As they garnered a wider audience, songs like their Gershwin cover became increasingly popular in the U.S.
in the 1960s and saw great international success. Like fellow British Invasion groups The Beatles and The Kinks, The Zombies toured in the U.S. This version’s greatest impact, however, was not its musical innovation, but rather the entrance of “Summertime” into the rock music scene. This version stayed fairly true to the original, with a guitar imitating the opera’s string swells at a driving tempo and only minor alterations to the lyrics. The Zombies, an English rock band, released a stripped-down cover of “Summertime” in their eponymous 1964 debut EP. Though these are among the most famous, over 25,000 recordings and arrangements of “Summertime” have been made since the opera’s premiere, with each artist taking a distinct musical approach.īy the 1960s, “Summertime” found its way outside of the jazz world and into other, perhaps more unexpected genres. In his 1959 recording, Miles Davis arranges “Summertime” for trumpet, and he improvises on the melody over a walking bass line. Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald’s 1958 album Porgy and Bess reinterprets the solo aria as a duet, with Armstrong both playing his trumpet and singing in a dialogue with Fitzgerald.
Big bands such as Duke Ellington and His Orchestra followed, opting in 1956 to perform it at a more moderate swing tempo. Many artists recorded their own covers of “Summertime” Billie Holiday’s 1936 rendition, released just a year after the opera’s premiere, quickly hit the US Billboard top charts, bringing “Summertime” off the stage and into the popular music realm. An aria modeled after an African American spiritual, the tune quickly found a life outside of the opera as a jazz standard. Muted strings swell and fade like waves as Clara sings this gentle lullaby to her infant son. The slow, bluesy strains of “Summertime” open Act I of Porgy and Bess. When examined in the context of these older recordings, Del Rey’s 2019 song-though vastly different from the original aria-reflects a long tradition of reinterpretation, and just one example of the many ways “Summertime” has been transformed since its premiere. From early jazz recordings in the 1930s, bossa nova and English psychedelic rock in the 1960s, to ska-punk in the 1990s, Gershwin’s composition has been reinterpreted by countless artists. But how did “Summertime” find its way off the East Coast operatic stage and into a 2019 music video depicting indie pop singer Lana Del Rey as a giantess wandering Venice Beach? To understand how we got here, we first need to look at the various forms “Summertime” has taken since its premiere. The aria “Summertime” from the American opera Porgy and Bess (1935) is perhaps composer George Gershwin’s most recognizable tune-so ubiquitous, in fact, that it has been reworked into a SoCal pop anthem. But how did “Summertime” end up on Top 40 radio? This post explores the rich afterlife of Gershwin’s famous aria, from early recordings to Sublime’s ska-punk interpretation, and its most recent appearance in pop star Lana Del Rey’s sixth album. Between the Metropolitan Opera’s new production and Lana Del Rey’s recent song “Doin’ Time,” we’re hearing about Porgy and Bess everywhere these days.
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