Where and When the Livin Is Easy
by Nisi Shawl
There is a magic land, a land found in a once-upon-a kind of time. For me, a favorite portal to this magic place is music. This soundtrack for the film Porgy and Bess transports me there immediately, in multiple ways, with referential touches landing layered and feather-light.
The opera’s overture is an announcement of intent, a compact gloss of Gershwin’s gorgeous melodies, a prescient recitation of the drama about to unfold. And then, sinuous as a garden snake, the clarinet line descends from its tree in the orchestral forest and oscillates between two notes. Quick, then slow, the notes repeat: first at the speed of life, then with the slow swing of a lullaby.
It has begun. “Summertime.” Perhaps the most frequently covered song in history. While these two notes rock us carefully, lovingly, in their cradling arms, a soaring soprano takes flight. Like a bird rising to the sun, it sees all, hears all, sighs and sobs with sinking acceptance of beautiful inevitabilities. The lyrics promise joy, protection, release--earnestly or sarcastically, depending on their delivery.
“Summertime’s” deliverers have been many, from Billie Holliday’s 1936 hit (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQvc-Gkwhow), through Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald’s 1959 version, to this instrumental soundcheck version by Prince: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVd1zZTbG9E I was shocked, shocked I tell you, to learn that this song had been written at a specific point by a specific pair of human beings. It felt more like a natural accretion.
Recently I began talking with one of my middle school friends and discovered that this musician whom I admired then as a rock-n-roller and admire now as a meditation music maestro was influenced early on by that selfsame soundtrack. How? Why? Wasn’t that our parents hung out together. They were a university family, we were working class. They were white, we were Black. But somehow our childhoods sounded partly the same.
Porgy and Bess was first performed in 1935. Perhaps not the wisest move to present the public with a challenging new opera in the midst of an economic depression. With its lead roles, at least, performed by African American singers, Porgy and Bess was born controversial. On tour in 1936, the cast protested against the racially segregated seating enforced at Washington D.C.’s National Theatre--and won.
Sometimes the controversy ran more along the lines of accusing the script of promoting racial stereotypes. And it is true that it delivers an account of Black lives which is based on white perceptions. Yet it’s also true that its focus places Black lives center stage. Just two white men appear, playing minor roles with barely a line each. The rest of the cast is us. In the mid-20th century, that focus on performing Blackness translated into unprecedented opportunities for classically trained Afrodiasporic singers.
And they didn’t just sing. They negotiated their appearances and argued for changes. Anne Brown is responsible for Bess’s expanded role in the opera, much more central to it compared to her limited part in the play on which Porgy and Bess was based. Black musicians helped with choral and orchestral arrangements. Pearl Bailey reportedly stipulated that she was not going to wear a headrag.
Listening to the results of these drives and maneuverings as a child, I felt awed by the rich panorama they opened up to me--an undiscovered country where familiar strangers came and went about mysterious, grown-up business. My parents approved. So did their friends and neighbors.
So did Miles Davis, who famously took shit from no one. He recorded an entire album of highlights from the opera’s score. Here’s a sample cut, his version of the heartrending “My Man’s Gone Now”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MUaf0pNNJ4
And here, because even Miles can’t do justice to the eerie glissando at this song’s finish, is the vocal version, which always, every time, lifts the hair on the back of my neck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYFTp_8NkGE&t=20s
One accusation made, often fairly, against outsider takes on the lives of the marginalized is that they consist of tragedy after tragedy, sorrow after sorrow. Not the case with Porgy and Bess, though the songs that attract me the most powerfully are salty and sad, or at least, bittersweet.
To my mind, the song that commits the unforgiveable is an allegedly happy one. “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’,” Porgy declares in trumpet-like tones, boasting of his equanimity and absolving his oppressors of their crimes. But the chorus’s commentary put a helpful slant on this song’s lyrics: Porgy’s over-the-top talk is all because “that woman come to stay with him.” He’s spouting foolishness; love has turned his mind to mush.
Love is powerful. It powers the swirling sweetness of the duet “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” the sound of half-dissolving hearts melded together in bliss. It supports the reassuring cry of the strawberry vendor: goodness is the norm. Contentment is due us and available.
All that’s part of what the music conveys. But what’s the action? What happens?
The opera’s plot, briefly, concerns the inhabitants of Catfish Row, who are divided between the town’s respectable folks and its riffraff: Bess, her abusive lover Crown, and her drug dealer Sportin’ Life. Crown kills one of the locals and runs to evade arrest. Bess resists Sportin’ Life’s advances. During a community picnic Crown kidnaps Bess and forces himself on her. Soon after she returns to Catfish Row and disabled beggar Porgy’s welcoming arms. Crown surfaces again. A storm rises and kills two more locals and, it’s assumed, Crown. But really his cause of death is Porgy. Porgy murders him. And when Porgy gets taken off for questioning, Sportin’ Life tricks Bess into believing Porgy’s gone for good. The pair leaves for NYC and a week later, released from his contempt jail sentence, Porgy follows in his goat cart, vowing to bring home “his” Bess.
That’s right. This opera ends with one of the principals heading out for what can only be described as a guaranteed failfest. The same fevered over-optimism he exhibited in “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’” powers us through the climax.
Into what? Into where?
In synch with the 20th century’s Great Migration (the mass exodus of Black people from the South), Bess and Sportin’ Life are headed North, to the land of opportunity, with Porgy close behind them.
Part of that upwards flow, some of my forebears on my mother’s side came to Chicago from down in New Orleans. Many of my father’s people settled in Vandalia, Michigan, a stop on the Underground Railroad. My father and my mother spoke and acted as if the freedom promised by the factories and offices and schools of the North, was a certitude. If not for them then surely for their children. Hush, little baby. Don’t you cry.
“Don’t you be downhearted”: that’s the chorus’s admonition to the spirits of Clara and Jake, lost in a hurricane. A simple melody descending to rest, then climbing to hope, candle-lit faces chanting against an accompaniment of querulous flutes and majestic deeps. Jesus is walking on the water, they sing. You can do it too. Rise up and follow him home.
I’m not a Christian. Neither was George Gershwin. Where do we go when we go home?
Gershwin is already gone; I can’t speak for him. But where I go is also a particular when. A magic land I’ve seen before, thanks to this music. I see it clearly now as I spread my wings and take the sky.
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