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Do You Like Summertime ?Brrrrrr, it’s cold. Wintertime is here and, baby, it’s cold outside. Been down in the 30s here the last couple of nights. I hate the cold. Maybe I’m too old or too skinny but I just can’t stand to be cold. I have coping strategies, of
course. I might read a book about the Battle of Stalingrad in the winter of ‘42-’43. It was really cold there. Or maybe I’ll read about life in the labor camps of Kolyma,¹ it got pretty cold there too. Last night we watched a movie about a year in Antarctica.² I do these things to remind myself that it never really gets cold where I live, although we sometimes have to put on a jacket. I like summertime better than winter, that's for sure, but that’s not what this piece is about.
I’m asking about the song called Summertime. I love that song. There’s a billion recordings of it, well, 33,000 anyway, according to Wikipedia.³ George Gershwin⁴ wrote the music for Summertime as part of his 1935 opera Porgy and Bess.⁵ The cool lyric, “fish are jumpin’ an’ the cotton is high,” was co-written by Gershwin and DuBose Heyward,⁶ the author of the 1926 novel Porgy that the opera was based on. Janis Joplin had a huge hit with the song back in the 60s but that’s not my favorite version. Her singing was soulful but I thought her band took liberties with Gershwin’s classic melody. I liked Sam Cooke’s recording better. One of my favorites is one recorded by saxophonist Stan Getz.
OK, I know it ain’t much, but that’s all I got for this chilly Tuesday morning. How ’bout you ? Any interesting links to share, anything we all ought to know and …
What’s your favorite version of Summertime ?