Ira Gershwin Biography Quotes 6 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family
Ira Gershwin was born Israel Gershovitz on December 6, 1896, in New York City to Russian Jewish immigrants Morris and Rose. He grew up in a bustling, multilingual household that prized wit and wordplay. His younger brother George, born a few years later, gravitated early to the piano, while Ira devoured newspapers, comic verse, and the urbane humor of writers who turned everyday speech into art. At Townsend Harris High School he befriended E. Y. "Yip" Harburg, a lifelong friend who would also become a distinguished lyricist. Ira spent a short time at City College, sampled office jobs, and quietly taught himself the crafts of rhyme, meter, and dramatic situation. Before he signed his own name in lights, he tried the pseudonym Arthur Francis, a nod to his siblings Arthur and Frances, as he learned how to place lyrics on the professional stage.

Finding a Voice as a Lyricist
Ira made early contributions to revues and then, by the early 1920s, began collaborating steadily with George. The brothers built a method that became legendary: George would sketch melodies and harmonic shapes; Ira, carrying notebooks bristling with rhymes, idioms, and phrases, would find the verbal pulse to suit the tune and the character. He favored internal rhymes, conversational slang tilted toward the urbane, and a balancing act between breezy humor and emotional directness. In this give-and-take the songwriter brothers, aided by shrewd producers like Alex A. Aarons and Vinton Freedley, were primed for Broadway.

The Gershwin Brothers on Broadway
The breakthrough came with Lady, Be Good! (1924), starring Fred and Adele Astaire, and its syncopated spark announced a new, distinctly American sophistication. Tip-Toes (1925) and Oh, Kay! (1926), with a book by Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse, supplied romantic yearning and sly comedy; Oh, Kay! introduced "Someone to Watch Over Me", in which Ira set plainspoken devotion against a gentle, haunting melody. Funny Face (1927) reunited the Astaires and gave Ira ample room for nimble patter and elegant sentiment. The brothers also sharpened their satirical bite in Strike Up the Band and, with George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, in Of Thee I Sing (1931), the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Ira's lyrics in these political comedies balanced topical barbs with a craftsmanlike clarity that made songs travel beyond the moment.

Girl Crazy (1930) was another milestone, launching Ethel Merman with "I Got Rhythm" and offering standards such as "Embraceable You" and "But Not for Me". Across these shows Ira refined a pop vernacular that could pivot from wisecrack to heartache in a couplet, always attentive to character and situation.

Porgy and Bess
In 1935 the brothers joined novelist and playwright DuBose Heyward for Porgy and Bess. While Heyward supplied the libretto and a large share of the lyrics, Ira contributed additional lyrics and helped shape the piece's musical-dramatic flow. The work drew on vernacular rhythms and operatic scale; its songs, including "Summertime" and others embedded in folk-inflected scenes, broadened the Gershwin canvas. Ira's sense of diction and prosody supported George's ambition to create an American opera rooted in speech and song.

From Stage to Screen
The late 1920s and 1930s also carried Ira and George to Hollywood, where their songs for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers translated Broadway verve into cinematic grace. For Shall We Dance (1937) and A Damsel in Distress (1937), Ira wrote lyrics for "They Cannot Take That Away from Me" (commonly known as "They Can't Take That Away from Me"), "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off", "A Foggy Day (in London Town)", and "Nice Work If You Can Get It", threading colloquial wit through melodies that glide. After George's sudden death in 1937, Ira completed and titled "Love Is Here to Stay", a final testament to the brothers' partnership that later appeared in The Goldwyn Follies.

Loss, Hiatus, and New Collaborations
George's death shattered Ira's working world. He paused, then returned on his own terms, choosing collaborators whose musical vocabularies invited fresh lyrical tactics. With Kurt Weill and Moss Hart he created Lady in the Dark (1941), a psychological musical starring Gertrude Lawrence, whose score yielded "My Ship" and "The Saga of Jenny", numbers that married irony and introspection. With Jerome Kern he wrote the yearning "Long Ago (and Far Away)" for the film Cover Girl (1944). He joined Arthur Schwartz for the Broadway musical Park Avenue (1946), reuniting with Kaufman on the book, and later partnered with Harold Arlen to write songs for A Star Is Born (1954), giving Judy Garland the torch classic "The Man That Got Away". These later works showed Ira adjusting his verbal palette to composers of differing temperaments while holding fast to his hallmarks: gleaming rhyme, conversational candor, and dramatic point.

Craft, Style, and Working Method
Ira's lyrics rarely called attention to themselves at the expense of character. He prized the feel of spoken American English, then nudged it into verse with playful exactitude. The comic brilliance of "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" turns pronunciation into choreography; the aching simplicity of "Someone to Watch Over Me" strips away ornament to reveal vulnerability. He revised tirelessly, searching for the one word that sounded inevitable under a given note. Friends and colleagues from George S. Kaufman to Morrie Ryskind and DuBose Heyward respected his quiet perfectionism. Performers like Fred Astaire, Adele Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Ethel Merman, and later Ella Fitzgerald kept his words alive in performance, while orchestral and jazz interpreters found that Ira's prosody sat naturally on a wide range of rhythms. In the postwar era singers such as Judy Garland and, later, champions like Michael Feinstein, helped carry the Gershwin lyric legacy to new audiences.

Steward of a Legacy and Later Years
Ira married Leonore (Lee) Strunsky in the 1920s, and together they became dedicated guardians of the Gershwin legacy. He curated scores and papers, advised publishers, and wrote the reflective, anecdotal volume Lyrics on Several Occasions (1959), a rare book in which a master practitioner explains how songs are made. In Los Angeles he welcomed younger musicians and researchers; among them, Michael Feinstein worked closely with him to organize archives that documented both the Gershwin brothers' partnership and Ira's independent career. He saw new generations embrace the repertoire on stage, on film, and on recordings, as ensembles and singers revisited Lady, Be Good!, Of Thee I Sing, and the film songbooks that continued to frame American popular singing.

Ira Gershwin died on August 17, 1983, in Beverly Hills, California. By then, the contours of his achievement were unmistakable. In the pantheon that includes contemporaries like Cole Porter and later lyric voices inspired by his craft, Ira stood as a poet of the American stage and screen, a writer who made the everyday musical without losing the ring of natural speech. The people around him over seven decades George Gershwin, Leonore Gershwin, Fred and Adele Astaire, Ethel Merman, Ginger Rogers, George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, DuBose Heyward, Kurt Weill, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Moss Hart, Guy Bolton, P. G. Wodehouse, Judy Garland, and the archivist-performer Michael Feinstein illuminate a life lived at the center of American song. His catalog, overflowing with standards, remains a map of how intelligence, humor, and heart can coexist in a lyric, carried as naturally by a dance number as by a lullaby.

Our collection contains 6 quotes who is written by Ira, under the main topics: Music - Love - New Beginnings - Aging - Contentment.

Other people realated to Ira: E. Y. Harburg (Musician), Ella Fitzgerald (Musician), Benny Green (Musician), Norman Granz (Musician), Vernon Duke (Composer), Bobby Short (Musician), David Lehman (Poet), Tony Bennett (Musician), Vincente Minnelli (Director)