Billy Stewart and Summertime: Sultry Goes Banger

Summertime: A song, I’d argue, that’s one of the sexiest to ever scrape a chord and float on drawn breath. 

For the inspired listener, the song’s traditionally sultry and languid journey into the earhole can drip straight to nipple and flap, thicken the pipe, and dry the mouth ever so. With a libation or two, what panty or zipper could resist the urge to drop? Summertime does all of this with an old fashioned and naïve grace and subtlety AKA as metaphor and double entendre. More contemporary expressions perfer the direct (like Cupcakke). While I can appreciate the brevity and laser focus of directness, there’s an argument to be made when the brain is left to do some of the work itself. The best art—be it an advertising headline, jokes, a plot device, entendre, etc.—always has layers. So, when the lyricist refers to fish and cotton as a stand-in for horny, the effect goes much deeper. Add to that, the song’s glistening descriptions of a world popping out all over with fecundity and a turgid impatience: It’s a boojie and banger universe where there just may be something for every body—but you’d better act now, it’s a limited-time offer:

Summertime/And the livin’ is easy/Fish are jumpin’/And the cotton is high
Oh, your daddy’s rich/And your ma is good lookin’/So hush, little baby/Don't you cry

One of these mornings/You’re going to rise up singing/Then you'll spread your wings/And you'll take the sky/But ’til that morning/There’s a’nothing can harm you/With daddy and mammy standing by

A word about the source material: For those who don’t know, Summertime was from the operetta Porgy and Bess—with a libretto based on a 1925 novel by Dubose Howard. It’d be easy to dismiss the material as more white appropriation of black culture but the work’s immortality, and the only reason we’ve any interest in this anachronistic work now, is wholly due to the career-peaking tunes of George Gershwin and lyrics by his older brother Ira. 

Just to note: Howard received praise for presenting black culture without condescension—no small achievement in the 1920s. The corpse of minstrelsy was still relatively fresh. Howard had gotten props from no less than poet Langston Hughes. 

Back to the song: Despite my argument for the song’s potent swirl of aphrodisia, Billy Stewart’s 1966 rendition has none of that. His has way too much bounce and agitation, way too much Las Vegas showroom in the arrangement for the sexy: This version is for standing up and moving, not laying down. But what Stewart does do is freebase the tune with a hyper-exuberance that’s like blue crystal meth to the song’s original cup vibe of spiked chamomile passion potion—a feel the composers had clearly intended. Between his violent alveolar trill that starts the song, and his ululating vocal run that ends it, in between we have four minutes of pure high impact aerobic joy.

Early in his career, Elton John was in a band that had opened for Stewart. On Elvis Costello’s television show Spectacle he told a story of a night when an audience member had foolishly thrown something at the 300+ pound singer as he was singing. Stewart dropped his hulk off the stage and chased down the evening’s anarchist. 

It is that very same kind of intense spunk that’s all over this song. That spunk will force exhilaration into your earhole by the fistful.