Clap Yo' Hands

Written: 1926

Music by: George Gershwin

Words by: Ira Gershwin
(possibly with assistance from
Howard Dietz)*

Written for: Oh, Kay!
(show)

On the Main Stage at Cafe Songbook

Les Petits Chanteurs de Laval

performing

"Clap Yo' Hands"

Quebec, Montreal, Canada, 2007

Mondial Choral Loto-Québec 2007 - Concours International - Best Childrens Choir: Les Petits Chanteurs de Laval - Philippe Ostiguy (director)

More Performances of "Clap Yo' Hands"
in the Cafe Songbook Record/Video Cabinet
(Video credit)

Cafe Songbook Reading Room

"Clap Yo' Hands"

Critics Corner || Lyrics Lounge

"Clap Yo' Hands" was introduced in the first preview of Oh, Kay! in Philadelphia on October 18, 1926, by Harland Dixon as Larry, Betty Compton as Molly, Paulette Winston as Daisy, Constance Carpenter as May, Janette Gilmore as Peggy and ensemble. It served to introduce a dance number that had no obvious connection to the plot of the story. From Philadelphia the show continued its previews in Newark, NJ and then opened on Broadway at the Imperial Theater, Nov. 8. In all these venues British musical comedy star Gertrude Lawrence appeared in the title role. After 256 performances, Oh, Kay! traveled to London where it opened at His Majesty's Theatre on September 21, 1927 with a new cast except for Lawrence, who was welcomed home as the local girl who had swept Broadway off its feet. In both New York and London, Oh, Kay! was acclaimed by the critics, though more extravagantly in New York where several called it the best musical of the year.

The broad outline of the show reveals a farce with touches of satire aimed at Prohibition in the United States. Oh, Kay! had a bifurcated birthright, the scorecoming from the American Gershwins, the bookfrom the British writing team of P. G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton. In fact, Wodehouse and Bolton worked on the show on their side of the pond, while the Gershwins, the shows producers Alex Aarons and Vinton Freedly, as well as director, choreographer, etc. worked on the new world side.

The story is set in the Long Island, New York Hamptons, already in the Twenties a summer playground for what we now call the one percent. An English duke has fallen on hard times and so turned to rum-running with his headquarters on a yacht anchored off the shore of a mansion owned by Jimmy, an American playboy, residing in the fictitious town of Beach Hampton, NY. Thus the tried and true formula of British aristocrats plus American millionaires plus lovely but confused young heroine and/or hero equal melodramatic hijinks. Along with Prohibition, the satire also focused, according to Gershwin biographer Howard Pollack, on "American self-righteousness," and included humor that was "unusually adult" for the typical romantic comedy of the time.

The heroine and title character of Oh, Kay! is the bootlegger-duke's sister, played by Gertrude Lawrence. who not surprisingly falls in love with the playboy millionaire, Jimmy Winter. The actions that drive the plot are the efforts made to save Jimmy from his unfortunate marital entanglements so he can become engaged to Kay and to save the duke and his associates from the law so millionaires and aristocrats all can live happily ever after. This was made acceptable because the aristocrat-bootleggers were all lovable, typified by Victor Moore (the comic actor who a decade later would play Fred Astaire's sidekick in the 1936 movie, Swing Time), so no one much minded that the criminals were not properly punished. As Philip Furia points out, Guy Bolton felt his and Wodehouse's book for the show, after much doctoring, had managed to "capture the rhythm of the era." And, we might add, as is so often the case with shows including songs that have taken their place in The Songbook, the stories now seem contrived and even silly, but a number of the songs, especially those that have becomestandards, are still as vital, relevant and appealing as they were then.

Just how "Clap Yo' Hands" fit into Oh, Kay!'s dramatic structure is less than clear, perhaps because the song wasn't, at least obviously, tightly integratedinto the show's story. A long-standing discussion about the evolution of American musical theater involves the degree to which (or the point at which) songs became integrated into the plots of musical shows and designed to carry the action forward as opposed to being songs serving only as featured numbers in a revue, i.e. a series of unrelated skits or acts, most of which had a single song as a focal point but were otherwise unrelated to the show as a whole.

Gershwin biographer Edward Jablonski writes that in Oh, Kay! "songs are not integrated in the contemporary sense -- songs like 'Fidgety Feet,' 'Clap You Hands,' and 'Heaven and Earth' have nothing to do with the plot and would serve in any score as production numbers" (Jablonski, p. 132-133, hardcover Ed.). Almost fifty years after the show was on Broadway, P. G. Wodehouse, one of the writers of the bookfor Oh, Kay!, appears to corroborate Jablonski's claim writing in a letter to his co-writer, Guy Bolton, that he recalls how Ira Gershwin simply gave Bolton the lyrics for "Clap Yo' Hands," having written the song's words, according to Wodehouse, with no intention of fitting the lyric to the story; in fact, he expected Bolton to "fit the book to them." (Pollack, p. 384).

