But Not For Me (From "Girl Crazy"): Lead Sheet

This lead sheet captures one of Gershwin's most singable melodies in a format that lets you strip away arrangement and focus on the song itself. The harmonic content rewards both straightforward reading and creative reharmonization, making it equally useful for a student first learning to navigate changes and a seasoned player building substitution vocabulary.

Nostalgic yet sophisticated, with a melody that seems effortless until you examine its construction. The harmonic palette sits comfortably between Tin Pan Alley accessibility and jazz harmonic depth, creating a song that feels both familiar and endlessly revisable.

Jazz musicians working from fakebooks, music students building standards repertoire, and educators introducing harmonic reharmonization and jazz vocabulary. Whether you're a bandleader preparing a small ensemble arrangement or an improviser deepening your working knowledge of American song, this lead sheet provides the essential information.

• Study the chord substitutions provided in your real book; the alternate changes often highlight voice-leading possibilities the original changes might obscure.
• Pay attention to the melody's phrasing rather than rushing into harmonic fills; Gershwin's gift for memorable lines means less is often more.
• Use the suggested recorded versions in the discography as reference, but treat them as starting points, not templates.

Program this alongside other Gershwin standards to trace his melodic and harmonic fingerprints across the American songbook. It works well in a jazz appreciation concert or a program exploring the intersection of musical theater and jazz idiom, and serves as repertoire for student combos and small ensemble arrangements.

• Reading lead sheets and chord symbols
• Identifying and applying harmonic substitutions
• Connecting melody contour to underlying harmonic movement
• Improvising over jazz changes
• Understanding Tin Pan Alley harmonic conventions