Someone To Watch Over Me

Written: 1926

Music by: George Gershwin

Words by: Ira Gershwin

Written for: Oh, Kay!
(show, 1926)

On the Main Stage at Cafe Songbook

Audra McDonald

performing

"Someone To Watch Over Me"

Live at the Donmar Warehouse, Covent Garden, London, August 26, 1999

More Performances of
"Someone To Watch Over Me"
in the Cafe Songbook Record/Video Cabinet
(Video credit)

Cafe Songbook Reading Room

"Someone To Watch Over Me"

Critics Corner || Lyrics Lounge

"Someone to Watch Over Me" was introduced in the first preview of the musical Oh, Kay! in Philadelphia on October 18, 1926, by Gertrude Lawrence, the British star of musical revues and musical comedy. The story was typical for Twenties shows that featured complicated plots tossing together the rich and famous with the hoi polloi. This one included American millionaires, flappers, British aristocrats hard-up for money, and bootleggers all involved in "mistaken identities and zany deceptions," which provide "the usual opportunities for the principals and chorus to burst into song" (Hyland, p. 112). "Someone To Watch Over Me," one of the great love songs in American musical theater history, is performed by Lawrence in the title role of Kay. During the second act, she appears on stage alone pouring out her heart to a rag doll. Kay, a British aristocrat disguised as a housemaid in love with an American playboy is feeling lonesome and insecure. She is despairing of her chances for winning his affection, or, for that matter, of ever finding anybody to care for her. She shares her feelings of needing someone to watch over her with the doll.

Gertrude Lawrence sings "Someone To Watch Over Me"
recorded October 25, 1927. during the London run of Oh, Kay!
Lawrence is accompanied by His Majesty's Theatre Orchestra.
(She also recorded the song with piano accompaniment only in 1926, during the show's New York run. (Listen below.)

From Philadelphia the show continued its previews in Newark, New Jersey, and then opened on Broadway at the Imperial Theater on Nov. 8, for the longest run of a Gershwin show up to that point. In all these venues Lawrence appeared in the title role. After 256 performances in New York, 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 remained. She 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 reviewers called it the best musical of the year. The New York Times reviewer Brooks Atkinson wrote, "Musical comedy seldom proves more intensely delightful than Oh, Kay!" (Hyland, p. 114).

The show 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 mostly on their side of the pond, while the Gershwins, the shows producers, Alex Aarons and Vinton Freedly, as well as the director, the choreographer, etc. were on the new world side -- all without the benefit of Skype.

The broad outline of Oh, Kay! reveals a farce with touches of satire aimed at Prohibition in the United States. The show also satirizes, according to Gershwin biographer Howard Pollack, "American self-righteousness," and includes humor that was "unusually adult" for the typical romantic comedy of the time.

The actions that drive the baroquely complicated plot are the efforts made to save playboy Jimmy Winter* from his unfortunate marital entanglements so he can become engaged to Kay; and to save Kay's brother, a destitute English duke turned bootlegger, and his underworld cronies from the law. The take-away from this modern day musical fairy tale is that millionaires, aristocrats and even some petty criminals can all live together happily ever after if they are charming enough and sing wonderful songs. One of the most appealing characters is Shorty McGee, a small-time hood, played by Victor Moore (the comic actor who a decade later would play Fred Astaire's sidekick in the 1936 movie, Swing Time). 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." Even though this may be true, Edward Jablonski notes that such cultural-historical value has not been enough to sustain revivals of Oh, Kay! in its original form (Jablonski, p. 133). Most subsequent versions, including one staged by Wodehouse and Bolton themselves in 1961, have been adapted to try to catch the rhythm of succeeding eras, but with limited success. And, we might add, as is so often the case, a song like "Someone To Watch Over Me," that has taken its place in The Songbook, is still as vital, relevant and appealing today as it was then, even while the show from which it came has been largely forgotten.

*Many Americans of the time would have heard in the name Jimmy Winter an allusion to New York's anti-Prohibition, playboy mayor Jimmy Walker who was first elected in the year Oh, Kay| opened on Broadway.

