"Strike Up the Band": Song History, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video

"Strike Up the Band"

For a complete listing of songs used in the original Broadway production of Strike Up the Band, see IBDB song list.

According to George Gershwin biographer Howard Pollack (pp. 396-397), the idea for the show Strike Up the Band came about when producer Edgar Selwyn heard, in 1926, that George S. Kaufman was at work on an anti-war satire and wanted the Gershwins to put it to music: "'We can all be grateful to Edgar Selwyn,' remarked Morrie Ryskind, for having the foresight to match their [The Gershwins'] genius with that of George Kaufman's.' The Gershwins were delighted at the prospect of working with Kaufman whom they considered 'the funniest and most intelligent playwright in America'." And, as it turned out, Ryskind, himself an anti-war type during his younger years, wound up rewriting Kaufman's bookafter the 1927 production failed even to make it as far as Broadway, closing in Philadelphia after only two weeks.

Gershwin biographer Edward Jablonski recounts the Philadelphia experience when he writes that "the failure [of the run in Philadelphia] "is generally attributed to the bite of Kaufman's unmusical-comedy-like book.":

Strike Up the Band was definitely not an Aarons-Freedly or a Ziegfeld musical. It underscored man's often trivial and venal rationale for going to war; Kaufman scourged profiteering, jingoism, diplomacy, business manipulations--it was not a conventional song and dance show . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Political satire, apparently, was not the stuff of a successful musical comedy. Though the show was critically acclaimed, audiences did not grasp its theme and were not amused by its long expository musical sequences . . . (Jablonski, p. 143) .

It was the rewrite by Ryskind that finally became a hit in 1930, and without it there would be a good chance we would know little about the show Strike Up the Band.

As for the song "Strike Up the Band," Ira Gershwin wrote in his memoir Lyrics on Several Occasions that the final (or fifth) version of the music for the song "Strike Up the Band" was written by his brother George lying in bed during the middle of the night. It was the spring of 1927 and the brothers were in Atlantic City for a meeting with Edgar Selwyn, the producer of their show in progress, also titled Strike Up the Band. Ira had gone out to get the Sunday paper and upon returning to their adjoining rooms and seeing no light under the door assumed George was asleep; however, the door opened and the pajama clad composer informed his lyricist brother that he'd got it. When Ira pressed him to explain the "it," he replied, "Why the march of course, I think I've finally got it. Come on in." Apparently George had thought he'd gotten it on four previous occasions but this time he assured Ira this was it, even though the first four were written while he was at the piano, this one in his head while he was in bed. George sat down at the piano (He always had a piano in his hotel room.) and played it almost exactly as the song is now known. Ira pressed his brother that this would indeed be "it," that there would be no more "maybe I'll come up with something better[s]." The fifth try did, in fact, turn out to be "it." Ira went ahead and "wrote it up" (Lyrics on Several Occasions, pp. 224-227, paperback Ed.)

The script, the lyric for the song and the show itself seemed to have been destined for endless revision: As Walter Rimler explains in his Gershwin Companion, and as referred to above, Gershwin had come up with four other melodies before settling on the one we all know and Ira kept revising his lyric to suit the mood of a rapidly and chaotically changing world:

In a series of revisions over the years, the original intent of the lyric was totally changed. "Strike up the Band" began as a sarcastic anti-war song ("We're in a bigger, better war for your patriotic pastime. We don't know what we're fighting for but we didn't know the last time!") But in 1940, with war in Europe spreading, Ira changed it ("We hope there'll be no other war but if we're forced into one, the flag we'll be fighting for is the red and white and blue one!"). Then after America's entry into World War II, he altered the lyric again and this time he was in a fighting mood, putting in a line about turning the Hun away from the gate (Rimler, Companion , p. 172).

Perhaps the revisions that have had the most lasting effect on the song are those put in place over succeeding decades by recordings and live performances by jazz musicians. It is not news that the richest source of material for jazz musicians, outside of their own compositions, has been The Songbook, but "Strike up the Band" is one of the few marches that has provided such inspiration. Howard Pollack suggests it was the song's ironic humor that explains this, noting that performances by such jazz greats as Charlie Parker (1950) and Oscar Peterson (1952) best capture this quality. Certainly the number of jazz performances of this "patriotic" march featured on this page would seem to confirm this. (See the Performer/Recording Index in the Cafe Songbook Record/Video Cabinet, right hand column, this page.)

