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\u2019s.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The two guitars wind and wind, bound together like two sides of a mobius strip.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Not every version has as many ups and downs.\u00a0
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Summertime was written in 1935 by George and Ira Gershwin for the musical Porgy and Bess<\/em>.\u00a0 Since then it has outgrown the show and become a standard on steroids for decades.\u00a0 Something about it has mattered to artists of every decade.\u00a0 Maybe the meanings are the same, maybe not.<\/p>\n The lyrics are simple.\u00a0 A brief lullaby, somehow inherently southern.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And always at night.\u00a0 That is the first double edge of the song.\u00a0 A song called Summertime should be bright or thick, at the least energetic, because that is what summer implies to almost everyone.\u00a0 Hot sun, sticky asphalt, thirst, sweat.\u00a0 But the song is dark, running along the minor scale, breathing the surviving air that lasts between sunset and early dawn.<\/p>\n Louis Armstrong captures this air the best, breathing it through his trumpet, blaring over his arrangement.\u00a0 A kind of largeness you can\u2019t swallow all in one go.\u00a0 His version with Ella Fitzgerald is swanky, loping, informed by his time confined in one of the hottest cities on record, New Orleans.\u00a0 Deep in the backbeat there is a ding\u2026dang, ding\u2026.dang like a blinking neon light.\u00a0 The cotton high here might be stacked, tumbled, and ready for transport.\u00a0 Civilized cotton far from its roots, but still earning that nightly praise.<\/p>\n Another city Summertime is Al Green\u2019s.\u00a0 Now the lyrics are hardly acknowledged, just words to vocalize, fodder for his syncopation and sprinting oratory.\u00a0 Gone are the stringed flutters or gunshot horn section.\u00a0 Just an overriding bass line and a makeshift pair breathing through a sax and trumpet.\u00a0 Just a few blocks of organ patter.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Then there are the white boys.<\/p>\n The Zombies provide us with a quick run through, high-pitched, long-haired, as groovy as the sixties are expected to be.\u00a0 The counterpoint comes from an overdubbed background vocal, ooooo-oooooooo, and their organist\u2019s enthusiastic sweeps.\u00a0 The song is a subtle rewrite of \u201cShe\u2019s Not There,\u201d almost, poured into the same mold.\u00a0 But it works.<\/p>\n Also tampering with the evidence, famously, is Sublime.\u00a0 For me, this is the most summery-sounding Summertime, though, admittedly, it is all suggested to my subconscious.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In \u201cDoin\u2019 Time,\u201d Sublime brings back the ding\u2026dang from Louis Armstrong on vibraphone, sets it as the leading point of the cool drumbeat, then winds in flutes, DJ scratches, Lou Dog\u2019s barks, and sets it all free to run like some South L.A. theme song.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Even though the song\u2019s lyrics are a comprehensive boast about the safety of the little one being sung to, Bradley acknowledges that \u201cIt gets harder\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n Finally, the most recent version I have in my collection.\u00a0 Western eccentric-rock gurus, Friends of Dean Martinez.\u00a0 An instrumental with a fuzzed-out guitar screaming slowly over Latin based beats and a carpet of organ noise.\u00a0 They turn Summertime into a requiem of a shootout in Tempe, Arizona or Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.\u00a0 This is a version that has come almost a decade too late.\u00a0 If it had been produced in the nineties, it would\u2019ve been indelibly seared into your imagination as the accompanying music to some Tarantino-clone, slow-motion aftermath sequence.\u00a0 It is steady, hot, and almost unearthly in its perfection.\u00a0 It echoes the length and breadth of a canyon from the past to now, maintaining every chord and harmony that the song\u2019s creator intended, while distorting it into a modern haunt.<\/p>\n I believe this is the true appeal and potential of Summertime.\u00a0 From blackface lullaby to post-modern cowboy surf, the song holds strong.\u00a0 It is the angry little sister of \u201cOver the Rainbow,\u201d a song for young artists to cut their teeth on, a song to hold some kind of loyalty to, a song to worry about.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We\u2019ve all known our summertimes to be short, to be hot, to be advantageous, to be a time on earth not taken for granted.\u00a0 Summertime can make or break you, whether you know the notes by heart or not.<\/p>\n