Apparently, according to Ira Gershwin's recollection, the melody for "Someone to Watch Over Me" was written before the Gershwin brothers had a clear idea of where it would be used in Oh, Kay! It was not unusual for the songs in Gershwin shows of the period to be at least sketched out before their exact use was determined. So while they were awaiting the snail-mail delivery of the book from Wodehouse and Bolton, George came up with a melody that was, as Ira tells it , "fast and jazzy," a rhythm tune that would most likely, had it been left alone, have turned out to be a "dance-and-ensemble number" to be used somewhere in the show. However, at one point while George was playing it for Ira, something caused him to slow down the tempo. One account suggests it occurred when their sister Frances Gershwin walked into the room and distracted George. In any case, upon hearing the melody played this way, both George and Ira were struck by its potential to become a "wistful and warm" ballad. They then decided to retain the slower version but put it aside until they discovered the right place in the show to use it. Only then would Ira would create an appropriate lyric (Lyrics on Several Occasions, p 111, paperback Ed.).

George playing his "fast and jazzy" version of
"Someone to Watch Over Me"
(written with this tempo before the song had a title or a lyric,
recorded at Columbia Record Studios, London, on November 8, 1926,
the day of the opening on Broadway of Oh, Kay!
(George was known for his capacity to multi-task.)

Even after a place for the song had been found and the lyric written, the matter was not settled. First, during the Philadelphia previews, the producers put it in the first act, but by the time the show got to Broadway, it had been moved to halfway through Act 2 between two contrasting rhythm songs: the duet "Do, Do, Do" and the production dance number "Fidgety Feet." Even then, there was a moment when replacing it with another song altogether was contemplated. The other song, "The Man I Love," had been written by the Gershwins two years earlier for their show Lady, Be Good!, but never used (Pollack, p. 384). Every great song presumably has its right moment to be introduced to the world. They kept "Someone To Watch Over Me" in Oh, Kay! and it evolved into the show's most successful song, then into a hit and finally into a standard. "The Man I Love" would have to wait a bit longer for its turn to achieve immortality.

The idea for Lawrence to include a rag doll in her performance of "Someone To Watch Over Me" originated with none other than the versatile multitasker George Gershwin himself, who was apparently not only the composer but a momentary propman, choreographer and director. He recollects, "This doll was a strange looking object I found in a Philadelphia toy store and gave to Miss Lawrence with the suggestion that she use it in the number. That doll stayed in the show for the entire run" (The Gershwins, Robert Kimball and Alfred Simon, Eds., New York: Atheneum, 1973, p. 75). Gershwin's thought was that the singer's vulnerability and need for someone to care for her would be intensified by having her alone on stage with only a doll to sing to. It certainly worked for the audience. Jablonski quotes one of the Philadelphia reviewers on Lawrence's performance: She would have "wrung the withers of even the most hard-hearted of those present" (Jablonski, p. 131). Gershwin scholar Michael Feinstein, writes that there is a photograph of Lawrence with the rag doll in which she appears "impossibly coy," yet Ira described her performance to him as "pure magic," and "by all accounts mesmerizing" (Feinstein, p. 185).

Julie Andrews performing "Someone To Watch Over Me"
in the 1968 Gertrude Lawrence biopic Star!.
In the clip we see Andrews/Lawrence figuring out how exactly to use the doll that Gershwin gave her, and then performing with it in Oh, Kay!.