In Ira's memoir, Lyrics on Several Occasions, he quotes George as marking the music "Spirited but Sustained" and that in the show the song was "exclaimed and stomped by Harlan Dixon and ensemble in a Long Island drawing room," but he makes no comment on how or whether "Clap Yo' Hands" bore any relationship to the plot, with the possible exception of it being used to reflect the positive state of mind of one of the characters at a given moment. In other words he was suggesting the song's purpose was to speed up the show's pace by means of a big, spirited rhythm number, not affecting the story or characters in any significant way -- and he (Ira) understood this and wrote the lyric to fit that bill.

In his book George Gershwin, an Intimate Portrait, Walter Rimler backs up, in a way, the idea that Ira wrote the lyric for "Clap Yo' Hands" with the expectation that the book would be fitted to his lyric and not the other way around. Rimler, referring to Gershwin shows scored before the end of 1926, suggests that the main reason that the Gershwin's did not tailor their songs to fit the plots of these shows was because the plots were too weak and silly. He notes "If Gershwin were going to fulfill his potential as a stage composer, he would need better scripts" and that Ira "would usually write independently of the plots and then wedge their songs into creaky story lines, usually about flaky socialites or lovable bootleggers," certainly the case in Oh, Kay!. Rimler postulates that the Gershwin's potential to write great songs was stymied by the frivolous nature of the shows that were being produced, stating that of the nearly 250 songs George wrote music for by the end of 1926, only a handful were gems" -- of which he counts "Clap Yo' Hands" as one.

On the other hand, the whole idea of the Gershwin's writing songs, even at the beginning of their careers, without regard for the context within which they would be performed is challenged by both Deena Rosenberg and Michael Feinstein both of whom have written that George and Ira almost never wrote a song "without a theatrical context in mind."

Rosenberg makes a case for "Clap Yo' Hands" not only having been written with the dramatic context of the show in mind but being integrated into that context with a great deal of subtlety and sophistication. It's a matter for Rosenberg of Oh, Kay! having a dramatic structure in which "quiet moments alternate with euphoric ones as the mood shifts back and forth between longing and certainty." The two songs that best represent these two poles of emotion are "Maybe" and the song that follows it in the score, "Clap Yo' Hands," a song Rosenberg calls "an exuberant foil to the pensiveness of the other." She elaborates on this contrast by pointing out that although both songs begin with "a similar melodic motif," they "move at different tempos" much like another pair of Gershwin songs written for their 1924 score for Lady, Be Good!, "The Man I Love" and "Fascinating Rhythm." She then speculates that the Gershwins might have been implying that the "effect of love can be public and kinetic as well as private and quiet" (Rosenberg, p. 141). If it is true that the Gershwins were consciously pursuing a dramatic rhythm for the show by writing this pair of songs, then it follows that they had indeed written "Clap Yo' Hands," both words and music, with, if not a dramatic context in mind at least a thematic one -- even if the words themselves do not seem to apply to specific actions of the characters. This could be exculpatory with regard to Wodehouse's accusation that Ira seemed to want Bolton to make the story fit his lyric, because it already did, just not in the conventional sense of specifically referencing elements of the plot. It is also quite ironic because as Philip Furia points out, "While none of the songs [in Oh, Kay!] are closely integrated into a particular dramatic scene, Ira did manage to achieve a more general level of integration between songs and story by weaving through his lyrics the thematic motif of time so central to the book. . . " (Furia, p. 57, hardcover Ed.) So in this thematic sense Ira did fit his lyric to the book by perceiving the theme of time residing in Bolton and Wodehouse's own story and weaving it into his [Ira's] lyrics, no place more directly than in Clap Yo' Hands":

Clap-a yo' hand! Slap-a yo' thigh!
Don't you lose time! Don't you lose time!
Come along--it's Shake Yo' shoes Time
Now for you and me!

On the sands of time
You are only a pebble;
Remember, trouble must be treated
Just like a rebel;
Send him to the Debble!

Deena Rosenberg believes that with "Clap Yo' Hands," "the meaning of time began to figure prominently in the Gershwins' work (Rosenberg, Fascinating Rhythm, p. 141).

This idea of a non-specific integration of book and song was in fact noted as early as The New York Times review of Oh, Kay! by theater critic Brooks Atkinson when he writes, "Mr. Gershwin's score . . . [is] woven closely into the fun of the comedy. Sometimes its purely rhythmic as in 'Clap Yo' Hands' and ' Fidgety Feet'; sometimes it is capricious as in 'Do-Do-Do'" (See Jablonski, hardcover Ed. p. 130).

