Someone to Watch Over Me

Someone to Watch Over Me
lyrics by Ira Gershwin
music by George Gershwin

When Jesus saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.
Matthew 9:36

Tell me, where is the shepherd for this lost lamb.
Polly, in Crazy for You

Today’s post practically writes itself, so I’ll try not to jump in too much and spoil things. First of all, the lyrics – in a very few lines – spell out what seems to me to be the longings of every human heart. It truly is a love song, and I think it is leading us to the “capital S” Someone of the title. On top of all that, the underlying music may very well be my all-time favorite popular song, so I’m thrilled to expound on it a bit (oops – looks like I already forgot what I said in the first sentence of this paragraph: sorry).

One more prefatory note: this classic song in the American Songbook has been performed by just about everyone: from Rosemary Clooney, Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra up through Linda Ronstadt, Elton John, Sting and beyond. In its original setting in the musical Oh, Kay! (1926), it was written for a man to sing. With its subsequent, amazing popularity, the Gershwins tweaked the lyrics a bit for the women and, in Crazy for You (a 1992 reworking of the Gershwins’ 1930 musical Girl Crazy incorporating various other Gershwin songs), the song is performed by a woman – Polly. I’ve used these distaff lyrics because of their added clever internal rhymes (lad/had and man some/handsome) and because of the One we’re talking about today. Let’s begin, shall we?

There's a saying old says that love is blind,
Still we're often told, "Seek and ye shalI find."
So I'm going to seek a certain lad I've had in mind.

Wow. We’re only two lines into the introduction and already we’re quoting Matthew 7:7. It’s even more amazing considering the author. Lyricist Ira Gershovitz was born in 1894, the oldest son of Morris and Rose Gershovitz, Russian Jewish immigrants to New York. Two years later, Ira’s brother Jacob was born, followed by another brother, Arthur, and a sister, Francis. The Gershovitzs held out high hopes for Ira as a concert pianist but it was soon obvious that his brother Jacob had the musical gifts. When Jacob, at the age of fifteen, became the youngest songwriter on the fabled Tin Pan Alley, he decided to Americanize his name from Jacob Gershovitz to George Gershwin. And the rest, as they say, is history.

I find it terrific that two Jewish brothers begin a love song by quoting the New Testament. As Christians, we believe that everything in the Old Testament is pointing us toward the person of Jesus Christ. Thanks be to God for Morris and Rose Gershovitz and for the education they provided their sons; both in music and in the Hebrew Scriptures.

Looking everywhere, haven't found him yet;
He's the big affair I cannot forget.
Only man I ever think of with regret.

A few years ago I was mistakenly trying to find the quote, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You” in the Bible. My friend kindly suggested that it wasn’t a biblical quote, but that I was trying to canonize St Augustine. I’ve also heard the sentiment expressed, in evangelical circles, that we have a “God-shaped hole” in our heart and that, no matter how we try to fill it with other experiences, only the Lord can bring completeness.

I'd like to add his initials to my monogram.
Tell me, where is the shepherd for this lost lamb.

I love the verse Matthew 9:36 quoted at the top of this post. There’s our Good Shepherd, full of compassion, willing to leave the 99 and the comfort of home to go out and find the lost one (that would be me and you). There’s also David’s great declaration in Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd.” I’ve actually been thinking about shepherds a lot the past couple of days. It’s the Westminster Kennel Club show this week and I always watch the Herding Group: our Rough Collie, Chester, dreams about taking top honors, I’m sure. I think the shepherding dogs also give us some more insight into a shepherd’s characteristics: focus, perseverance, gentleness.

One more tangential thought before we leave the song’s introduction. When Jacob Gershovitz became George Gershwin, his brother Ira first adopted the pen name “Arthur Francis”, in honor of his other brother and sister. He then decided to bring honor to the name his parents gave him (Ira) while linking himself with his brother (Gershwin). So the “initials of his monogram” reverted back to their original state. All right, here comes the part of the song everyone knows.

There's a somebody I'm longing to see
I hope that he
Turns out to be
Someone who'll watch over me.

If you watch the Mythbusters show, you know that they flash “Warning: Science Content!” on the screen when they are about to bring up some arcane scientific principle. Well, here comes a “Warning: Geeky Music Content!” but I promise it will be the last one. Besides, I believe the music actually furthers the purposes of the song. The melody of Someone to Watch Over Me covers the span of a ninth (an octave plus one extra step). Most songs stay close to one octave in range (The Star-Spangled Banner, by contrast, is a whole octave plus a fifth). Mr Gershwin begins on the tonic note (the root note of the key of the song) on the word “There’s” but, by the time we get to “longing” only seven syllables later, we’ve already overshot the octave and are up on the ninth. Warning to agoraphobics: like the little lost lamb, we’re way out in the open, exposed and vulnerable. And it doesn’t get better when the line ends with the word “see” on the leading tone of the scale – we’ve now circled all around the tonic note and come up short. To finish up the verse, Mr Gershwin does something that I think is stunning: he places the word “watch” on the tonic (albeit an octave higher than where we started), so there’s the familiarity of the root note there, but the underlying chord couldn’t be more restless. It’s a diminished chord based on the tritone interval – suffice it to say, if we were talking chemistry and atoms, this chord would be an isotope. It is aching for resolution, and it finds it on the first syllable of the phrase “over me” when the melody drops a whole octave, down to the tonic note where we began.

I'm a little lamb who's lost in the wood.
I know I could
Always be good
To one who'll watch over me.

We come back to the lamb and shepherd theme again in this second verse. The musical structure of verse one complements these lyrics perfectly. Before we head into the bridge, allow me to branch off onto another song about lambs and shepherds. This is the week of Valentine’s Day and I remember, as if it was yesterday, the first time I attended worship services at our church. It was on Valentine’s Day in 1999 and printed in the bulletin was the following verse taken from Sir Henry William Baker’s reworking of the 23rd Psalm, The King of Love My Shepherd Is:

Perverse and foolish, oft I strayed
And yet, in love He sought me
And, on His shoulders, gently laid
And home, rejoicing, brought me

What a wonderful shepherd we serve! Well, on to the bridge.

Although he may not be the man some
Girls think of as handsome
To my heart he carries the key.

We discussed that “God-shaped hole” earlier and I think we’ve found the “God-shaped key” that fits it. Are you wondering about the “handsome” line? Well, consider this, from verse two of Isaiah 53:

He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

And, as we learn a few verses later, in Isaiah 53:6 –

We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to our own way;
and the LORD has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.

There’s the Good Shepherd, laying down His life for His sheep. Let’s let the Gershwins take us home:

Won't you telI him please to put on some speed -
Follow my lead -
Oh! How I need
Someone to watch over me.

Don’t we all? Lent invites us to contemplate this fact: we all need a Savior. And, thanks be to God (and in the words of another song), He’s as close as the mention of His name . . .