George Gershwin
A composer and pianist from Brooklyn who wrote for Broadway, the concert hall and the opera house.
He was born in 1898 and lived only 38 years.
date in BaseKGdate sourced by us, not yet in BaseKG
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Rhapsody in Blue
On February 12, 1924, Paul Whiteman’s band played Rhapsody in Blue for the first time in New York, with Gershwin at the piano.
It opens with a clarinet sliding up more than two octaves.
Words by Ira
His older brother Ira wrote the words to most of his songs: Fascinating Rhythm in 1924, Someone to Watch Over Me in 1926, I Got Rhythm in 1930.
BaseKG links each song to George as its composer. Who wrote the words is not a relation it holds.
The concert hall
The Concerto in F followed in 1925.
An American in Paris, from 1928, came out of a stay in Paris and puts real taxi horns in the orchestra.
Porgy and Bess
His opera, from DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy, is set on Catfish Row, a street of Black families in Charleston, South Carolina.
He wrote it in 1934. It opened in 1935.
Summertime
The opera opens on a lullaby, Summertime, with words by Heyward. Abbie Mitchell sang it first.
It went on to become one of the most recorded songs of the century.
Everyone’s Summertime
Sam Cooke recorded it in 1957. Booker T. & the M.G.’s, Mina, and Adriano Celentano made it their own too.
Who performed what comes from BaseKG’s music layer, joined to the graph by entity id.
Other Summertimes
The name was already in use: the year the song appeared, a cartoon called Summertime was playing in cinemas.
BaseKG holds a 1955 David Lean film by that name, and two more works called Porgy and Bess, a 1959 film and a 1959 Miles Davis album. Each is its own entity in BaseKG.
Miles Davis is in BaseKG, but the sample does not link him to his album.
After 1937
Gershwin died in Los Angeles in 1937. In 1973 he was on an American stamp.
An asteroid carries his name, and so does the Library of Congress prize for popular song, first given in 2007.
What the graph holds
Everything above rests on one small neighborhood of BaseKG: George Gershwin, what he links to, and a few facts from the music layer.
The sample this story sits in holds 899 of BaseKG's 1,063,614 entities, and 1,507 of its 6,905,330 facts.
The grid is the whole graph, one dot for every 899 entities. The lit dot is the size of this sample.
Lines are the facts in the sample. A date in a solid outline is BaseKG's; a dashed one is ours, from the sources below, because the graph does not carry it.
Events and dates: Wikipedia articles on George and Ira Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris, Porgy and Bess, “Summertime” and Sam Cooke
Images via Wikimedia Commons, public domain unless marked: