“Embraceable You” was one of the hit songs of the Gershwins’ Girl Crazy, which opened on Broadway October 14, 1930 (just about one year after the onset of the Great Depression), and ran for 272 performances.
The show subsequently appeared in two movie versions and was featured in the very successful 1992 Broadway revision, retitled Crazy for You. The 1943 movie Girl Crazy attracted a large audience due in no small degree to its stars, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, and to the big band presence of Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra.
“Embraceable You,” introduced by Ginger Rogers, then a burgeoning star, and Allen Kearns, was no doubt the most popular song in Girl Crazy. But other songs in this great musical, which starred Ethel Merman, were also to become standards, notably, “Bidin’ My Time,” “But Not For Me,” and the perennial “I Got Rhythm,” which became a standard in the jazz repertoire. All these songs are performed and often recorded today, with “Embraceable You” still attracting special attention, just as it did at the time. It has been said that after 1930 this song was responsible for the consolidation of many love relationships.
