There are four major recordings inspired by the 1959 film Porgy & Bess, an adaptation of the famed 1935 opera by George and Ira Gershwin^[1]Which was in turn based on the 1927 stage-play Porgy by Dorothy and DuBose Heyward, and the 1925 novel Porgy by the latter. The plot centers on a disabled black beggar in post-Reconstruction South Carolina trying to save Bess, the woman he loves, from both her abusive lover and a drug dealer; yet as with most operas, the plot is of secondary significance to the music itself, which became an important resource for numerous Jazz musicians of the era. The opening number “Summertime” especially became a Jazz standard, with rousing renditions recorded by the likes of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane^[2]not to mention Janice Joplin and Sublime..

Even more importantly, Porgy & Bess was pretty much the only artistically “respectable” opportunity that most Black stage actors and singers had access to during that disgracefully racist period in American history, when they were otherwise relegated to either degrading minstrel shows or minor side-roles. Hence that mid-century generation of Black artists looked forward to the film adaptation with great celebration and anticipation.

The film itself garnered mixed reviews; James Baldwin for example was frustrated by the inability of the white director Otto Preminger to coax better performances from the absolutely stacked cast, which included future Oscar nominee Dorothy Dandridge, future Oscar winner Sidney Poitier, and future Emmy winner Sammy Davis, Jr. There has never been an official home video or DVD release^[3]Although a digitized version of the movie was later added to the Library of Congress in the 2000s for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”, and most of the film prints have been lost^[4]It is at least available on streaming nowadays.. Ironically, the film’s biggest cultural impact has been in the aforementioned music albums inspired by it.

[Note: I will be using each album’s rendition of “Summertime” as a baseline comparison for each.]

First and foremost of course would be the cast recording of the MGM film itself, which is largely performed in the straight operatic fashion of the Gershwin original. If you want to hear how Sidney Poitier sounded as a singer (a skill he never got to show off much even after he did become an Oscar-winner), this version is of definite value. It is also the most widely available straight-opera version of the production—high vibrato and everything—all other cast-recordings being the sorts of archived compilations only accessible to specialists via interlibrary loan.

More popular at the time of the film’s release was the Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong album of the same name. These two living Jazz legends had already released a pair of Grammy-winning duets albums together in the late-‘50s^[5]Ella and Louis in 1956, and Ella and Louis Again in 1957, and Porgy & Bess completed the trilogy^[6]Indeed, the CD version of this album is still only available as part of a boxset with the other two duets.. Though there is no hint of the operatic in their inimitable vocal stylings (they remain Jazz singers through and through), Ella and Louis are arguably even more dramatic than the cast recording, more soulful, and (dare I say) even more cinematic! It’s old school Big Band performed as though it were an opera. If this version had been the film soundtrack instead of the actual cast recording, I suspect it would’ve met more with James Baldwin’s approbation.

Wisely, Ray Charles and Cleo Laine chose to go a different route for their take on the opera (which was also their only known collaboration together). Their version of Porgy & Bess is decidedly Bluesier, sultrier, more inflected with R&B and even early Rock ‘n Roll. George Gershwin was known for trying to mix Jazz with Classical^[7]most famously on “Rhapsody in Blue“, yet most versions of Porgy still tend to lean more towards the operatic end of the spectrum; it is on the Ray Charles/Cleo Laine version that Porgy & Bess at last sounds like straight Rhythm & Blues. This is very much the Porgy & Bess record that you can make love to.

Yet the most famous Porgy & Bess of all doesn’t feature any singing whatsoever: the Miles Davis version. It’s easily one of the trumpet master’s top ten recordings^[8]Elvis Costello cited it as his personal favorite—and it’s not even his best album of 1959! Kind of Blue, the top-selling Jazz record of all time, debuted later that same year. This was the era when Davis was trading off doing one “Big Band” style record for older audiences, and then a BeBop one for the younger; the one-two punch of Porgy & Bess and Kind of Blue was the premier example of this pattern. If the two albums share one thing in common, it is that they are both the sort of record you can put on at the end of a long hard day, pour yourself a stiff one^[9]or a Diet Coke, whatever your persuasion, and then feel cool as hell. Porgy was also his second collaboration with band-arranger Gil Evans^[10]The first being Miles Ahead in 1957, from which the 2015 Davis biopic starring Don Cheadle derives its title., with whom he recorded the equally acclaimed Sketches of Spain a year later in 1960. It was an absolutely astonishing creative streak that Davis wouldn’t match again till the early-‘70s.

But those four albums represented the final peak of Porgy & Bess in the American pop-cultural consciousness. 1959 was not the beginning, but the end, of the public’s fascination with the opera^[11]Not to mention with opera in general.. Furthermore, the rise of actual Black playwrights like Lorraine Hansberry^[12]whose play Raisin in the Sun also starred Sydney Portier, and to much greater acclaim, as well as the elevation of Black art forms like Jazz and Blues to “respectable” genre status, meant that African American artists no longer had to wait for crumbs from the table of opera for their legitimization; they could just create their own.

This is not to dismiss the achievement of these four great recordings, which I re-listen to every summer time (even as I recognize how they can be accused of romanticizing an era that we must never return to); nor is it to downplay the contributions of the Gershwins and the Heywards, who were at least trying to practice a species of white-allyship in an era when that was even more dangerous to practice than now (given how involved each of these artists were with the Civil Rights movement, it would be foolish to read the Porgy writers otherwise). Indeed, I morosely reflect that all throughout the era in question, the vast majority of the members of my own faith were, with rare exception ^[13]e.g. Lowell Bennion, Eugene England, etc., digging in their heels on a Black Priesthood ban that never should’ve existed in the first place. Look at all the fantastic music we missed out on! All this beauty! All this passion! Look at all the ways we could’ve collaborated and contributed to the arts (not to mention, ya know, the entire Civil Rights movement itself) yet utterly failed to do!

We are fond of quoting Orson F. Whitney’s “We will yet have Shakespeares and Miltons of our own,” but that will never happen while we fail to collaborate with the proverbial Shakespeares and Miltons right in front of us. For what all these aforementioned artists understood, from George Gershwin clear down to Miles Davis, is that you don’t push the limits of art by staying hermetically sealed in your own little scene, but by reaching across boundaries and collaborating with people beyond your comfort zone. This is how we create new worlds.