Oh I Can't Sit Down

Today's post isn't any kind of analysis of any kind of musical genre, it's a little journey I went through concerning a particular song.

When I was growing up, we had the soundtrack album from the movie of "Porgy & Bess," a work which suffered through more than its fair share of troubles on its way to release, and more afterwards. (For the whole long, sad story, check out the Wikipedia entry) As a small child, I noticed something I thought was strange in the lyrics to one of the songs, "Oh I Can't Sit Down," which is an otherwise innocuous song about a celebration called Picnic Day. The male singer sang, "Guess I'll take my honey and his sunny smile along" at one point in the song, and also, "Hey there, Andy, be my sugar candy!" Another lyric in the song a little later on is, "Today I am gay and I'm free...," so when I got a little older, I guessed I had figured out the song's secret.

Fast-forward to a few days ago, when, for whatever reason, this song appears in my memory again; who knows why, perhaps I heard someone say, "I can't sit down" and that triggered it. I start thinking about the theory I've held for decades that this is a gay anthem, and then I realize that's impossible; when the opera was written, being gay was so illegal that no one in their right mind would even obliquely refer to it in public. Curious now, I google the lyrics, and find that the lyric is actually "Guess I'll take my honey and her sunny smile along," and the line about Andy doesn't appear at all. The plot thickens. Now I'm trying to figure out if the music director of the movie has hidden an Easter Egg for gay friends in the movie by switching the lyrics in that one song. Seems unlikely; Andre Previn was married 5 times and had several children.WTF??!

Eventually, I run across a YouTube video of some songs from the movie, including "Oh I Can't Sit Down," and I get my answer. In the movie, instead of being sung by a man, the song is sung by Pearl Bailey, a deep-voiced woman who for decades I have assumed is a man from the sound of her voice.

The music from the original opera is amazing, but often runs long and involves a lot of crashing and banging onstage in the recordings I've heard. Previn's edits to Gershwin's arrangements brilliantly highlight the lovely songs and dispense with the filler. If you want to skip straight to "Oh I Can't Sit Down" to see what I was talking about, skip ahead to 18:04, but all of this music is pretty great: