Nick Heyward wrote the lyrics and the Gershwins are credited for the music. The Gershwins wrote several plays together and wrote many popular songs, including "I Got Rhythm," "The Man I Love," "Someone to Watch Over Me and "They Can't Take That Away from Me."

Summertime is one of the most covered songs in history, with well over 2000 official recordings. Janis Joplin's Blues-Rock version with Big Brother & the Holding Company is probably the best known, but other notable covers were recorded by Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Sam Cooke, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Frank Sinatra. Fantasia from American Idol performed it twice on the show when she won in 2004, which introduced the song to a new audience.

Summertime was used in the Folk Opera Porgy & Bess, which started as a 1924 novel by DuBose Heyward called Porgy. The novel is about a black community in South Carolina, and George Gershwin thought it would make a great stage production. Along with his brother Ira, Gershwin collaborated with Heyward and brought the novel to the stage in 1935. This is the most famous song from the musical and appears 4 times in the production, most notably as a lullaby to help put a baby to sleep. The lullaby style became very popular and many children grew up hearing this song from their parents.

Porgy & Bess had a test run in Boston and had a disappointing stint in New York in 1935. It was performed in Russia in 1955 and made into a movie in 1959 starring Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, Sammy Davis Jr. and Diahann Carroll, who performed the song. After the movie came out, the Opera became much more popular and it continues to be performed as a stage production. George Gershwin didn't get to see his play become a big success - he died in 1937.

An international group of collectors of recordings of Summertime exists under the name The Summertime Collection. At 07-07-2007 they know of almost 19,500 performances, out of which about 13,325 have been recorded and of which 8,151 are in the collection of the group.

Joplin performed this at the Woodstock festival in 1969.