To Scherzando or Not To Scherzando

Writing in 1972, Alec Wilder, states that he heard that the 1926 Gertrude Lawrence Broadway performance of "Someone To Watch Over Me" in Oh, Kay! was taken at a tempo "fast to the degree that none of the ballad quality associated with the song for so many years could have been present" (p. 137, hardcover Ed.). He explains this by noting that the only direction George Gershwin included on the sheet music was "sherzando" (in a playful or sportive manner), implying that Lawrence and the orchestra must have done it that way. That Gertrude Lawrence sang the song "scherzando" on stage, despite what Wilder may have remembered hearing, was not the case. The notion that she did runs counter to Ira Gershwin's comments in his Lyrics on Several Occasions (published originally in 1959). There he states that the music originally marked "scherzando" was intended to be used for a dance number, but when George and he realized it would work better as a ballad (See above.), it was decided to put the newly slowed down version of the music aside "until the proper stage occasion arose for it" (p. 111, paperback Ed.). This all occurred before George and Ira had even seen Wodehouse's and Bolton's book. The spot for the song finally settled on came mid-way through act 2 and found her singing it as a ballad. Although there is no known recording of Lawrence's on stage performance, her 1926 New York studio recording as well as her 1927 London recording, are presumably both taken at similar tempos as her contemporaneous stage performances, a tempo described by Ted Gioia as "an animated medium pulse" not atypical for the performance of a ballad. Either Wilder's threshold tempo for a ballad is quite low or he must have heard or remembered incorrectly how Lawrence sang it. He is, of course, exactly correct about "the ballad quality associated with the song" ever since. Here is how she recorded it during the run of the show:

Gertrude Lawrence 1926 New York Victor recording of
"Someone To Watch Over Me"
with piano accompaniment by Tom Waring
(Fred Waring's brother).

On the other hand, when George recorded his piano version in 1926, he followed his original scherzando direction. (Listen above.) As very few if any subsequent recordings used "scherzando" as their guide (See Record / Video Cabinet, this page), Gershwin's recording serves as an historical footnote, providing us with what the composer originally had in mind. That he made the recording on the day (November 8, 1926) Oh, Kay! opened on Broadway with its slowed-down version of "Someone To Watch Over Me," suggests he he is reminding us and himslef what his musical child was really like before she underwent a little neonatal surgery, and, perhaps, hinting at some residual affection for her as originally conceived, enough affection possibly that George had a hand in keeping the "scherzando" around on the published sheet music.

After praising various aspects of the song's composition, Wilder repeats that his liking for it is based on the song being performed as a ballad, which, he says, it "isn't . . . if one accepts 'scherzando' as the intent" -- not taking into account that it was only the intent of the songwriters until George and Ira changed their minds and slowed it down, which was before the lyric was written and before the show opened. What they forgot to do was get rid of the "scherzando" on the sheet music -- unless George didn't want to. In fact, it survives even today on some of the digital sheet music sold on the web. (View here.)

Michael Feinstein connects the lyric of "Someone to Watch Over Me" to Ira Gershwin's personal experience despite the fact that "Ira emphatically denied that any song [he wrote] bore any resemblance to his real life." Nevertheless, Ira himself admitted to Feinstein that a line from "Someone To Watch Over Me," (namely, "He may not be the man some girls think of as handsome,") derived from his own feelings of good fortune in marrying Leonore Strunsky, an event that coincided with the writing of the song.

Feinstein sums up what makes a great theater love song by enumerating the crucial elements present in "Someone To Watch Over Me": "a memorable and emotionally affecting tune; a lyric that amplifies the music, captures the mood, and moves the story along; a great show to set it in; and a great star to sing it." He adds that it doesn't hurt if the stars are properly aligned (pp. 187, 188).

"Integration": The Very Model for a Modern Major Songwriter

Both Deena Rosenberg and Michael Feinstein have stated more or less flat out that the Gershwin's never wrote a song for a show without a dramatic context in mind. The Twenties was a period in the history of American musical theater when musical shows were transitioning away from the revue format into show scores featuring songs integratedinto a plot. Nothing, of course is ever absolute, and "Someone To Watch Over Me," though written during the aforesaid period by songwriters who were on the cutting edge of modernity in musical theater, was nevertheless, not written with an exact dramatic context in mind. George Gershwin composed the music knowing only the show's general structure, a structure that would include, like all shows of the time, up-tempo dance numbers; therefore, he wrote a lively piece of music and labeled the tempo "scherzando" (lively and playful). He believed he was writing a rhythm number that would get plugged into the show to accompany an animated dance. Ira knew this also and believed he would write a lyric to suit such a number but couldn't do it until "we knew the exact spot where [the piece] would fit" (Furia, p. 58). However, when (as described above) they discovered that the melody was actually more suited to becoming a ballad, plans had to change. The song would go into a slot where a ballad, not an ensemble dance number, was needed. Moreover, when, after the lyric had been written, the number was moved from one act and scene to another, Ira, was faced with the fact that his lyric would now somehow have to fit a different dramatic context.

