Sat. 1 pm – George Gershwins’ “Porgy and Bess.” on the Metropolitan Opera Radio Matinee. WRUU – 107.5 is Savannah’s home now for this radio tradition that goes back to 1931. 02/01/2020.

The 1976 and 1977 recordings of the opera won Grammy Awards for Best Opera Recording, making Porgy and Bess the only opera to win this award over two consecutive years.^[52]

Although members of the jazz community initially felt that a Jewish piano player and a white novelist could not adequately convey the plight of blacks in a 1930s Charleston ghetto, jazz musicians warmed up more to the opera after twenty years, and more jazz-based recordings of it began to appear. Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald recorded an album in 1957 in which they sang and scatted Gershwin’s tunes. The next year, Miles Davis recorded what some consider a seminal interpretation of the opera arranged for big band.

Porgy and Bess (/ˈpɔːrɡi/) is an English-language opera by the American composer George Gershwin, with a libretto written by authorDuBose Heyward and lyricist Ira Gershwin. It was adapted from Dorothy Heyward and DuBose Heyward’s play Porgy, itself an adaptation of DuBose Heyward’s 1925 novel of the same name.

(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porgy_and_Bess)