Nice Work If You Can Get It is a popular song and jazz standard with music by George Gershwin and lyrics by Ira Gershwin. It was written for the 1937 film A Damsel in Distress, one of nine songs the brothers wrote for the picture, and Fred Astaire performed it on screen. The song was published in 1937 and released as a single that November. Its earliest form was a nine-bar phrase dating from 1930, under the working title "There's No Stopping Me Now"; the title phrase came from an English magazine.
Astaire recorded it with Ray Noble's orchestra on October 17, 1937. The first jazz recording was made by Tommy Dorsey weeks after the film's release, and early recordings by Shep Fields, Teddy Wilson with Billie Holiday, Maxine Sullivan and The Andrews Sisters followed. Bebop musicians adopted the song, and Thelonious Monk recorded it at Minton's Playhouse in 1941. Later versions by Art Tatum, Sarah Vaughan, Mel Tormé, Frank Sinatra, Erroll Garner and Ella Fitzgerald with André Previn are among the notable ones.
