Follywood was the summer house DuBose and Dorothy Heyward built in 1933 at 712 West Ashley Avenue on Folly Beach, and in the summer of 1934 it was one of the places where George Gershwin and the Heywards worked on Porgy and Bess. The opera came from DuBose Heyward's 1925 novel Porgy, and Heyward had urged Gershwin to come to the Lowcountry to hear Gullah life at first hand. Gershwin arrived by train in Charleston in mid-June with his cousin, the painter Henry Botkin, and stayed about six weeks in a small beachfront cottage he rented near the Heywards' house. Heyward wrote most of the libretto and lyrics himself, and Gershwin worked on the score on Folly and in New York.
By the account of the Folly Beach tourism office, the island then had no fresh water and visitors brought their own drinking water. In a letter Gershwin likened Folly to a battered South Seas island and complained that the waves kept pulling him from his work. Heyward took him to hear spirituals at a Black church on James Island, and he judged the 1934 Miss Folly Beach contest at the pier.
Gershwin's rented cottage was later washed away, and its site on upper West Arctic Avenue is now underwater; a watercolor by Botkin is the main record of it. Porgy and Bess opened on Broadway in 1935, and the piano Gershwin used on Folly is held by the Charleston Museum. The Heyward house still stands and is known today as the Porgy House.
Getting there
32.6491, -79.9540
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