Philip Furia explores the change in positioning of "Someone To Watch Over Me" from Act 1 to Act 2 and how that effected the integration of the song into the story. The book-writers Wodehouse and Bolton, required only one thing from the songwriters and that was for them to come up with a "lady-in-waiting" song, a song about a lady waiting for her love to come along, that would be long enough to cover a scene change. They were apparently not that concerned with integration. Ira, however, Furia notes, needed more integration as well as inspiration than this rather mechanical requirement provided and found it in the complexity of the title character, Lady Kay. She was not the generic flapper of earlier Gershwin shows but a multi-faceted figure, one who came from wealth but was streetwise, one whose personas in the show included an "urbanely flippant" society lady, a housemaid with a brash Cockney accent, and an innocent, vulnerable and naive young woman. With the exception of Gertrude Lawrence, few musical comedy performers of the day could have played a character with such a variety of traits and personas.

Ira wrote his lyric (by that time knowing the song would be a ballad not a rhythm number) with all that complexity as well as the action of the first scene of Act 1 in mind. In that scene the lady is looking for a man she had rescued from revenue officers who thought him to be a bootlegger. She knows almost nothing about him, doesn't even remember what he looks like, but is young, romantic and desperately hoping to find him. (In fact, he is not a bootlegger but, conveniently for the plot, an American playboy millionaire, owner of the mansion where the lady's brother, a down-and-out English duke turned bootlegger, has stashed his hooch.) Ira's lyric is therefore vague in terms of describing the man ('the someone" of the lyric). All she knows is that she wants him to "turn out to be [that] someone to watch over me," reinforcing the needy and innocent side of her character.

When, however, the song is moved to Act 2, she has, as Furia notes, "already met, kissed and cavorted with her millionaire" rendering Ira's lyric less directly related to this new context. This was the penalty, according to Wayne Shirley (quoted by Furia) "for writing lyrics too closely connected to the plot of a show," in other words integrating the lyric too tightly. Furia says, the lyric succeeds anyway because "it retained its particularity from a character who was a combination of hard experience and innocent yearning" and even more so because Lawrence's performance was irresistible (Furia, p. 60). It could be added that the lyric is conveniently vague enough not to be glaringly out of context. Although she now knows the fellow she wants, she is convinced their romance has little or no chance of success. Her loneliness has returned and so the sentiments expressed in the song still apply. Apparently, in 1926, the bar of integration for keeping a song in was not as high as it would become in subsequent decades. Her general state of mind was enough to bridge the gap between her specific situation and the lyric. George insured, according to Deena Rosenberg, that the gap would be filled by supplying "Miss Lawrence," as he called her, with the doll he had found. She sings "Someone To Watch Over Me" alone on stage with only the doll as a candidate to take care of her, thus intensifying the "wistful" quality that both he and Ira had discovered when early on George had inadvertently slowed down the tempo -- which turned out to be integration enough.

Click here to read lyrics for "Someone To Watch Over Me" as sung by Ella Fitzgerald on her album The George and Ira Gershwin Songbook, original 1959 version on which Ella sings the verse-- conducted and arranged by Nelson Riddle.

This video and album contain the same 1959 track
as Ella's original Gershwin Songbook version.

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Lyric and Gender: Typically lyricists try to write so that a lyric originally intended for a character in a show who is of one gender can be easily converted to a lyric that will fit a performer of the other gender should he or she wish to perform or record the song independently of the vehicle for which it was written. Often this is quite simply a matter of changing a pronoun or two. "Someone to Watch Over Me" was written for Gertrude Lawrence to sing in Oh, Kay! and so Ira Gershwin wrote,

Although he may not be the man some
Girls think of as handsome,
To my heart he'll carry the key.

