On this day, March, 11, 2024, Smithsonian Magazine reported the discovery of lost sheet music from the first full-length musical by George Gershwin — nearly 100 years after its first performance.
The complete score had long been considered lost until musician and researcher Jacob Kerzner went digging around in Amherst College’s Samuel French Collection. That’s when he struck gold, finding 800 pages of music from Gershwin’s “La, La Lucille.”
It was written when Gershwin was 20.
Kerzner told “Hyperallergic’s” Maya Potone, “It feels like Gershwin just beginning to learn what makes a hit song, and just beginning to play around with some of his adventurous harmonies and syncopated rhythms.”
