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Signature Song
by Bill Berkson

Bunny Berigan first recorded "I Can't Get Started" with a small group that
included Joe Bushkin, Cosy Cole and Artie Shaw in 1936, the same year that
the song, written by George Gershwin and Vernon Duke, made its debut in the
Ziegfield Follies. (In the Follies it had been rendered as a duet patter
number by Bob Hope and Eve Arden.) By 1937, when Berigan re-recorded it in a
big-band setting, "I Can't Get Started" had become his signature song. That
same year Billie Holiday recorded her well-known version of the song backed
by Lester Young and the rest of the Count Basie Orchestra. In 1936, Wiley
and Berigan, who were lovers for a time, began appearing together on Wiley's
15-minute CBS radio spot, Saturday Night Swing Club. But in 1939, when
Wiley recorded her album of Gershwin songs, both Berigan and "I Can't Get
Started" were absent from the set. Berigan died from alcoholism-related
causes on June 2, 1942. Although "I Can't Get Started" is perfectly suited
to Wiley's deep phrasing and succinct vibrato, she recorded the song only
once, informally, in 1944, during a Los Angeles club date. The Spanish Civil
War started in 1936 and ended in 1939 with General Franco's forces entering
Madrid. "I've settled revolutions in Spain" goes Vernon Duke's lyric,
equally odd.

Poet, critic, and professor at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Publications:

SERENADE (Zoland Books)

BLUE IS THE HERO (L Publications)

YOUNG MANHATTAN (with Anne Waldman) (Erudite Fangs) -- all available from SPD

Email: berkson@pacbell.net

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