But when Chet Baker sings the song we get

Although I may not be the man
Some girls think of as handsome,
To her heart I'll carry the key.

(italics ours)

Editor's note: Only one of the five male singers, Cheyenne Jackson, who performs "Someone to Watch Over Me" on this page, uses Ira's original lyrics text. This may be because he wants to be authentic to that text, or, perhaps, because he wants to be authentic to himself as one who desires to be watched over by a man. Whether or not the latter is the case, that the recording was made in 2010 suggests being authentic to oneself is possible at that date in a way it wouldn't have been for earlier generations of performers who might have wanted to do the same. It is also interesting to note that if in Jackson's rendition this is a song being sung by a man about a man, Jackson chooses not to change the word "girls" to "men," which would have made things entirely clear. That he doesn't, may leave things a bit ambiguous but doesn't rule out anything either. Ambiguity in art is not always, or perhaps even mostly, disadvantageous as it would be in, say, mathematics.

 

 

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.

Click here to read Cafe Songbook lyrics policy.

Visitor Comments

Credits

The Cafe Songbook
Record/Video Cabinet:
Selected Recordings of

"Someone To Watch
Over Me"

1926
Gertrude Lawrence
albums: various

Aamzon

iTunes

Notes: The Amazon link above above is to a discography of albums eac of which includes a Lawrence version of "Someone to Watch Over Me." The recording on the YouTube Video above is from the original 1926 Oh, Kay! production on Broadway. The length of tis recording is 2;47, which can be sued to identify albums that include the 1926 version. Other Lawrence version of "Someone To Watch Over Me," include are the one from 1927, recorded in London during the West End run of Oh, Kay! Gershwin biographer Howard Pollack noting that no matter how effective later on stage performances of songs like "Someone To Watch Over Me" . . . might be, we are fortunate to have Lawrence's own contemporaneous recordings with "their special elegance and humor, that at their best characterized Gershwin's musical comedies in their own time" (Pollack, p. 389).
More Video: View/listen to original recording on 78 RPM disc from 1926 and 1927 recordings at left.
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1926
George Gerswhin
album: George Gershwin Plays George Gershwin

Notes: This is a two CD set consisting of recordings of George Gershwin on piano made during the 1920's and 1930s. These recordings are not from piano rolls but are Gershwin himself at the piano; and, according to the liner notes, document "Gershwin's commercial recording career including all his commercial solo piano and piano with orchestra recordings." Included are songs made at Columbia studios in London during 1926, some with Gershwin accompanying Fred and Adele Astaire; concert pieces including Rhapsody in Blue with Paul Whiteman and his orchestra in the New York City Victor studios June 10, 1924, four months after the famous premier performance in Aeolian Hall, New York; the finale of Corncerto in F (the only recording of him playing any of this work) and An American in Paris with Nat Shilkret; selections from Porgy and Bess with Gershwin accompanying Lawrence Tibbett and Helen Jepson; and various recordings from radio shows.
Music-Video: same track as on album shown above -- View and listen at left

1939, 1944
Lee Wiley
album 1 (1939): Lee Wiley Sings the Songs of George and Ira Gershwin and Cole Porter

Notes: Lee Wiley is accompanied only by Fats Waller on organ for "Someone to Watch Over Me." According to Ted Gioia, Eddie Condon (who played guitar on some of the other tracks during the session for the Gershwin portion of this CD) "must have been impressed [with the song] since he added it to his repertoire in the mid-1940s," which was important in bringing "Someone To Watch Over Me" to the attention of the jazz community and eventually to the public in general after the song had slipped in popularity. Wiley continued to sing with Condon's band for several years after the session with Waller, including Condon's broadcasts from Town Hall in NYC. She often performed "Someone to Watch Over Me" on their gigs and made the recording on video 2, just below.

