Walking the Dog

George Gershwin was eleven when his family first brought a piano into their apartment. Four years later, after some lessons in classical repertoire including Chopin and Debussy, Gershwin dropped out of high school and found work as a “song plugger” on Tin Pan Alley, New York’s row of music publishing firms. He began to write his own songs, signed on with a publisher, and gravitated toward Broadway, finding work as a rehearsal pianist on a Jerome Kern show. Gershwin’s first Broadway production opened in 1919, and the influential performer Al Jolson added Gershwin’s “Swanee” to a revue that year. Jolson’s recording of “Swanee” sold millions of copies in 1920 and put Gershwin on the map as a top songwriter. Still Gershwin never stopped stretching himself in his unfairly short life; he did not settle into the breezy patchwork style of Rhapsody in Blue, written at age 25, nor simply churn out hit Broadway tunes like the many he co-wrote with his lyricist brother, Ira.

The last musical Gershwin completed was Shall We Dance, a 1937 film starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. With Astaire playing a famous ballet dancer whose real love was jazz, the score led Gershwin to create some of his most sophisticated hybrids of classical and jazz styles. The flirtatious Promenade, affectionately known as Walking the Dog, features a solo clarinet (a part written for jazz bandleader Jimmy Dorsey) inserting “blue notes” and other sassy inflections. In the movie, this music accompanies a wordless scene in which the prim and disinterested Ginger Rogers walks her dog on the deck of a cruise ship; Astaire’s character bribes his way to borrowing a dog just so he can stroll alongside her.