Ira Gershwin Drama for "Of Thee I Sing". In 1988 UCLA established The George and Ira Gershwin Lifetime Musical Achievement Award in recognition of the brothers' contribution to music, and for their gift to UCLA of the fight song "Strike Up the Band for UCLA". Recipients include Angela Lansbury (1988), Ray Charles (1991), Mel Tormé (1994), Bernadette Peters (1995), Frank Sinatra (2000), Stevie Wonder (2002), k.d. lang (2003), James Taylor (2004), Babyface (2005), Burt Bacharach (2006), Quincy Jones (2007), Lionel Richie (2008) and Julie Andrews (2009). Ira Gershwin was a joyous listener to the sounds of the modern world. "He had a
Ira Aldridge an adaptation of Kotzebue's "" by Sheridan as "Pizarro" in 1883, "School" by Thomas William Robertson in 1885, and George Melville Baker's "Comrades" in 1889. The most prominent troupe named for him was the Ira Aldridge Troupe in Philadelphia, founded in 1863, some 35 years after Aldridge left the US for good. The Ira Aldridge Troupe was a minstrelsy group that caricatured Irish white men. The Ira Aldridge Troupe is unique in annals of minstrelsy; it was named for a Black actor who had left his homeland some 35 years before and achieved fame in Europe. Unlike most, later, Black