The CD referenced above joins the tracks from two vinyl albums (Lee Wiley Sings George and Ira Gershwin and Lee Wiley Sings Cole Porter) with personnel including pianist Joe Bushkin, trumpeter Max Kaminsky, tenor-saxophonist Bud Freeman, clarinetist Pee Wee Russell, a quartet with Bushkin and trumpeter Bunny Berigan, and Paul Weston's Orchestra.

The separate vinyl albums were, in fact, the first of the so-called songbook albums with a single singer focusing on a single composer (most notably the Ella Fitzgerald Songbook series, which followed Wiley's):

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iTunes

album 2 (1944): Lee Wiley
Live on Stage, Town Hall, New York

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iTunes

During 1944 and 1945 Eddie Condon and his band broadcast weekly from Town Hall in New York, where "Someone to Watch Over Me" was a staple of their repertoire. On the album referenced above, Wiley, often his vocalist, is accompanied by Condon's band with Condon on guitar; other personnel on the album include Edmond Hall, Joe Marsala, Pee Wee Russell (clarinet); Ernie Caceres (soprano saxophone, baritone saxophone); Dick Cary (trumpet, cornet); Max Kaminsky, Billy Butterfield (trumpet); Muggsy Spanier, Wild Bill Davison, Bobby Hackett (cornet); Benny Morton's All Stars, Lou McGarity, Miff Mole, Tommy Dorsey (trombone); Jess Stacy, Joe Bushkin, Gene Schroeder (piano); Joe Grauso, Gene Krupa, George Wettling, Danny Alvin, Big Sid Catlett, Johnny Blowers (drums).
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1945
Coleman Hawkins
album: Indian Summer

Notes: Hawkins is an early representative of the slow tempo, romantic school in jazz interpretations of "Someone To Watch Over Me." Coleman Hawkins, tenor sax; Howard McGhee, trumpet; Sir Charles Thompson, piano; Allen Reuss, guitar; John Simmons, bass; Denzil Best, drums, recorded Los Angeles, March 9, 1945.
Video: same track as on album shown above

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1945, 1954
Artie Shaw
album: title

1945

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1954

Notes: Shaw recorded "Someone To Watch Over Me" early (1945), a very good swing era orchestra recording; and late (1954) that could be described as sophisticated swing with a touch of bop in which Shaw was tipping his clarinet to the successors of swing. His small group here includes Artie Shaw, clarinet; Hank Jones, piano; Tal Farlow, guitar; Joe Puma, guitar; Tommy Potter, bass; Joe Roland, vibes; and Irv Klugar, drums.
1945:

1954:

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1945, 1947
Frank Sinatra
album: Best Of Columbia Years 1943-52 [4-CD Set]

Notes:
1945, 1947:

Notes: The track on The Best of the Columbia Years compilation set shown above comes originally from the album The Voice that included eight songs on four 78 rpm discs, all of which appear on The Voice of Frank Sinatra CD shown immediately above, recorded July 30, 1945, in Los Angeles on Columbia Records. The album also contains ten bonus tracks of alternate takes from 1945-1947. Will Friedwald comments that The Vocie album "is Sinatra's first done with the intent of creating a uniform sound throughout, in this case a kind of chamber music created by an eight piece ensemble or 'double quartet' with an emphasis on one of the violins as solo instrument and the guitar as the primary rhythm instrument." This intent to create a sound for the album is true of several early 78 albums that should be seen, according to Friedwald, not as just random collections of songs Sinatra had already sung but as early versions of his thematic concept albums of subsequent decades. The chamber music effect, Friedwald points out, is especially prominent during the violin/guitar duo in "Someone To Watch Over Me," which is overall a "moving expression of vulnerability, explaining why bobby-soxers wanted to mother him as well as wrestle with him in the back of a DeSoto" (Will Friedwald, Sinatra! The Song Is You A Singer's Art, p. 151, hardcover Ed.). Music-Video: Same track as on Best Of Columbia Years 1943-52, shown first, above.

