Original subtitles

# It's summertime

# And the livin' is easy... #

This is a journey into a song.

A song that's captured the imagination of the world.

# Your daddy's rich

# And your mamma's good lookin'

# Won't you hush, pretty baby

# Don't you cry... #

I can play Summertime in Turkey, I can play Summertime in Tokyo,

I can play Summertime in Sao Paulo, I can play it in Kingston, Jamaica.

The audiences all know it.

# Then you'll spread your wings

# And take to the sky... #

Summertime has got its own pair of wings.

I don't know why, but they know Summertime.

Everybody knows Summertime.

Summertime is the most covered song on the planet.

At least 25,000 versions exist.

SLOW BALLAD: # Summertime... #

From jazz to disco...

DISCO: # And the livin' is easy... #

SOUL: # Fish are jumpin'... #

..from blues rock...

BLUES: # And the livin' is easy... #

..to hip hop.

SLOW BLUES: # It's summertime

# And the livin' is easy... #

It's become the ultimate hymn to summer.

Yet Summertime has taken on other meanings too.

It's been re-invented throughout the 20th century.

As a civil rights prayer...

..a hippie lullaby....

..an ode to seduction...

..and a modern freedom song.

# You're going to rise up singing... #

But for the composer, it was none of these things.

George Gershwin wrote Summertime as the opening aria to an opera

and never dreamt of the global impact it would have.

This is the story of how, against all odds,

a forgotten melody conquered the world.

George Gershwin was born in New York in 1898

to Jewish immigrants from Russia.

At this time, there was a huge migration of Jews from Europe

and black Americans from the South.

There was nothing to suggest that George or his brother Ira,

sons of a shoe factory foreman were destined for greatness.

This is a kid who grew up in the rough and tumble of Brooklyn.

He was a streetwise troublemaker.

It was Ira who used to bail him out

when he got into trouble with the police or the neighbours.

You couldn't see, in those days, that this intensely-concentrated

musical mind would emerge.

# Rhythm, rhythm, rhythm that pitter pats through my brain... #

Young George Gershwin might have been a troublemaker,

but he had a passion for music,

which blossomed in his teenage years.

# Comes in the morning without any warning

# And hangs around me all day... #

After a short stint playing the piano in a bar,

the teenage Gershwin was offered the job of song-plugger

in the fiercely competitive world of Tin Pan Alley.

By the 1920's, Gershwin was writing hit songs like

Fascinating Rhythm and Oh, Lady Be Good for Broadway musicals.

# Start a-hopping

# Never stopping... #

But for Gershwin this success was not enough.

He was determined to rise above his humble origins

and prove himself as a serious composer.

MUSIC: "Rhapsody In Blue" by George Gershwin

At the age of 25, Gershwin composed Rhapsody In Blue,

a jazz-influenced classical concerto.

It was a triumph.

But this Brooklyn marvel had his eyes on an even greater prize -

a grand opera.

When he set out to write an operatic work, it became known that

that's what he was doing and there were snorts of derision

from various parts of the serious and classical musical world

and that attitude remained right the way through

to beyond the first night.

# Like the beat beat beat of the tom-tom

# When the jungle shadows fall

# Like the tick tick tock of the stately clock

# As it stands against the wall... #

Much of Gershwin's life up to the early 1930s was Broadway.

This was the world of Cole Porter's Night And Day and musicals

with frothy storylines, sparkling lyrics and big show-stopping tunes.

# Night and day, you are the one... #

In choosing to write a serious opera,

Gershwin was taking a massive gamble.

He risked damaging his reputation and alienating his huge audience.

But it was a calculated risk

because he believed he had discovered just the right story

that would play to his dramatic and musical strengths.

DuBose Heyward had written a novel called Porgy,

not Porgy And Bess, and Gershwin was not a great reader.

His apartment wasn't full of learned books or even novels,

but for some reason, he read it one night

and apparently he stayed up until four in the morning

because it simply captivated him.

