George Gershwin rose from his modest musical beginnings as a teenage "song plugger" on Tin Pan Alley to become one of America’s foremost popular composers. Born in Brooklyn in 1898, Gershwin began studying theory and piano as a child. At the age of twenty-one, Gershwin wrote both his first musical score for La, La, Lucille, as well as his first big hit, 'Swanee,' as performed by Al Jolson. Since the beginning of his career coincided with the inception of recorded music, the Gershwin songbook was and continues to be intimately linked with jazz.
Gershwin and his lyricist brother Ira went on to collaborate on numerous musicals including Strike Up the Band, Girl Crazy, and Of Thee I Sing, the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize in drama.
In addition to his achievements with the American popular song, George Gershwin pursued an ambitious career in the Western classical tradition. After the premiere of Rhapsody In Blue in 1924, Gershwin went on to write Three Preludes for piano, An American in Paris, and the folk opera Porgy and Bess. Although Porgy and Bess was not an immediate commercial success, the work has become one of Gershwin’s most popular, in part due to landmark interpretations by jazz artists such as Miles Davis, Gil Evans, Louis Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald.
After Porgy and Bess closed on Broadway, George Gershwin moved with his brother to Hollywood. During this final phase of Gershwin’s career, he wrote songs for movie soundtracks such as Shall We Dance, A Damsel In Distress, and The Goldwyn Follies until his untimely death from a brain tumor in 1937. Yet the popularity of Gershwin’s songs show no signs of decline, and many have become essential components of every jazz musician's repertoire.