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1949
Art Tatum
album: title

Notes: album consists of mostly solo recordings made in 1949. Ted Gioia writes that Tatum's '49 recording transforms "Someone to Watch Over Me" "into a virtuoso piano rhapsody."
Video: Not the same track as on album but similar

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1950, 1959
Ella Fitzgerald
album: Pure Ella

Notes: Two notable recordings by Ella of "Someone to Watch Over Me": The slightly lesser known is the earlier 1950 recording for Decca originally appearing on the album Ella Sings Gershwin, recorded in New York City, September 11-12, 1950 and March 29-30, 1954. On this version, she is accompanied only by Ellis Larkins on piano. The more well known is from Ella's George and Ira Gershwin's Songbook album produced by Norman Granz in 1959, with Nelson Riddle arrangement: video and album in the Cafe Songbook Lyrics Lounge, center column on this page. She sings the verse on both.
Video: 1950 with Ellis Larkins

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1955
Chet Baker
album: Chet Baker Sings Again

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Video notes: Chet Baker on vocal and trumpet recorded live in Holland, 1955, with Dick Twardzik (piano), Jimmy Bond (bass), and Peter Littman (drums). Track on video is very similar to the one on the compilation album shown above, but we are not certain if it is the same one.

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1957
Sarah Vaughan
album: Sarah Vaughan
Sings George Gershwin

Notes: On this Sarah Vaughan version of "Someone To Watch Over Me," which includes the verse, she is backed by Hal Mooney and his studio orchestra, recorded March 20, 1957 for EmArcy Records (an affiliate of Mercury Records) in New York City for the two volume album Sarah Vaughan Sings George Gershwin, which here is a 2 CD set that includes the original 2 volumes on vinyl. On the album she is accompanied either by Jimmy Jones on piano or by the Hal Mooney Orchestra. Previously unreleased material is added to the CD version. Liner notes are by Leonard Feather, John Wilson, Ben Young and Peter Keepnews. All tracks have been digitally remastered using 24-bit technology.
Video: same track as on album shown above

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1959
Blossom Dearie
album: My Gentleman Friend

Notes: Recorded at Nola Studios, New York City, May 21-22, 1959, originally released as Verve (2125). Blossom Dearie accompanies herself on the piano and according to Amazon customer reviewer flyingductchman1971, "This is the most intimate album that Blossom recorded during her Verve years. The stand-out track on the recording is definitely 'Someone to Watch Over Me' which Blossom approaches as if she is writing the very words into her diary or whispering them into a prayer locket."
Video: same track as on album shown above

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1965
Ben Webster
album: At Montmartre 1965-66

Notes: The track on the CD above is from Paris in 1965, and has Webster on Tenor sax playing with Atli Bjørn (piano), Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen (bass) and Rune Carlsson (drums).
Video: A live performance also from 1965 in Copenhagen has some of the same personnel: Ole Steenberg drums;, Ben Webster tenor, Nils Henning Oersted Pedersen bass and Kenny Drew piano. According to YouTube uploader jaejaeman, the scene is likely Nils Henning Oersted Pedersen's apartment in Copenhagen. He notes that in his video, the piano Intro. has been dropped -- beginning with a shot for Ben.

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1965
Barbra Streisand
album: My Name is Barbra

Notes: The album is a collection of songs and excerpts from motion pictures and stage musicals taken from the first Barbra Streisand television special broadcast on April 28, 1965. The album won her the Grammy for best female vocalist of that year.
Video: same track as on above album

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1968
Oscar Peterson
album: Exclusively for My Friends (box set), Vol. IV (My Favorite Instrument, Live)
The four disc box set