This novel, about a crippled black beggar and his attempt to rescue

Bess from her pimp, allowed Gershwin to write a revolutionary new opera

imbued with the African-American music he loved so much.

# I got plenty of nothin'

# And nothing's plenty for me

# I got no car, I got no mule

# I got no misery

# The folks with plenty of plenty... #

Gershwin travelled to Charleston, South Carolina,

where the novel was set, immersing himself in the black culture

of the area, particularly that of Folly Island.

# What for? #

It was as though this New Yorker had never lived anywhere else.

So we have to be grateful

that this chromium-plated, Manhattan cocktail party hero

who had round his piano in New York all these flappers

and his latest songs, which he played for hours on end,

this was very different from the man who was living in a shack

down in South Carolina with the sand crabs and singing the songs,

which he was hearing with the local community around there.

In fact, he got so much into this, with such a great degree

of enthusiasm, DuBose Heyward said when he was chanting

with those people, it was as though he was one of those. Heywood said,

"I don't think any other white man in America could have done it."

Back in New York, Gershwin started pulling together

his South Carolina research, shaping it into an opera score.

PIANO PLAYS

In 1934, he completed one of the first compositions

for Porgy And Bess at a friend's Manhattan apartment.

It was a lullaby called Summertime.

Kay Halle was a friend of Gershwin's.

She's generally described as a socialite

and she knew that Gershwin had been working on a couple

of different versions of the lullaby and none of them really worked

and he kept scrapping the lullaby and rewriting it, coming up with new ideas for it.

PIANIST PLAYS "SUMMERTIME"

'She came home one night, late at night,

'and she heard this music coming from her music room.

'And she said it was so exquisite.'

Now it sounded as though he'd finally cracked it

and he'd got the finished version.

PIANIST PLAYS SUMMERTIME

'And she said she listened and tears were coursing down her cheeks.'

Like they say, it was an "Aha!" moment.

She said the minute she heard it, she knew what it was going to be.

The two of them, there was this energy going on,

this electric connection where the two of them looked at each other

and realised this was it, this was going to be THE song.

And that everybody was going to love it.

I think the phrase she used was,

"I knew it was going to be beloved by the world."

# Summertime

# And the living is easy... #

Fancy being the first person, apart from Gershwin,

to hear Summertime.

# And the cotton is high... #

# In olden days

# A glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking

# Now, God knows

# Anything goes... #

In October 1935, Broadway's Alvin Theatre had just finished

a hugely successful run of Cole Porter's musical, Anything Goes.

# Anything goes. #

It was here at the Alvin, not in a grand opera house,

that Gershwin now presented his daring new work, Porgy And Bess.

Even more radically,

it was performed by a classically-trained all-black cast.

And on the first night,

as the curtain rose in front of an unsuspecting audience,

the first vocal performance heard

was the opening aria, Summertime.

# One of these mornings

# You're going to rise up singing

# Then you'll spread your wings

# And you'll take to the sky... #

'It's sung by a young mother to her child. It's a lullaby.

'It's the end of a swelteringly hot day.

'It's early bedtime for this child that must go to sleep

'as the late afternoon is beginning to give way to the evening.'

And the song has something that is wonderfully languid about it.

Something that is languid because there has been sweltering heat.

# S-u-u-u-u-u-u-mmertime... #

There's also something plangent about it.

There's something in the musical line

that touches on melancholy.

Oh, the love of the mother, cradling the child,

and therefore a kind of sadness that the child is going to go to sleep.

And...

a kind of sadness that the child, one day, is going to grow up and...

..leave the coop, is going to fly away

but that's also going to be wonderful.

But despite its apparent simplicity,

Summertime had hidden depths.

We might ask ourselves why is Summertime actually in a minor key?

HE PLAYS A MINOR CHORD

A very sad-sounding key, a minor key, because, after all,

if you look at the lyric here there's nothing but good news for the baby here.

The fish are jumping, there's...

the cotton is high, your daddy's rich,

your mum's good-looking. This is not a threatening lyric.

All of this is positive and yet...

