“Fascinating Rhythm” is a popular song written by George Gershwin in 1924 with lyrics by Ira Gershwin. It was first introduced by Cliff Edwards, Fred Astaire and Adele Astaire in the Broadway musical ‘Lady Be Good’. The Astaires also recorded the song in April 1926, in London with George Gershwin on the piano. The song provided the music for a famous dance sequence by Eleanor Powell in the movie Lady Be Good.
Gerald Mast calls “Fascinating Rhythm” the Gershwins’ first and best song about rhythm [the other being, of course, the later “I Got Rhythm”], and alludes to the terms Ira used while referring to it when he first heard an early version George brought back from London in 1924. The “tricky” and eventually “fascinating” rhythm of “Fascinating Rhythm” that was both so frustrating and appealing to Ira is analyzed by Mast who concludes, “The result of this playful trickery is a rhythmically complex song about rhythmic complexity, a song about rhythmic fascination that is fascinating because its rhythms can never be predicted or taken for granted.”
Many recorded versions exist. One of the rarest recordings is by Joe Bari (a pseudonym of Anthony Dominick Benedetto, later better known as Tony Bennett) for Leslie Records in 1949 and issued as catalog number 919 with “Vieni Qui” as the flip side. Having rerecorded it as a duet with Diana Krall in 2018 for their duet album Love is Here to Stay, he currently holds the Guinness World Record for the “longest time between the release of an original recording and a re-recording of the same single by the same artist”.
Michael Feinstein discovered an early manuscript for the music of “Fascinating Rhythm” that bore the title “Syncopated City” in a warehouse in Secaucus, NJ, while he was working for Ira Gershwin in 1982. Feinstein explains in his book The Gershwins and Me that the musical style of “Fascinating Rhythm” was something entirely new for its time. Its “accent changes on the notes for rhythmic effect and the shift of accompaniment” contributed to a restless “restless energy” that is a trademark of the song. Feinstein recognizes that George was inspired by “the sounds of New York that he’d been soaking up his whole life . . . all the insistent, percussive machinery” of a modern, “Syncopated City”.
“Fascinating Rhythm” inspired the riff to the 1974 Deep Purple song “Burn”. The 1926 Astaire/Gershwin version and a 1938 version by Hawaiian steel guitarist Sol Ho’opi’i have both been added to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry of “culturally, historically, or aesthetically important” American sound recordings.
