Best Songs Ever

ø 5 at 11 votes
What’s your rating?

“Summertime” is an aria composed by George Gershwin for the 1935 opera Porgy and Bess. The lyrics are by DuBose Heyward, the author of the novel Porgy on which the opera was based, although the song is also co-credited to Ira Gershwin by ASCAP. The song soon became a popular and much recorded jazz standard, described as “without doubt... one of the finest songs the composer ever wrote....Gershwin’s highly evocative writing brilliantly mixes elements of jazz and the song styles of African-Americans in the southeast United States from the early twentieth century.“ Composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim has characterised Heyward’s lyrics for “Summertime” and “My Man’s Gone Now” as “the best lyrics in the musical theater”. The song has been claimed to be one the... Read on...