Two Strikes, Two Hits, And One “Man” Out
By Tommy Krasker
The score to Strike Up the Band includes two of George and Ira Gershwin's best-loved songs: "The Man I Love" and the title tune. The former suffered a bumpy road to fame; the latter endured a series of revisions after it became a hit.
George composed the insistent, almost hypnotic refrain of "The Man I Love" in the spring of 1924 as a possible verse to another song. But, as Ira relates in Lyrics on Several Occasions, the brothers realized that, as a verse, the tune "wasn't light and introductory enough. So this overweighty strain ... was, with slight modification, upped in importance to the status of a refrain." Ira then wrote a lyric, the brothers collaborated on a verse, and "The Man I Love" resulted.
The song was included in the Gershwins' next Broadway musical, Lady, Be Good! (1924), where it was introduced during the pre-Broadway tryout by the star, Adele Astaire. But the first performance in Philadelphia lasted almost four hours; extensive cuts were required, and "The Man I Love" was an unfortunate casualty. The song had already been published, but as it was deleted on the road, it created little stir in the music world.
Soon after, Lady Mountbatten, during a trip to the States, asked George Gershwin for an autographed copy of the song, which she had heard him play several months earlier in London. Upon returning home, she presented the sheet music to her favorite band, the Berkeley Square Orchestra, and asked them to prepare a special arrangement for their concerts. Soon, other local orchestras picked up the tune (by ear, since the song had not been published there), and "The Man I Love" swept London and, eventually, Paris as well.
With its popularity thriving abroad, "The Man I Love" was again placed before American audiences – this time by producer Edgar Selwyn. Selwyn had first heard the song in 1924; instantly enchanted, he resolved to feature it someday in a Gershwin vehicle. His chance came in 1927 with Strike Up the Band, and at his urging, the number received considerable stage time. In the first act, it served as the principal love duet between hero and heroine; in the second act, it was reprised twice, first by the heroine (as a torch song), and then, as "The Girl I Love," a specialty solo for tenor Morton Downey. The song was highly praised by the out-of-town critics: One called it "the loveliest song of the entire work ... a plaintive, richly orchestrated lyric." But with the abrupt closing of Strike Up the Band, "The Man I Love," released a second time as sheet music, was again denied New York exposure.
Later that year, an effort was made to work the number into Rosalie, Ziegfeld's latest vehicle for Marilyn Miller, but again the song was dropped before the Broadway opening. Publisher Max Dreyfus believed in "The Man I Love," however, and continued to promote it. The song received encouragement from others in the theatrical community as well; in fact, when Show Boat opened in December of 1927, the Variety critic complained that star Helen Morgan was not as well-served by her second-act torch song "Bill" as she might have been by an interpolated "The Man I Love." Thanks to the efforts of Dreyfus, as well as those of Miss Morgan herself, who went on to popularize the song in her many club engagements, "The Man I Love" caught on with the public by the summer of 1928, and sheet music sales soared.
Ironically, when Selwyn revived Strike Up the Band in 1930, the song's popularity precluded its reuse. (There was also no spot in the revised story-line that suited it.) "The Man I Love" has since been recorded by such diverse vocalists as Dinah Shore, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday, and Lena Horne. On this new recording, it is heard once again, this time in its original arrangement.
The title song underwent similar growing pains. As Ira tells it: "Late one weekend night in the spring of 1927, I got to my hotel room with the Sunday papers. I looked for a slit of light under the door of the adjoining room - but no light, so I figured my brother was asleep. (We were in Atlantic City for Strike Up the Band discussions with producer Edgar Selwyn.) I hadn't finished the paper's first section when the lights went up in the next room; its doors opened and my pajamaed brother appeared. 'I thought you were asleep,' I said. 'No, I've been lying in bed thinking, and I think I've got it.' 'Got what?' I asked. 'Why, the march, of course. I think I've finally got it. Come on in.' It was off-season and, with no guests to disturb within ten rooms of us, the hotel had sent up a piano. I sat down near the upright and said: 'I hope you've really finally made up your mind.' He played the refrain of [Strike Up the Band] practically as it is known today."
This was George Gershwin's fifth attempt at a march distinctive enough to serve as the title number of their new show, and, as Ira relates, "The fifth try turned out to be it. Interestingly enough, the earlier four had been written at the piano; the fifth and final came to (George) while lying in bed."
"Strike Up the Band" was featured in the 1927 production and, upon its Broadway debut in 1930, became a huge hit – despite what Ira Gershwin later called "the satirically pacifistic tenor of the verse," which began:
We fought in nineteen-seventeen,
Rum-ta-ta tum-tum-tum!
And drove the tyrant from the scene,
Rum-ta-ta tum-tum-tum!
We're in a bigger, better war
For your patriotic pastime.
We don't know what were fighting for
But we didn't know the last time!
This verse, so perfectly in keeping with the tone of the show, was largely ignored by audiences, who embraced the catchy refrain as a rousing rallying cry.
In 1936, Ira was asked to adapt the number into a football song for U.C.L.A. He responded with a witty rewrite that included the following quatrain:
We're Sons and Daughters of the Bear,
Were the California Bruins;
We fight the foe and do and dare
And the foe is left in ruins!
This version ("Strike Up the Band for U.C.L.A.") was published, and for his generosity, Ira was given lifetime season passes to the home football games.
The next "Strike Up the Band" revision came with the MGM film of the same name. When one of MGM's 1939 releases, Babes in Arms (with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland), caught fire at the box, office, the studio decided to capitalize on its success by churning out several sequels. According to Hugh Fordin's The World of Entertainment, Louis B. Mayer chose Strike Up the Band as the next Rooney/Garland vehicle because "it sounds so patriotic." Producer Arthur Freed instructed his screenwriters to use the title song, bur otherwise "forget the Broadway show." The film musical Strike Up the Band emerged in the fall of 1940 having only a title song in common with the stage show: The other numbers were non-Gershwin (most of them written by Freed and/or his associate producer Roger Edens); the plot – as with all of the Rooney/Garland "kid pictures" – was about putting on a show, this time in order to raise enough money to fly to Chicago and compete in a radio contest. The film was designed to capitalize on the popularity of swing bands, and the studio wrote new, "Strike Up the Band" lyrics that began:
We must have music in the land
For ev'rybody loves a band.
The film's release necessitated a re-release of the sheet music, and Ira Gershwin was able to revise the original lyric to one that expressed the sentiments of a nation on the verge of war. The second quatrain became:
We hope there’ll be no other war,
But if we are forced into one
The flag that we'll be fighting for
Is the Red and White and Blue one!
(This lyric, the standard version today, appears in the vocal selections from Strike Up the Band issued by Warner Brothers Music in 1984.)
Two years later, with the country again at war, Ira revised the lyric one last time, with the following result:
Again the Hun is at the gate
For his customary pastime;
Again he sings his Hymn of Hate
But we'll make this time the last time!
"Strike Up the Band" has received numerous recordings since its stage debut in 1927. Such artists as Paul Whiteman, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, and Tex Benecke have offered stirring renditions. Perhaps its most memorable interpretation remains a 1930 recording by Red Nichols' orchestra utilizing many of the musicians then performing in the show's pit. That arrangement, with its infectious tenor sax solo, is excerpted on this new recording.
