years into the only songwriting partnership he'd ever really had, and he didn't write another word for over a year afterward.

What's worth taking from their career

Ira went on writing for another quarter century after George died, with Kurt Weill, Jerome Kern, and Harold Arlen among his later collaborators, and he lived to see the Gershwin catalog become as close to a national songbook as American music has. But nothing he wrote afterward, by his own account and by the historical record, matched what the two of them built together in thirteen years as brothers who happened to also be the best possible collaborator either one of them would ever have.

Both were eventually inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, George in 1970 and Ira in 1971, and in 1985 they jointly received the Congressional Gold Medal, one of only a handful of composers or lyricists ever to be honored that way. The Pulitzer committee finally gave George a posthumous special citation in 1998, on the hundredth anniversary of his birth, sixty-six years after the prize he should have shared.

It's a good story to keep in mind if you're a composer working alongside a lyricist, or the other way around: the credit systems built around songwriting don't always know how to split the difference evenly, and sometimes they get it wrong for decades before anyone fixes it. The work is still the work either way. If you've got a melody and need someone to find the words, or the words and need someone to find the tune, go find your co-writer.

Sources: Songwriters Hall of Fame: George Gershwin, Songwriters Hall of Fame: Ira Gershwin, Britannica, Wikipedia: The Man I Love, Wikipedia: Of Thee I Sing, Deseret News: It's High Time Pulitzers Recognized Gershwin, Hektoen International: The Fatal Illness of George Gershwin