My Ship

"My Ship" is a popular song written for the 1941 Broadway musical Lady in the Dark, with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Ira Gershwin.

Composer Kurt Weill

The music is marked "Andante espressivo"; Gershwin describes it as "orchestrated by Kurt to sound sweet and simple at times, mysterious and menacing at other".[1]

It was premiered by Gertrude Lawrence in the role of Liza Elliott, the editor of a fashion magazine. In the context of the show, the song comes in a sequence in which Elliott, in psychoanalysis, recalls a turn-of-the-century song she knew in her childhood.[2]

The song was not included in the 1944 Hollywood film Lady in the Dark, a fact which Ira Gershwin found inexplicable:

Later, when Lady in the Dark was filmed, the script necessarily had many references to the song. But for some unfathomable reason the song itself—as essential to this musical drama as a stolen necklace or a missing will to a melodrama—was omitted. Although the film was successful financially, audiences evidently were puzzled or felt thwarted or something, because items began to appear in movie-news columns mentioning that the song frequently referred to in Lady in the Dark was 'My Ship'. I hold a brief for Hollywood, having been more or less a movie-goer since I was nine; but there are times ...

— Ira Gershwin[1]

In 2003, Herbie Hancock won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Solo for a version of this song released on the album Directions in Music: Live at Massey Hall.

Cover versions

Artists who have recorded the song include (in alphabetical order):

A few notes of the song are sung in a Sesame Street cartoon sequence promoting the letter R from the show's premiere 1969-70 season.[6]

gollark: The old system was not very good.
gollark: Well, it might be possible, just very hard.
gollark: How would you get profit, I mean? Just "invest, and there's no competition, and after a few hours you get money"?
gollark: How would meme investment work?
gollark: It might also be interesting to try and *not* base it vaguely on real-world stock markets, so does anyone have ideas there?

References
  1. Gershwin, Ira (1959). Lyrics on Several Occasions (First ed.). New York: Knopf. OCLC 538209.
  2. "Gertrude Lawrence - My Ship". YouTube.com.
  3. "Sixteen Sunsets - Jane Ira Bloom | Songs, Reviews, Credits | AllMusic". AllMusic. Retrieved 21 July 2020.
  4. "Bob Chester And His Orchestra", Discogs.
  5. "Hugh Masekela – Almost Like Being In Jazz". Discogs. discogs.com. Retrieved 24 October 2017.
  6. "Classic Sesame Street animation - R for radio". YouTube.com.

Further reading
  • Furia, Philip (1996). Ira Gershwin: The Art of the Lyricist (First ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-508299-0.
  • McClung, Bruce (2007). Lady in the Dark, Biography of a Musical. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-512012-4
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.