Historic 1929 film of George Gershwin playing songs from Strike Up The Band during rehearsals at the Times Square Theatre, New York City shortly before the opening of the 1930 version of the show (the version Ira Gershwin called "the fifth try") on January 14, 1930. The film begins with George bantering with the show's comedic stars Clark and McCullough. The songs, in abbreviated rehearsal renditions, are "Hangin' Around with You," "Strike Up The Band" (buck dance), "Mademoiselle in New Rochelle" and "Strike Up The Band" (piano solo). (Footage courtesy of Edward Jablonski, video and adapted text by Jack Gibbons)

Victor Arden and Phil Ohman, dual pianists, and their Orchestra, made this recording (Victor 22308) on January 31, 1930, two weeks after Strike Up the Band opened on Broadway, January 14, at the Times Square Theater. The vocal refrain on the record is by the Revelers Quartet. Arden and Ohman frequently appeared in the pit for Gershwin shows of the era, but in the pit for Strike up the Band was Red Nichols and His Strike Up the Band Orchestra.

The 1930 pit orchestra for Strike Up the Band included at every performance, along with Red Nichols leader/coronet, some, to say the least, now familiar names, in fact a Who's Who of the swing era that was just getting under-way: Benny Goodman on clarinet, Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey on trombone, Gene Krupa on drums, Jimmy Dorsey on clarinet and alto sax, and Charlie Teagarden on trumpet. The track on the video just above was recorded in New York, January 17, 1930, three days after the show opened. (We are currently uncertain about who the vocalist is on the recording, but it has been suggested that it might be Jim Townsend who played Jerry Goff in the 1930 Broadway production of Strike Up the Band and was the featured singer in the show on "Strike Up the Band." The album includes 51 Gershwin songs (on two discs) performed by various artists -- also available as singles.
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Issac Goldberg
George Gershwin: A Study in American Music
Originally published, 1931 by Simon and Schuster, New York,
reprinted and supplemented by Edith Garson, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co. 1958.

In her 1958 supplement to Issac Goldberg's 1931 lifetime biography of his friend George Gershwin, Edith Garson notes that the 1927 production of Strike up the Band (although it failed even to reach Broadway until it was later revised in 1930) was the first of three "political operettas" with scores by the Gershwins. Strike up the Band lampooned war. (In that same year of 1927, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein had a much greater success with a seriously themed musical, Show Boat.) The other two Gershwin productions were Of Thee I Sing (1931) which won the Pulitzer Prize for its satire of American politics, and Let Them Eat Cake (1933), which took as its subject, revolution. Garson writes of the Gershwin trilogy of topical operettas:

It was this beginning, in 1927, that marked a turning point in the American lyric theater. The operettas, with their satirical topical themes, their songs that were tightly woven into the plot, and their sophisticated production (not just the usual line of chorus girls against lavish backdrops) pioneered the tradition of the " integrated score" that has been the heart of the contemporary musical from Oklahoma! to My Fair Lady (Goldberg/Garson, pp. 297-298, paperbound Ed.) .

For Walter Rimler, Strike Up the Band was clearly a show in the spirit of Gilbert and Sullivan, the British operetta writers of the last half of the 19th century.

For Ira, this was an opportunity to write the sort of satirical, intricate rhymes that W. S. Gilbert, his hero, had created fifty years earlier. For George, it was the chance to construct lengthy musical scenes advancing them, as his biographer Howard Pollack has noted, with "various archetypes--the solemn hymn, the patriotic march, the recited pledge, the military drill, the folk song, the romantic waltz." But [George S.] Kaufman's script--in which hostilities erupt between the United States and Switzerland because of an argument about Swiss cheese--was second rate, as Kaufman himself later admitted. "A composer of musical comedy is so horribly dependent on the quality of the book," he added, explaining [the 1927] show's failure at the box office [ Pollack , 399-400] .

To listen to the satirical 1927 verse, play the video at the 1990 Studio Cast recording in the Record/Video Cabinet which recreates the original 1927 production.

It was producer Edgar Selwyn, who was as devoted to Gilbert and Sullivan as antecedent and model as were the Gershwins, who pushed to make sure the influence of the British team remained strong in the revised versions of Strike Up the Band. Ira's satirical lyric for the verseof the title song "mocked jingoism":

We're in a bigger, better war for your patriotic pastime. We don't know what we're fighting for-- but we didn't know the last time.

Philip Furia points out, however, that Ira's lyric, when it got to George's stirring chorus, "got caught up in the very martial fever" the song was meant to mock:

Let the drums roll out, let the trumpets call, while the people shout strike up the band!

Furia explains, "George had managed to cram a Sousa-like march into the confines ofTin Pan Alley's thirty-two bar AABA structure, and Ira gave in completely to the music's spirit creating an inspiring yet thoroughly vernacular, call to arms":

There is work to be done to be done! There's a war to be won, to be won! Come you son of a son of a gun! Take your stand!

The patriotic power of the melody wedded to the no longer satirical lyric is probably more responsible for the continued success of the song and its being taken up by performers and movie producers like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in the MGM World War II Era movie that bears the title of the song and the earlier anti-war stage show, but otherwise reveals no relation to the original. (View the Rooney/Garland version above on the Cafe Songbook Main Stage.) (See Furia pp. 85-86 (hardcover Ed.).

No doubt it is also George's stirring melody that resulted in the request in 1936 by The University of California at Los Angeles for Ira to compose a new lyric that would enable the University to use the piece as its fight song, which indeed it did.

A 1937 recording of Strike Up the Band for UCLA, music by George Gershwin and words by Ira Gershwin, played by Jimmy Grier and His Orchestra with a vocal octet. (In 1936, when Ira wrote this lyric, the Gershwins lived in Beverly Hills not far from the UCLA campus. At the time the brothers were working for RKO Radio Pictures writing some of their greatest songs for movies such as Shall We Dance? starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

To read the lyric for "Strike Up the Band," at least for the chorus without the verse, click here. To hear the original verse left off of most recordings of the song because they would have been satires of war and patriotism during periods when such fare was no longer in vogue. To listen to the original satirical verse, go to the Record/Video Cabinet (this page), and play the video associated with the 1990 Studio Cast album, which recreates the original 1927 production of the show Strike Up the Band. See also excerpts from Philip Furia's discussion in the Critics Corner in which he comments on the changes in the song's lyrics during different time periods. (this page, above).

Katestew (5/18/2016 11:58:39):You seem to have left off on your page, this song was used in the musical My One and Only also. The arrangement is quite nice too.

• Barney Kessel, Tal Farlow: Dorian Grey
• Rooney and Garland: Wagglino's channel
• Red Nichols: Martin Schuurman
• George Gershwin, 1929: Jack Gibbons
• Count Basie: Matteo Grassi
• Sammy Nestico and SWR Big Band: fenderstyle1
• Strike Up the Band for UCLA, 1937: danieljbmitchell

Notes

• George Gershwin: His Life and Work Berkeley: Univ. of California Press 2006
• Edward Jablonski Gershwin A Biography, New York: Doubleday, 1987 (paper bound edition shown)
• Ira Gershwin, Lyrics on Several Occasions , New York: Limelight Editions, 1997 (originally published by Knoph, 1959)
• Other songs written for Strike Up the Band currently included in the Cafe Songbook Catalog of The Great American Songbook :
• 2. I've Got a Crush on You (first used in this show, but not written for it)
• Walter Rimler, A Gershwin Companion: A Critical Inventory & Discography, 1916-1984 , Popular Culture Ink, 1991
• Walter Rimler George Gershwin: An Intimate Portrait Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009
• Philip Furia Ira Gershwin: The Art of the Lyricist New York, Oxford Univ. Press 1996
• The UCLA Marching Band plays and marches to Strike Up the Band for UCLA.

Cite this page: "Strike Up the Band": Song History, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video, Cafe Songbook, https://greatamericansongbook.net/pages/songs/s/strike_up_the_band.html