ON MY WAY: THE UNTOLD STORY OF ROUBEN MAMOULIAN, GEORGE GERSHWIN AND PORGY AND BESS

By Joseph Horowitz

"Bring my goat!" Porgy exclaims in the final scene of Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess. For years it was assumed that DuBose Heyward―the librettist for the opera Porgy and Bess―penned this historic line. In fact, both it and "Oh Lawd, I'm on my way" were added to the play by the unheralded Rouben Mamoulian. Culling new information from the recently opened Mamoulian Archives at the Library of Congress, award-winning author Joseph Horowitz shows that, more than anyone else, Mamoulian took Heyward's vignette of a regional African-American subculture and transformed it into an epic theater work. Part biography, part revelatory history, "On My Way" re-creates Mamoulian's visionary style on stage and screen, his collaboration with George Gershwin, and the genesis of the opera that changed the face of American musical life

W.W. Norton & Company ((2013)