George termed Clap Yo' Hands" "a modern dance spiritual," but did not, as far as we know, comment on its integration or lack thereof into the plot or other aspects of Oh, Kay! Ira, however, in his memoir Lyrics on Several Occasions, writes that usually he has a preference for concluding a lyric with a "verbal twist" or minor "surprise ending" but in "Clap Yo' Hands" he merely repeats the opening group of three lines. He explains that he did this because "Clap Yo' Hands" is a "stage tune" the purpose of which is to introduce a dance, and he didn't want to "impede" any "exhortatory momentum" the song might create before the dance by distracting the audience with verbal cleverness. (See pp. 213-215, paperback Ed.) Although his comment does not completely exclude the possibility that he had another purpose for the song in mind; that is, using it to augment certain themes some critics have suggested are at work in the show and thereby revealing how the song is integrated into the show as a whole, the comment seems to reduce the likelihood of the lyricist having this in mind, at least consciously.

That the immediate and perhaps only purpose of "Clap Yo; Hands" is to introduce a dance is reinforced by spot Ira places "Clap Yo Hands" in his memoir. He includes the lyric for and his comments on the song in a chapter titled "A Gathering of Guidance," which also includes "Lose that Long Face," One Life to Live," "Slap that Bass," and "Strike up the Band," all song titles that reflect a straight forward, practical intention more than a subtle hint at a relatively hidden theme.

Wilfred Sheed, The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty,
New York: Random House, 2007 (paper-bound ED. 2008 shown)

Howard Pollack

George Gershwin: His Life and Work
Berkeley: Univ. of California Press
2006

Wilfred Sheed in his book The House That George Built comments that it wasn't the case, as some critics pejoratively suggested, that Gershwin's concert pieces were not much more than an off-shoot of hisTin Pan Alley/Broadway style songs; rather, and more tellingly, his concert music was an important influence on his songs (pp. 58-59, hardcover Ed.).

Howard Pollack states that Gershwin himself confirms this notion when he quotes the composer: "In my songs and in my pieces for symphony orchestra I've naturally made plentiful use of the five note scale. Off-hand, you'll find an obvious example in the refrain of 'Clap Yo' Hands', from Oh, Kay! [1926] and in one of the early themes of my Concerto in F." After quoting Gershwin, Pollack elaborates on the point by writing that the song resembles the Concerto by exhibiting "metrical dislocations of a sort found in the Concerto, and that the score for Oh, Kay! reveals a harmonic sophistication related to the concerto, suggesting further that Gershwin's concert pieces not only drew on but helped nourish his work in the theater" (p. 350). (For more on this topic, visit the Cafe Songbook page for The Man I Love.)

As mentioned above, George Gershwin saw his song as a "modern dance spiritual." Astutely, Pollack sites "Clap Yo' Hands" as playing a role in developing the relationship between African American spirituals and American musical theater, noting that of "the Big Four get-happy religious numbers from Broadway musicals" ("Clap Yo' Hands" -- 1926, Vincent Youmans' "Hallelujah" -- 1927, Harold Arlen's "Get Happy" -- 1930, and Cole Porter's "Blow, Gabriel, Blow" -- 1934), "Clap Yo' Hands" is the earliest and, furthermore, it might not be a coincidence that Gershwin first read Dubose Heyward's novel Porgy, and perhaps even got the idea for making it into an opera ( Porgy and Bess), during the rehearsals for Oh, Kay! (Pollack, pp. 383-384, hardcover Ed.)

More than one commentator on "Clap Yo' Hands" has observed that the song uses the pentatonic scale (a five note scale) as opposed to the more common diatonic scale. Alec Wilder writes that "Clap Yo' Hands," "a strong, direct and markedly rhythmic song" does not interest him except for it being Gershwin's first use of this scale. (It is, however, of interest to Gershwin himself. See his comments, just above.)

Wilder also notes, writing c. 1972, that the song's lyric with its African American colloquial speech is "out of bounds" in contemporary life. Ira Gershwin, in his 1959 Lyrics on Several Occasions, shows no awareness of this problem. He notes that the title never appears in the song in exactly the same form it does as the title itself. He writes that for the purpose of how the title would look on the sheet music, he changed the "Clap-a yo' hand" that appears repeatedly in the body of the song to "Clap Yo' Hands" for the title. He adds that some thirty-three years after he created the lyric and title he no longer thinks too much of the change he made or the reason he had for making it (See Wilder, p. 136, hardcover Ed.).

Click here to read lyrics for "Clap Yo' Hands" as sung by Ella Fitzgerald on her album The George and Ira Gershwin Songbook, original 1959 version on which Ella sings the verse.

In the performance on the Main Stage, above and the album shown in the Record-Video Cabinet, Ella omits the verse and begins with the refrain.

 

The full and authoritative lyric is published in:

Robert Kimball, Ed. The Complete Lyrics Of Ira Gershwin, New York: Alfred A. Knoph, 1993; reprinted as paperback by Da Capo Press, 1998.

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