My Man's Gone Now

"My Man's Gone Now" is an aria composed by George Gershwin, with lyrics by DuBose Heyward, written for the opera Porgy and Bess (1935).

Sung in the original production by Ruby Elzy, it has been covered by many female singers, notably Ella Fitzgerald (Porgy & Bess album), Leontyne Price, Audra McDonald (who would later sing the part of Bess), Nina Simone, Sarah Vaughan, and Shirley Horn, among others.

In the opera, the aria is sung by Serena, the grieving widow, at her husband Robbins's wake. He has been murdered by Crown, a drunken stevedore, during a crap game played in the courtyard of Catfish Row. She sings that she will no longer hear his footsteps coming up stairs and that "ol man sorrow" will be her companion from now on, telling her she is old. The aria's music and lyrics refer to popular African American spiritual songs and are accompanied by melodic wails which are picked up by the chorus.

Stephen Sondheim has expressed his deep admiration for the Dubose Heyward's lyrics, writing that, along with Summertime, it creates a distinctive "informal, uneducated diction and a stream of consciousness" that defines the verbal style of the characters.

Deryck Cooke in The Language of Music refers to the song as an example of "substituting the minor for the major third in the descending 5-3-1 progression, we have a phrase which has been much used to express an 'incoming' painful emotion, in a context of finality: acceptance of, or yielding to grief; discouragement and depression; passive suffering; and the despair connected with death." Gershwin uses it to express "the despair of Serena... as she laments that her murdered husband will never come home to her again--'My man's gone now'."

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