HE PLAYS MINOR CHORD

..it's written in this bluesy, minor key.

Since the mid-1920's, George Gershwin's brother, Ira,

had often collaborated with him.

Ira wrote the snappy, urbane lyrics to many classic Gershwin compositions.

including 'S Wonderful.

# 'S wonderful

# 'S marvellous

# That you should care for me

# 'S awful nice

# 'S paradise... #

George and Ira Gershwin, as well as DuBose Heyward,

were all credited with writing Summertime,

but this composition was believed to be much more the work

of just George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward.

'If Ira had worked on it, it would have had some of his wit,

'some of his energy, some of his sort of, verbal magic'

which it doesn't. The fact that Summertime works so well is because it doesn't have any of those things.

# And the living is easy... #

Heyward wrote the lyrics first.

Ira Gershwin edited it slightly.

He took out a couple of conjunctions and sort of just gave it a more

firm poetic grounding, but Ira said, "DuBose Heyward is a poet, I'm not. And this is poetry."

# ..is high... #

There's a thousand images, millions, probably,

that could have been chosen to start this poem,

to describe Summertime and there's just two -

fish jumping and cotton high.

And how the writer has put these two things together

so that they work in the minds of everybody who reads them,

you know, it's the sign of great lyrics.

# Hush, little baby

# Don't you cry. #

# It ain't necessarily so

# It ain't necessarily so

# The things that you're liable

# To read in the Bible

# It ain't necessarily so... #

In 1935, the original Broadway run of Porgy And Bess,

despite, or because of, its innovations, confused critics at the time,

and it was not the triumph Gershwin had so hoped for.

It ran, Porgy And Bess, initially

for, I think, 128 performances, which is marvellous for an opera.

You'd have to do it at the opera house many seasons

but it was not a big success in terms of a run on Broadway.

And he was very disappointed.

He lost all the money that he'd invested,

including the copying of parts and everything

and it never made money for him in his lifetime.

Just two years after Summertime was first performed on Broadway,

George Gershwin started to experience severe headaches and blackouts.

These were the first signs of a fatal brain tumour

that would soon kill him.

The saddest and most poignant thing, of course, about the Gershwin story

is that he died 11 weeks short of his 39th birthday.

He was among that hapless group of composers, Mozart and Schubert

and Mendelssohn and Bellini, Chopin,

who never got to their 40th birthday, even, at the height of his powers.

George Gershwin died on 11th July, 1937.

He would never know how immortal Summertime would become.

Summertime might have remained an aria in a forgotten opera.

But something happened that set it on the road to global recognition.

It occurred, not in the glittering neon world of Broadway,

but in one of New York's poorest neighbourhoods, Harlem.

Harlem was the heart of New York's black community

and fast becoming the spiritual home of jazz.

At first, many Harlem jazz musicians had been offended by Porgy And Bess.

Duke Ellington declared that this black-inspired opera

written by three white men was "not in the Negro idiom."

'I can understand people being jealous of Gershwin'

because when you're as good as Gershwin was,

jealousy is just an automatic thing.

JAZZ INTERPRETATION OF "SUMMERTIME"

One young singer dared to disagree with Duke Ellington.

She was the child of a broken home called Eleanora Fagan.

But the world would come to know her as Billie Holiday.

# Summertime

# And the living is easy

# Fish are jumping

# And the cotton is high... #

She recognized that this operatic aria, Summertime,

could be transformed into a jazz tune.

Billie's hot, bluesy version hit the charts in 1936

and was crucial in launching her solo career.

# ..little baby, don't you cry... #

'Billie holiday made the first'

pop...that's to say recorded by someone not in any way

associated with the show, and she makes it swing.

She's got a big drum vamp going on,

and yet it's one of the definitive recordings of it.

So it lends itself to the artist,

and Gershwin, unlike some of his colleagues,

loved the liberties that great jazz and popular musicians would take with his music.

He had no problem with that at all.

# There's nothing can harm you

# With daddy and... #

Billie Holiday recorded Summertime

when America was in the middle of the Great Depression.

