Sometimes a song manages to succeed against all odds. As the sheet music for “The Man I Love” was on its way to production, it was unceremoniously dropped from the 1924 Broadway musical Lady, Be Good! The song was then included in Strike Up the Band (1927), which closed during its out-of-town tryouts. It was then slated for the Ziegfeld hit Rosalie (1928), a team effort by Sigmund Romberg, the Gershwins, and P.G. Wodehouse. Yet again the song was dropped before the show opened. Even a modestly successful 1930 revival of Strike Up the Band could not end the song’s streak of bad luck as the Gershwins agreed to drop it before the show opened.

Despite such endless setbacks, the homeless composition had become popular in London and Paris as Lady Mountbatten, a Gershwin friend, had returned to Europe with a copy of the sheet music. Slower to catch on in the United States, the popularity of “The Man I Love” crested in 1928 with five recordings on the pop charts in the same year. A 1927 recording by Marion Harris led the way, entering the charts in March and rising to number four.

• Marion Harris (1928, #4)
• Sophie Tucker (1928 #11)
• Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra (1928, Vaughan DeLeath, vocal, #15)
• Fred Rich and His Orchestra (1928, Vaughan DeLeath, vocal, #19)
• Benny Goodman and His Orchestra (1937, #20)

“The Man I Love” was also the signature song for George Gershwin’s weekly CBS radio show, Music by Gershwin, which ran from 1934 to 1935.

The ballad’s checkered past was not due to lack of appeal and it became one of Gershwin’s biggest hits despite the lack of a successful production association. The song’s problem stemmed more from the fact that it just didn’t fit in a lively musical. Standing alone “The Man I Love” was wonderful, but in a show it brought the action to a near standstill.

As improvisational vehicles, many songs could not endure the transition from the loose Dixieland style of the “Roaring Twenties” to the smooth swing sound of the 1930’s. They were dropped from jazz musicians’ catalogs, performances and recordings and relegated to period collections and specialty bands. There are, however, a handful of songs written in the mid-twenties or earlier that have persisted as the topmost jazz standards: W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” (1914); George and Ira Gershwin’s “The Man I Love” (1924) and “Oh, Lady Be Good” (1924); and the Ken Casey, Maceo Pinkard, Ben Bernie composition “Sweet Georgia Brown” (1925).