”The Man I Love” started out as an up-tempo dance number but was slowed down to become one of the greatest ballads in the Gershwin canon. It was featured in three different George and Ira Gershwin shows in the 1920s and rejected from all three in tryouts. Eventually it became a success as an independent song. This weekend I’ll show just how versatile this song is and why it rose to the top of the Great American Songbook.
By the time she became a regular on the “Ed Sullivan Show” and Jack Paar’s “Tonight Show” in the Fifties, her reputation as “The Last of the Red Hot Mamas” was something of a joke. Few remembered her glory days with the Ziegfeld Follies in the Teens and her stage shows in the Twenties and Thirties. She began by performing in blackface, then hired black professionals to teach her how to sing authentically black. Leaving that behind her in the Twenties, she had a stage act where she sang and bantered about her sexual appetite, something that was rarely done, even in those days.
This is what the song sounded like after it was ejected from three shows and made its reputation as an independent song. You can hear how Sophie’s sheer vocal power made her so popular. The way she handles the middle eight is wonderful.