25% of the US population was unemployed.

Black Americans suffered terribly,

and Billie Holiday's Summertime captured their anger.

'This line, "Your daddy's rich and your mamma's good-looking" is the ultimate.

'And what's so wonderful about it is saying to this baby,'

in the world where we live in, in the world that I want for you,

this is what I want for you,

'in this era when no one has any money, no one has anything.'

# One of these mornings

# You're going to rise up singing

# Then you'll spread your wings

# And you'll take to the sky... #

'I always thought that her version,'

it's faster and it's a little more severe

than we're used to hearing the song in the show itself.

It's a lot less like a lullaby.

'One way to look at it, she's not just singing a baby to sleep,

'but she's encouraging a race of people to wake up.'

'There had been riots in a Harlem where people were protesting

'against places where they couldn't go.

'And because this was the '30s, because it was the depression,

'that was all very much in people's consciousness.'

Billie would have sung it that way.

That's how she was, that's how she'd have swung it.

BEBOP JAZZ MUSIC PLAYS

Billie Holiday had brilliantly adapted Summertime into jazz.

But this music was about to be radically updated during World War Two

when a new breed of black musician forged a revolutionary sound.

Bebop.

Charlie Parker was THE icon of this fast,

frenetic style, whose spiky rhythm shocked many jazz lovers.

HE PLAYS BEPOP

But his 1949 recording, Parker With Strings,

was an attempt to make bebop more palatable to a wider audience.

On this album, Parker decided to record a version of Summertime.

CHARLIE PARKER PLAYS "SUMMERTIME"

'People like Charlie Parker,'

they weren't thinking about covering something,

they were playing something because they liked it,

because people asked them to play it all the time.

Because it provided them with a...

a bridge to the audience.

'Parker stays fairly close to the melody but he plays it'

with an incredible ebullience.

I mean, there's no other recording even now that's quite like Parker's.

'He plays it with a sense of triumph.

'It's not so much a lullaby, but it's a kind of expression

'of liberation, this sense that the song is not so much'

"Go to sleep, darling,"

but, "We are marching into the next world here."

With Summertime now given such a significant blessing by the bebop king, Charlie Parker,

other jazz instrumentalists, like Art Pepper,

Chet Baker,

John Coltrane,

and Bill Evans followed his lead,

all helped establish Summertime as a classic jazz standard.

JAZZ INTERPRETATION OF "SUMMERTIME"

'I think, as an instrumentalist, when you approach a piece,

'a classic like this, which has such a strong lyric,

'that has such a strong melody,

'you're able to explore it in other ways.'

Sometimes in ways that the vocalist wouldn't explore.

They wouldn't bend certain melodies

in the way that we would as instrumentalists do.

'As a kind of jazz standard, it is the basis'

for a lot of people doing improvising around it,

and if this was some incredibly complicated melody,

it would leave very little room for that kind of improvisation and embellishment.

'The lyric is in your head all the time.

'And that's actually why I like instrumental versions

'because I know the lyric. There are only a very few lines to this song'

but when you hear an instrumentalist taking that melody

and doing something with it, as Miles does,

playing a wonderful improvisation on it,

then you just...you have that in your consciousness already.

MILES DAVIS' INTERPRETATION OF "SUMMERTIME"

Miles Davis included his interpretation of Summertime

on his 1958 Porgy And Bess album.

'When Miles Davis did Summertime,

'it's the perfect soundtrack'

for a car ride somewhere in the summer.

'Summertime does seem sort of autobiographical for Miles.

'His daddy was rich and his ma was good-looking.'

'But, for the most part, it's an instrumental'

version that explores the music that Gershwin wrote.

'It's the most vocalised playing he had done on recording up to that time

'and very rarely afterwards does he equal it.

'And he said it was some of the hardest playing he ever did

'because he felt he had to convey'

the meaning of Summertime, the lyric of Summertime.

It has a wonderful kind of lightness about it.

It seems to float above the ground, but it's not

a portrait of the South, nor is it a portrait of life in New York.

