The Fascinating Story behind “Fascinating Rhythm”

Have you ever had the experience of paying attention to the lyrics of a familiar song and thinking, “Hmmm. This doesn’t say what I’d always thought it did”? You might take a look at my post about the song “Oh the Days of the Kerry Dancing” in which this same realization took place for me.¹

Anyway, you’d think from the title of this song that it would be about how wonderful it is to be in thrall to a particular set of notes or to musical rhythm in general, but that’s not really what the words say. Here’s perhaps the clearest statement about the rhythm’s deleterious effects on the speaker:

I know that once it didn’t matter, but now you’re doing wrong;
When you start to patter, I’m so unhappy.
Won’t you take a day off?
Decide to run along somewhere far away off, and make it snappy!
Oh, how I long to be the man I used to be!
Fascinating rhythm, oh, won’t you stop picking on me?

Let me say first off that the song itself has very little to do with the plot of either the 1924 stage musical Lady, Be Good! or the 1941 film Lady Be Good in which it appears. I’m not even going to try for a plot summary of either one; suffice it to say that the song provides an excuse for a big dance number in each. In the stage version Fred Astaire and his sister Adele performed their dance midway through and then as the grand finale. In the movie the great Eleanor Powell gave an astounding tap routine.  

George Gershwin had come up with at least the first few bars of the tune before work started in earnest on Lady. When he presented the fragment to his brother Ira, who was also his lyricist, Ira was unimpressed: “What kind of lyric do you write to a rhythm like that?” Gradually Ira got drawn into the song despite himself, always maintaining that the rhythm was “tricky,” as indeed it is. I got very tickled reading about George and Ira’s arguments about two specific lines:

I’m all a-quiver (line 4)
Just like a flivver² (line 8)

Ira wanted a “single” rhyme, while George wanted a “double” one; that is, covering two words instead of one. It all had to do with complicated rhythm issues, of course—

Ira finally gave in to his little brother and accepted the need for the double rhyme “a-quiver” and “a flivver,” because, [as George insisted] whereas in singing, the notes might be considered even and require only a single rhyme, in conducting the music, the downbeat came on the penultimate note and thus required a double rhyme. And so, that’s what made the cut.

Do you understand all that? I’m not sure that I do, but it’s indeed fascinating to get these glimpses into the incredibly laborious and picky processes that the two brothers went through as they co-wrote their great music. We know about this particular fight between the brothers because Ira wrote a book titled Lyrics on Several Occasions that included the information above.³

One more deep dive into the lyrics and then we’ll get to the good stuff—the videos. This quotation is from the same source as above:

The best evidence for just how anxiety producing Ira found the process of writing the lyric for “Fascinating Rhythm” is the lyric itself. Although the sense of the lyric has very little to do with the plot of the show Lady, Be Good!, being not much more than an explanation for why Fred and Adele are so fervently dancing — This “fascinating rhythm” has “got [them] on the go” –, it has everything to do with the story of Ira’s battle with George’s rhythm. . . . The entire lyric is the lyricist’s account of how writing the words to “Fascinating Rhythm” almost drove him “insane,” just as the rhythm almost drives the dancers crazy.

I feel particular sympathy for Ira when he writes the line “Each morning I get up with the sun/to find at night no work has been done.” Ain’t it the truth, even if one isn’t working with George Gershwin!

Sadly, but perhaps understandably, we have no video of Fred and Adele’s performance of the 1924 musical. In Astaire’s autobiography, though, we at least get a description of how George Gershwin gave the dancing duo an idea about how to end the number: “It was the perfect answer to our problem, however, this suggestion by hoofer Gershwin, and it turned out to be a knockout applause puller. . .” (Apparently Gershwin did make a brief foray into vaudeville early in his career, but as a pianist and not an actual dancer. Astaire says, though, that Gershwin was perfectly capable of demonstrating what he thought Fred and Adele should do.) The best I can do here is to include a video that has stills of Gershwin at the piano with Fred and Adele singing:

And here’s Eleanor Powell performing in the 1941 film. Note how the curtains are pulled back to reveal other pianos as she keeps going (and going, and going)–

Astonishing as it may seem, Powell was not the female lead in the film. That role went to Ann Sothern, for whom this movie was seen as a way to launch her career as a musical star. Powell was in a supporting role as the female lead’s friend, but since she was more well known than Sothern she was given top billing to attract audiences. Hmmm. Hope she was paid accordingly! But Sothern is absolutely charming in the following video, and hey! the Berry brothers aren’t bad either. Those guys! I can’t believe that no one died during that dance sequence at the end of the video:

1. Because there is no (conceivable) situation for which there isn’t a relevant Princess Bride quotation, I will include here this line spoken by Inigo Montoya to Vizzini, who keeps using the word “inconceivable” to describe events that have indeed happened and are therefore perfectly conceivable: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” ↩︎
2. In the Mark Hayes arrangement the word “flivver” is incorrectly spelled “fliver,” thus leading some of our (ahem) younger members to mispronounce it. We more mature members had to explain what a “flivver” was. ↩︎
3. No, I didn’t look all of this up myself. Instead, I availed myself of an excellent website that does the work for me—not Wikipedia this time, but one called “Café Songbook,” which bills itself as the “Internet Home of the Songs, Songwriters and Performers ofThe Great American Songbook.” The specific article referenced in this post is “Fascinating Rhythm,” and I’d highly recommend it in its entirety if you’re eager for more info on this song and on the Gershwins in general. There’s a sidebar with info about the books cited in their post. ↩︎

(c) Debi Simons