George Gershwin And The Blues

[RonPrice]

BACKGROUND MUSIC FOR THOSE HIATUS YEARS

 

George Gershwin composed popular songs from 1919 to 1938, from the time the Tablets of the Divine Plan were made public to the beginning of the International Teaching Plan, the Seven Year Plan, of 1937 to 1944. His music was made for the multicultural world of the 1920s, the 1930s and our world today. His compositions combined: blues, Afro-American, jazz, broadway, classical, gospel, opera, among other musical forms. It manifested so beautifully the philosophy of one-world.

-Ron Price with thanks to ABC TV, Gershwin: They Can't Take That Away From Me, 17 October, 10:30-11:25 pm.

 

You gave us a background music

for those hiatus years1

when an Order was being born

and taking its first form.

 

You gave us sounds we'd never heard

while he2 gave us that leviathan

with beautiful curves so that we

could swim forever in the sea.

 

Your song form was a serious craft

as the Cause was for him a place to

define those interpositions of Providence.

 

You gave us songs, eternal, sweet as

Summertime, telling us of our lives

and their transcendental oneness amidst

the trivial and the everyday; while he

defined that global form in a language:

composer, director, producer, inheritor

of an Epic Script for all humankind.

 

Ron Price

17 October 1998

 

1 these were the years of waiting before the Tablets of the Divine Plan could be promulgated in the first organized international missionary campaign in 1937. During this period the national Baha'i administrative system was defined and developed. See Studies in Babi and Baha'i History, Vol.1, "Development of Baha'i Administration", pp. 255-300.(Kalimat Press, 1982)

2 Shoghi Effendi gave the Baha'i community a wonderful exegisis of 'Abdul-Baha's, Baha'u'llah's and the Bab's writings.