It's Miles producing something intangible, it's indefinable.

# I wouldn't have left no gate Yeah

# Bobby's hen pickled in a grate Yeah

# Keep your eyes on the prize

# Hold on, hold on... #

In the mid-1950s, the cry for civil rights intensified

as black Americans embraced a strategy of non-violent direct action.

# Keep your eyes on the prize

# Hold on, hold on... #

Few would have guessed that Summertime would play a role in this movement.

Gospel music gave the civil rights struggle much of its moral strength

and the Queen Of Gospel, Mahalia Jackson,

recognised Summertime as a hymn to a better life for her people.

# Summertime...

# And the living is easy

# Fish are jumping

# And the cotton is high... #

It's about the civil rights' struggle.

Hush, little baby, don't you cry.

It's about, we're gonna survive, we're gonna win.

We're gonna overcome this

and so this song became an anthem, of a sort.

# Oh, your daddy is rich

# And your ma is good-lookin'... #

But Mahalia Jackson did something extraordinary with Summertime.

She recorded it as medley, pairing it with Motherless Child,

a black spiritual about a baby who has nothing.

# One of these mornings

# You're gonna rise up singing... #

She almost never sang anything that wasn't a religious song.

So, when you're her and you choose to sing Summertime

and connect it to... Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,

see, that's a big one there.

See, that's fairly heavy.

Mahalia Jackson was from Chicago.

Her version of Summertime was affected by a tragic murder

that rocked the city's black population in 1955.

At that time, a young southsider, named Emmett Till,

had gone to Mississippi to visit his relatives

and we don't know what happened.

Either he looked at a white woman,

maybe said a wise crack.

Anyway, he wound up in the Pearl River, dead.

# Like a motherless child

# Sometimes I feel...

# Like a motherless child... #

Mahalia Jackson recorded her version of Summertime in 1956,

a year after Emmett Till's murder.

# ..like a motherless child... #

So, she's mourning the fact that...

When you hear about Emmett Till, it brings all the terror back.

It brings back the depression.

It brings back the fear.

# But till that morning

# Nothing will harm you... #

Through melding those two songs together,

she says, "White America, you see the fish hop, you see all that.

"And the cotton is high, let me tell you what's inside that cotton field.

"Let me tell you what it looks like in there."

So, Mahalia sees inside that cotton patch.

She sees a corpse, because, that's what would have been in there.

# Well, Summertime

# And the living is easy

# Fish are jumping

# And the cotton is high

# Your daddy's rich

# And your mommy's good-lookin'... #

By the late 1950s, Summertime had been recorded in all styles of black music,

jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues.

# One of these mornings

# You're gonna jump up and see

# Then you spread your wings

# And you take to the sky

# Until that morning there is nothing... #

It's got to be rare that somebody can write a song

about another race, and then the people from that race

start to own the song

because it is so like who and what they are.

For many, the ultimate version

of Summertime was by the first lady

of song, Ella Fitzgerald.

# Summertime... #

APPLAUSE

# And the living is easy

# Fish are jumping... #

There is a clarity about the way she sings.

You can read so much into the song.

In its way, it's a perfect...

Her performance is as perfect as it can be.

# Your daddy's rich... #

After George Gershwin's death,

his brother, Ira, had continued writing lyrics for movie scores and Broadway musicals.

He once admitted, "I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them."

You can always tell a great jazz artist if they can take a standard and make it their own.

If you hear Ella perform this, it's as if she wrote it.

She really owned that song.

# One of these mornings

# You're gonna rise up singing... #

Ella's recording was a crossover hit

wowing white as well as black audiences.

George Gershwin was now considered one of the great American composers

and Porgy And Bess was finally experiencing long overdue acclaim.

This started with a Gershwin biopic, Rhapsody In Blue,

which featured a Porgy And Bess sequence.

# Summertime and the living is easy... #

The opera's reputation steadily grew, and in 1959

was made into a Hollywood blockbuster by Otto Preminger.

But just when Summertime had climbed the dizzy heights

of both the jazz and opera worlds,

its hard-won status was now threatened by a brand new sound.

# You ain't nothing but a hound dog

# Crying all the time

# You ain't nothing but a hound dog

# Crying all the time

# Well, you never caught a rabbit and you ain't no friend of mine... #

In the mid-1950s, singers like Elvis Presley revolutionised the American musical landscape,

turning white teenagers on to black rhythms.

# Yeah, you ain't never caught a rabbit

# And you ain't no friend of mine... #

Yet, incredibly, Summertime would do what no other jazz standard would do...

It fitted in with rock and roll.

# Summertime

# And the living is easy... #

Summertime was a song that early rock and roll singers could perform,

in their own style, and yet establish a relationship with an earlier generation.

# And your ma is good-lookin'

# So, hush little baby

# Don't you cry... #

Well, Gene Vincent and Ricky Nelson

had a huge effect on British bands in the early '60s.

# You're gonna spread your wings

# And take to the sky... #

Ricky Nelson was a particular favourite of mine.

I really liked his voice.

His version is one where he sticks very close to the melody.

It just works.

# And daddy and mommy, they're standing by... #

In 1965, The Zombies, from St Albans,

were one of the very first rock groups to cover Summertime.

I was familiar with the song but I don't know anything its history.

It was just this arrangement that interested us and interested me.

It was an opportunity to do something that was different

to what many of the bands were playing at the time.

It was something, which gave us an opportunity to improvise

and the mood was fantastic.

# It's summertime

# And the living is easy... #

We were playing in clubs and pubs and we got a great reaction.

I think, it was quite brave of us to play it in a rock environment.

It's surprised me even that to the present day.

You can still play soft ballads to people if they are good ballads.

# Why don't you hush, pretty baby

# Don't you cry... #

I loved the construction of the song.

Gershwin totally understands what it is to write a song, to produce music.

On the feeling level, on the slightly magical level,

where, if you write a song, you reach out and grab something.

He has reached out and grabbed that.

That is something that people universally tap into.

The British invasion of America in the mid-1960s

was spearheaded by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.

The Zombies were very much a part of this invasion

and helped popularise Summertime with a new generation of American teenagers.

I'd like to think that The Zombies did contribute to the mystique

and the popularity of Summertime.

We always included it in our repertoire when we were playing,

especially in America.

I think a lot of young people in America would have been introduced to that song,

that perhaps wouldn't have heard it in any other way.

# Summertime... #

As the '60s progressed, it became increasingly apparent

that Summertime could be interpreted from some very different perspectives.

# Fish are jumping

# And the cotton is high... #

The Julie London record is clearly a romantic

interpretation of Summertime.

A seductive interpretation, not at all maternal.

This is not a woman trying to get a baby to go to sleep,

She's trying to get somebody to go to bed, but not to sleep.

It's a "come on" song to a lover.

It's sensuous, very laid-back, it's witty.

It's lithe and, in its way, it's just as authentic.

It's still the song.

It's not that she's turned it into something else,

she's just found another place to go with it.

She totally made it because of her looks

and because she looks so glamorous and so hot.

She's on every album cover, posing seductively.

A lot of men and boys, bought those covers because of the images.

When you got home and played the records, she really delivers.

She's not a tease.

# ..standing by... #

Now...

Zip me up.

Summertime's roots within a 1930s opera were now so distant

that in the flowering mid-'60s music scene of San Francisco,

it was believed by many to be a traditional folk song.

# Yes, summertime

# And the livin' is so easy... #

I'd wager everyone in Big Brother & The Holding Company

thought of that as a folk song.

There had just been this folk revival shortly before that.

They were used to playing that song in coffee houses.

I doubt that they thought of it as a jazz song or an opera song.

I think they thought of it as a folk song, like House Of The Rising Sun.

# Your daddy's rich... #

In 1966, Janis Joplin joined the San Francisco rock band,

Big Brother & The Holding Company.

