The tune “I Got Rhythm” by George Gershwin is brilliant in its simplicity yet has very interesting chord changes in the bridge. It’s so interesting that hundreds of jazz tunes have been written using the same chord changes, known as a contrafact, even though Gershwin was not thinking about Sonny Rollins or Miles Davis when he wrote it in 1930. This set of changes is universally known as “Rhythm changes” for that reason.
But I wonder if George Gershwin pulled this out of thin air or if he was building on lesser-known repertoire to write this tune. In those days there were a lot of clichéd chord changes that popped up all the time (kind of of like so many rock tunes that use the same four chords).
Was “I Got Rhythm” really the first song written to these changes?