Vol. 4 only from the above box set

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iTunes

Notes: Volume 4 of the box set, pictured just above, was Peterson's first full record of unaccompanied piano solos. The solo album features Peterson "stretching out on nine familiar standards and really tearing into a few of them, including "Perdido," "Bye Bye Blackbird," "Lulu's Back in Town," while giving "Little Girl Blue" a beautiful and lyrical treatment" (Scott Yanow, CD Universe). "Someone to Watch Over Me" is the opening track on Vol. 4 on which Peterson begins with a forceful up-tempo treatment, perhaps reminiscent of Gershwin's original "Scherzando" intent, then slows it down to ballad tempo (more like Gertrude Lawrence and subsequent singers have used), moving up and back between these two speeds as the fancy takes him.
Video:

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1978
Willie Nelson
album: Stardust

Notes: The album Stardust, originally released in 1978, is Nelson's first contribution to the crossover movement into The Songbook by artists who typically perform in other areas of American pop. Many have noted how he has managed to carry with him his country sound both in instrumentation and voice without violating the music he applies them to, which is a tribute both to him and to the songs. This stands in contrast to Linda Ronstadt who leaves her previous genres behind and becomes, with her Nelson Riddle arrangements, a completely convincing, high quality Songbook performer.
The edition of Stardust shown above contains the originally released songs plus bonus tracks.
Video: same track as on the album shown above

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1983
Linda Ronstadt
album: What's New

Notes: Arrangements and orchestra conducted by Nelson Riddle on Ronstadt's first crossover to "standards" album. "Someone To Watch Over Me" also appears on her 1986 compilation album 'Round Midnight, which collects her previous Riddle arranged standards recordings.

Video:

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1998-99
Keith Jarrett
album: The Melody at Night with You

Notes: This is a Jarrett solo album of contemplative, romantic renderings of traditional American songs, standards (in the Songbook sense), and one of his own compositions ("Meditation"). The standards include "Someone to Watch Over Me," "I Loves You Porgy," "I Got it Bad and That Ain't Good" (which was nominated for a Grammy for best jazz solo), "Don't Ever Leave Me," "Blame It on My Youth," "Something To Remember You By," and " I'm Through with Love." -- recorded at Cavelight Studio, Oxford, New Jersey, 1997, 1998, released 1999.
Video: same track as on album shown above

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1996
Sting
album: Let Your Soul Be Your Pilot

Notes: Sting performed and arranged "Someone To Watch Over Me" for the 1987 Tom Berenger movie of the same title. The track on the album above is a very similar rendition with piano accompaniment only. The album version is a shorter, studio performance.
Video: Similar track to one on album shown above -- Sting vocal with piano only accompaniment

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2003
Amy Winehouse
album: Frank (B-Sides)

Notes: 2008 limited deluxe two CD edition of Winehouse's 2003 first album, Frank. Frank (B-Sides) is heavy on original compositions that didn't make it onto the 2003 debut, and also includes "a sublime take on George Gershwin’s 'Someone to Watch Over Me' [that] plays with a sultry, smoky lounge feel" (iTunes album review").
Video: same track as on album shown above

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2009
Cheyenne Jackson (vocal)
Michael Feinstein (piano)
album: The Power of Two

Notes: Singer, pianist and Songbook scholar Michael Feinstein teams up with film star and Broadway actor and singer Cheyenne Jackson for this album. Tracks include both solo and duet performances. On "Someone To Watch Over Me," Jackson sings and Feinstein accompanies him on piano. The album is nice work, and "getting it" for them is having figured out how to do a duets album without the forced and artificial qualities found in so many other albums of this sort.
Video: same track as on album shown above

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2010
Lady Gaga
Live on the Today Show Summer Concert Series

Notes: Both Tony Bennett, on whose second Duets album Lady Gaga joins him to perform "The Lady Is a Tramp," and Michael Feinstein have been very complimentary regarding her performance of standards. While writing about the wide range of performers, from classic to contemporary, who have sung "Someone To Watch Over Me," Feinstein (a traditionalist performer and scholar of The Songbook, writes, "In 2010, Lady Gaga sang ["Someone To Watch Over Me"] on the Today show and I was at first shocked, then thrilled to hear her rich performance of it." (Lady Gaga's performance was on the July 9, 2010 Today Show. As far as we know, she has not recorded the song.)
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