They recorded one of the most celebrated versions of Summertime

that included a new introduction by Sam Andrew.

Bach has a prelude that starts up. He has this thing and it goes...

HE SINGS THE TUNE

It's a very typical Bach motif.

So I just slowed that down.

It's exactly that and I slowed it way down

and used that as kind of a motivating force for Summertime.

INTRODUCTION PLAYS

Summertime is such a great song.

It was something Janis loved to sing.

# Summertime, time, time, time

# Time

# For livin' easy... #

She sang the song to herself. I think she was rocking herself.

She was singing a lullaby to herself

but she was also singing it to the universe, to the audience.

She was reassuring them.

This is a song that will calm people because it is a lullaby.

# Your daddy's rich

# And your ma's

# So good looking, babe... #

Janis Joplin's voice has always been a voice that haunts me

every time I listened to it

because there is something in her voice

that makes me feel like she knew she was not going to last long.

And every minute, every second she'd got to give it all.

And she was able to do a version of Summertime

that would keep the lullaby part of it,

keep everything we've said before but with her urgency to it.

# Woah

# One of these mornings

# Shine, your eyes upset, baby

# I said you're gonna go

# Honey, gonna spread your wings

# Gonna take, take to... #

If you don't enjoy Summertime while you are alive, shame on you.

I'm telling you, just embrace life in summer or any other time.

That's what her version makes me feel like. Gives me goosebumps.

She mines a particular quality of the song most people left behind.

Even though I find her performance painful in many respects,

because her voice was so stretched out of shape,

and that's the blues quality.

I mean, she sings it as the blues.

She screeches at the top. Almost, it's Summertime in extremis.

# Your dad's rich

# And your ma's good looking baby... #

As well as performing it live, Big Brother & The Holding Company

included Summertime on their number one album, Cheap Thrills.

This was one of the biggest selling records in America in 1968

and gave Summertime a massive new audience.

The LP cover was designed by the cartoonist Robert Crumb.

The idea behind his Summertime illustration,

with its image of a black maid with a white baby,

was to satirise white stereotypes of African-Americans,

but it still offended some.

The Black Panthers were really upset about that depiction

and they black-balled the album.

They hated that depiction.

In America, the summers of the 1960s

were intimately related to love-ins and flower power,

and Janis Joplin's version of Summertime

fed into that notion of a beautiful, psychedelic summer.

But the summers of the 1960s for many black Americans

were the long, hot summers of rage.

Again, it's a characteristic of the song that,

not only can it withstand those different treatments,

it has been treated in those different ways

with some very dark, negative,

broken versions of Summer.

Albert Ayler's tense, discordant version of Summertime

perfectly encapsulated the black American mood of anger

and disaffection in the 1960s.

Summertime meant to black people,

how many black people are going to be killed by police this year?

How many rednecks are going to murder somebody?

How many churches are going to be bombed?

How many demonstrations are going to be had in which people are going to

act towards their fellow citizens

like wild dogs?

DISCORDANT JAZZ VERSION OF "SUMMERTIME"

Albert Ayler is saying, "Uh-uh, uh-uh, uh-uh,

"I don't want you to get it.

"I want you to be irritated.

"I want you to be upset because in the upset and irritation,

"you can see what people are saying.

"They're saying no.

"And this, I'm saying no to the beauty of Summertime."

# Summertime

# And the living is easy

# Fish are jumping

# And the cotton is high... #

At the end of the 1960s, Summertime was everywhere in America,

three decades since its birth.

# ..and your ma is... #

It was now set for world domination.

# Summertime

# And the living is easy... #

Starting in the 1950s and '60s,

musicians in the Caribbean picked up on Summertime.

The song travelled to Havana...

# Well, your daddy's rich... #

There's a wonderful version by a Cuban singer called Enrique Herrera.

Just with conga drums.

Just voice and congas, very elemental.

But it's very, very powerful indeed.

Summertime also entered Puerto Rico.

You could feel the heat of the beach and the heat of the Afro-Cuban rhythms of the congas of Africa even.

