Summertime

The first version I heard of Summertime that made a real impression on me, that made my ears hone and drill in on it as an impossibly moving melody was Janis Joplin’s.  Though, to be fair, the men of Big Brother and the Holding Company, that rag-tag band playing behind Janis, had as much to do with it as her hardwood vocals.  The two guitars wind and wind, bound together like two sides of a mobius strip.  Janis twists around both with longer notes, lets her voice fade out after the meager verses, and lets the guitars quicken and wail and hush again.  Not every version has as many ups and downs. 

Summertime was written in 1935 by George and Ira Gershwin for the musical Porgy and Bess.  Since then it has outgrown the show and become a standard on steroids for decades.  Something about it has mattered to artists of every decade.  Maybe the meanings are the same, maybe not.

The lyrics are simple.  A brief lullaby, somehow inherently southern.  I always almost imagine an immense area of dark green ground, pastureland or rows of corn or even wooded foothills when I hear the song.  And always at night.  That is the first double edge of the song.  A song called Summertime should be bright or thick, at the least energetic, because that is what summer implies to almost everyone.  Hot sun, sticky asphalt, thirst, sweat.  But the song is dark, running along the minor scale, breathing the surviving air that lasts between sunset and early dawn.

Louis Armstrong captures this air the best, breathing it through his trumpet, blaring over his arrangement.  A kind of largeness you can’t swallow all in one go.  His version with Ella Fitzgerald is swanky, loping, informed by his time confined in one of the hottest cities on record, New Orleans.  Deep in the backbeat there is a ding…dang, ding….dang like a blinking neon light.  The cotton high here might be stacked, tumbled, and ready for transport.  Civilized cotton far from its roots, but still earning that nightly praise.

Another city Summertime is Al Green’s.  Now the lyrics are hardly acknowledged, just words to vocalize, fodder for his syncopation and sprinting oratory.  Gone are the stringed flutters or gunshot horn section.  Just an overriding bass line and a makeshift pair breathing through a sax and trumpet.  Just a few blocks of organ patter.  As if the entire song was a transition, reaching deep into the icebox for the last few cubes, a soul cool-down before ratcheting back up again into sweaty romance and grooves.

Then there are the white boys.

The Zombies provide us with a quick run through, high-pitched, long-haired, as groovy as the sixties are expected to be.  The counterpoint comes from an overdubbed background vocal, ooooo-oooooooo, and their organist’s enthusiastic sweeps.  The song is a subtle rewrite of “She’s Not There,” almost, poured into the same mold.  But it works.

Also tampering with the evidence, famously, is Sublime.  For me, this is the most summery-sounding Summertime, though, admittedly, it is all suggested to my subconscious.  Sublime were second only to Nirvana when I was in high school, an unbeatable force of hooks, hip-hop, and reggae, the soundtrack to the California we all wanted to live in, the California that was the backdrop for every major 80s venture and catchphrase.  In “Doin’ Time,” Sublime brings back the ding…dang from Louis Armstrong on vibraphone, sets it as the leading point of the cool drumbeat, then winds in flutes, DJ scratches, Lou Dog’s barks, and sets it all free to run like some South L.A. theme song.  Bradley improvises on the lyrics, uses all the building blocks of the melody for his own lines, acknowledging the depressing aspects of the song with a repeated line.  Even though the song’s lyrics are a comprehensive boast about the safety of the little one being sung to, Bradley acknowledges that “It gets harder…”

Finally, the most recent version I have in my collection.  Western eccentric-rock gurus, Friends of Dean Martinez.  An instrumental with a fuzzed-out guitar screaming slowly over Latin based beats and a carpet of organ noise.  They turn Summertime into a requiem of a shootout in Tempe, Arizona or Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.  This is a version that has come almost a decade too late.  If it had been produced in the nineties, it would’ve been indelibly seared into your imagination as the accompanying music to some Tarantino-clone, slow-motion aftermath sequence.  It is steady, hot, and almost unearthly in its perfection.  It echoes the length and breadth of a canyon from the past to now, maintaining every chord and harmony that the song’s creator intended, while distorting it into a modern haunt.

I believe this is the true appeal and potential of Summertime.  From blackface lullaby to post-modern cowboy surf, the song holds strong.  It is the angry little sister of “Over the Rainbow,” a song for young artists to cut their teeth on, a song to hold some kind of loyalty to, a song to worry about.  Summertime is so vague and downhill and lazy that almost any personality can stick to it, yet so forceful, clean, and sharp that it can evoke a real half-good, half-bad memory from anyone.  We’ve all known our summertimes to be short, to be hot, to be advantageous, to be a time on earth not taken for granted.  Summertime can make or break you, whether you know the notes by heart or not.

Download my collection of Summertime versions here!