George Gershwin wrote Summertime in 1934. He was a 36-year-old Jewish composer from Brooklyn writing an opera about the black community of Charleston, South Carolina. He spent time in Charleston. He listened. He tried to understand something from the inside that he could only access from the outside.
The song he wrote was a lullabi, a mother singing to her child. Simple, beautiful, the melody doing what great melodies do, appearing as if it had always existed and merely needed someone to find it. It premiered on Broadway in October 1935 as part of Porgi and Bess. Gershwin died in July 1937. He was 38 years old. He wrote one of the most covered songs in the history of recorded music and died 2 years after it was first performed.
Over 33,000 official recordings of Summertime have been documented. Most of them sound nothing like what Janice Joplain did with it in 1967. This is the story of that song and what she did to it and why it has never been the same since. The song found its first great interpreter almost immediately. In September 1936, just one year after Porgi and Bess opened, Billy Holiday recorded Summertime.
It was the first cover version to reach the US pop charts. Holiday’s version took the lullabi and added the specific weight of someone who had earned the right to sing about loss and beauty in the same breath. She transformed it. She made it hers and she made it clear that the song was bigger than any single version of it. The decades that followed confirmed this.
Ella Fitzgerald and Louisie Armstrong recorded it in 1957. the full orchestral treatment. Armstrong’s trumpet solo preceding Fitzgerald’s voice in one of the most celebrated jazz recordings of the era. Miles Davis recorded it the following year with Gil Evans, the muted trumpet, the French horns, the song becoming something interior and slightly melancholy.
John Col Train in 1961, Sam Cook in 1957. The Doors performed it as part of their Light My Fire Medley. By 1967, Summertime had been covered by virtually every major artist in American music. It had been jazz and blues and gospel and pop and folk. It had been performed in concert halls and honky tons. It had been sung by opera singers and street musicians.
It was by any measure a fully explored song and then Janice Joplain sang it. Big Brother and the Holding Company were not the obvious band to record Summertime. They were a San Francisco psychedelic blues band in 1967. Roarer, louder, less controlled than the tradition the song had lived in for 30 years. Their sensibility was not the sensibility of jazz precision or gospel warmth.
They played like people who were making it up as they went, which was at once their limitation and their specific genius. The arrangement they built for summertime starts slowly. Sam Andrews guitar enters like a question, the specific dark quality of a blues guitar, asking something it already knows the answer to.
The band builds underneath it, and then Janice Joplain opens her mouth. What she did to the melody of summertime was not what any of the 33,000 other versions had done. She did not beautify it. She did not interpret it from a position of mastery and control. She inhabited it, took the words and the melody and applied to them everything she was, which included everything that Port Arthur had done to her and everything that she had done with what Port Arthur gave her.
The lullabi quality of the original. Gone, not discarded, but transformed. Underneath the psychedelic blues storm she and Big Brother created, you can still hear the lullabi. You can still hear Gershwin’s structure, but it sounds like someone singing the lullaby to themselves because no one else is there. The comfort turned inward.
The song about protecting someone else becoming a song about surviving. One music writer described it as one of the most audacious reinterpretations in rock history. That is precise. That is what it is. She sang it at Mterrey in June 1967. The same show where she sang Ball and Chain and Stopped the World. The same set that launched her from San Francisco Phenomenon to national name.
Summertime was in that set. And then it appeared on Cheap Thrills in 1968. The album that went to number one. The album with the Rumbrum cover, the album that put Janice Joplain on the radio from coast to coast. Suddenly, this song that had been covered 33,000 times had a new reference point.
Not the only reference point. Billy Holidayiday’s version endures. The Fitzgerald Armstrong version endures. Miles Davis endures. But for a generation of listeners who encountered Summertime for the first time through Janice Joplain, who heard Big Brother’s guitar intro and her voice before they heard anything else, the song was hers first.
Everything else came after. There is something specific about the relationship between Janice Joplain and this song that goes beyond the quality of the recording. Summertime was written about the American South, about the specific quality of life in a place where beauty and poverty and oppression exist in the same landscape.
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The original is set in a black community in Charleston. The lullabi is sung by a mother who is promising her child that things will get easier and who may or may not believe the promise she is making. Janice Joplain grew up in Port Arthur, Texas, the Gulf Coast, the South, the specific weight of a place that makes promises it doesn’t always keep.
She knew the landscape the song was describing, not from academic sympathy, but from the inside. She had breathed that air. One writer said it directly. In many ways, this song was waiting for her to record it because its story is hers. That is exactly right. She didn’t cover summertime. She recognized it. George Gershwin died in 1937 without knowing what would happen to his lullabi.
He did not know that Billy Holidayiday would take it to number 12 on the pop charts the year before he died. He did not know that 30 years later a girl from Texas would stand on a stage in San Francisco and tear it apart and rebuild it as a psychedelic blues explosion. He did not know about the 33,000 versions that would follow. He wrote a lullabi.
He meant it as a comfort, a mother’s voice in the dark, telling a child that something better is coming. Janice Joplain took that comfort and showed what it sounds like when the person singing it isn’t sure the promise is true. When the voice is still offering the comfort, but the rawness underneath tells you exactly what it costs to offer it. That is what great interpreters do.
They find the thing underneath the thing. The cost beneath the comfort, the wound beneath the lullabi. She found it in summertime. She put it in her voice and it has been there ever since. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