Latin music in general is a very happy kind of music, very danceable.

This song fits right into that category.

Summertime travelled to Trinidad.

It's really African-based and it's African, even though

it's written by a Jewish man, it's really an African-based song

and Latin rhythms just fell into this naturally.

And on to Jamaica.

REGGAE VERSION OF SUMMERTIME PLAYS

Every culture has their folk music so, if you look at reggae music

which is all about survival,

all about the voice

of the underdog, erm...

a song like Summertime is particularly relevant.

# One of these mornings...

# You're gonna rise up singing... #

In the early '70s BB Seaton cut his reggae version of Summertime in Kingston, Jamaica.

The melody is so relaxed that you could go to sleep singing it.

Putting it on a reggae rhythm, I think that gave it life.

You know, I mean, because when I was singing it I remember the beat,

you know, it was so pulsating,

that I was actually floating on top of the rhythm,

with that melody.

# ..with your daddy

# Sta-a-a-anding by... #

From Jamaica, Summertime breezed on down through the Tropics

to Rio de Janeiro.

For this song to have had quite such an extraordinary ability

to remain with us and to be transformed and to be played

and sung by so many people it has to have these very adaptable qualities.

I think it's the adaptability of it that is perhaps at the root of the

fact it's become quite so pervasive in our culture.

SINGING IN HINDUSTANI

As the 20th century became the 21st,

musicians as far as India were now interpreting Summertime.

Amit Chaudhuri from Mumbai recognised that he could work

Summertime's languid lullaby qualities into India's classical music.

Indian music and the way you improvise in Indian music

allows you - often demands that you slow down the tempo.

To make those improvisations possible.

That slowing down of the tempo,

which I have in my version,

also kind of nicely fits in with the idea of sleep.

There's something simple about the scales and about the song.

I think that's why it continues, its life continues.

# Oooh-oooh... #

SINGING IN FON

Angelique Kidjo is from the West African nation of Benin.

When she recorded her version of Summertime, she sang the song's lyrics in Benin's language - Fon.

SHE SINGS IN FON

You cannot translate English into Fon literally.

It doesn't work, because it's a language that paints a picture for you.

SHE SPEAKS FON

..which means Summertime.

It translates as Summertime but it means when the heat time comes.

Your daddy's rich and your ma is good-looking -

I say that in my language by saying that...

your father have wealth.

It's not richness.

The wealth is the knowledge of life and your mom is good-looking,

your mother have such a beautiful soul.

So I take it from what Gershwin wrote to the reality of Africans.

Great songs that transcend all styles, languages, nationalities

have a beautiful simplicity at their very heart.

Summertime shares this quality with the other two most-covered songs in the world -

My Way and Yesterday.

A really good song touches people.

It means something to people and in this case it's meant something

to millions of people and all three of those songs on their own

level work like that, whether you prefer one more than the other,

they all just touch people.

Summertime's global appeal is also due to its brilliant ability

to trigger personal emotions in us all.

This song works if you're having a wonderful time

and if you're celebrating somewhere.

Or if you're having quite a bad time and you want summer.

You know, if you want to be looked after, this song is great,

and if you feel lost, this song is great.

It's extraordinary.

Today, Summertime is the most covered song on the planet.

Over 25,000 versions exist.

But more importantly,

Summertime is one of the most loved melodies in the world.

As George Gershwin's friend Kay Halle predicted it would

become when she first heard it all the way back in 1934.

People on the street, you can stop them and they've heard of Summertime.

They probably haven't heard of something written two or three years ago.

They probably couldn't name some Madonna song from 2005.

They probably couldn't name three Lady Gaga songs but they all know what Summertime is.

Summertime has magically tapped into something deep inside us all.

Nostalgia and innocence, sadness and joy,

and our intrinsic desire for freedom.

Summertime is a state of mind.

Everybody has got a Summertime somewhere.

Everybody knows what that means.

There's something about that song that makes people feel more free

when they're playing it and when they're listening to it.

I think that's the greatest achievement of all.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media