"They Had Plenty of Somethin'": The Heyward-Gershwin Collaboration on Porgy and Bess

   by James M. Hutchisson

James M. Hutchisson, Professor of English at The Citadel, is the co-author of Perspectives on the Charleston Renaissance, 1920-40 and author of DuBose Heyward: A Charleston Gentleman and The World of Porgy and Bess.

Porgy and Bess, the great American folk opera about the Gullah people of Charleston's Catfish Row, began life as a slim novel by DuBose Heyward, called Porgy, published in 1925. The story is poignant in its simplicity: in one summer of passion and violence, a crippled black beggar finds his heroic inner self and overcomes physical and social handicaps by pledging himself to the love of a woman.

Revolutionary for its time, the book depicted African Americans in non-stereotyped ways and was an instant critical and commercial success. It propelled Heyward on an upward course that attracted the notice of George Gershwin, King of Tin Pan Alley and widely acknowledged American musical genius.

Gershwin read the novel a few months after it appeared and excitedly wrote Heyward a letter proposing a collaboration on an opera based on the book. But ten long years would come between that moment of initial inspiration and the opera's debut, in October 1935. In the meantime, Gershwin produced a string of successes—among them the epochal Rhapsody in Blue, and Heyward, in addition to other novels, dramatized Porgy for the stage in a nonmusical version, with his wife, Dorothy.

Contracts were finally signed and work on the opera began in earnest in October 1933. That winter, the collaborators set about their respective tasks. Porgy and Bess is often mistakenly thought of as mostly (or exclusively) the work of George Gershwin. Actually, Heyward did much of the work, too. No mere assistant to Gershwin, Heyward single-handedly wrote the libretto (the text, or sung dialogue, of the opera); he authored or coauthored the lyrics to more than half a dozen of the show's most famous songs (among them "Summertime," "A Woman is A Sometime Thing," and others); and he revised scripts, scouted talent, and coached actors on their performances.

The collaboration was a perfect marriage of North and South. In April 1934, Gershwin installed his friend from Charleston in a guest suite in his fabled fourteen-room duplex in Manhattan. There, with Gershwin's lyricist-brother Ira on hand as well, Heyward wrote many of the lyrics. Then in mid-June Gershwin stayed in a rented shack near Heyward's cottage on Folly Island, where he went completely native—unshaven, and often wearing only some cutoff jeans—and pressed on with the score, conservatively estimating that he had "millions of notes to write." Heyward and Gershwin also toured the countryside, peeking in on revival meetings at rural black churches where the composer discovered the Gullah tradition of "shouting," a complicated rhythmic pattern beaten out by hands and feet as an accompaniment to the spirituals.

Alas, when Porgy and Bess debuted in New York in October 1935, it was a relative failure—critically and financially. Heyward and the Gershwin brothers each lost their considerable investment in the production, and carping critics pecked away at an academic point: was Porgy and Bess a "true" opera, in the tradition of Carmen, or just a Broadway show, like Gershwin's earlier works? The show closed after a creditable but hardly lengthy run. Heyward and Gershwin both died soon thereafter, each thinking that his greatest achievement had been his greatest flop.

Today, Porgy and Bess shines as one of the brightest stars in the American musical firmament, a compass point that marks the South's historical place and shows the way to its future.

1952 promotional poster

From left, George Gershwin, DuBose Heyward, Ira Gershwin