I got rhythm,
I got music,
I got my man—
Who could ask for anything more?

These lines are from the refrain of “I Got Rhythm,” with lyrics by Ira Gershwin and music by George Gershwin. The song was written for the Broadway musical Girl Crazy (1930), where it was introduced by Ethel Merman. Emerging at the start of the Great Depression, the lyric’s buoyant inventory of satisfactions—rhythm, music, and love—helped make it an emblem of upbeat resilience in American popular song. The tune also became a jazz standard, and its chord progression (“rhythm changes”) proved enormously influential for later improvisers and composers.

The speaker reduces “having enough” to a few essentials: artistic vitality (“rhythm,” “music”) and intimate companionship (“my man”). The rhetorical question—“Who could ask for anything more?”—turns this list into a philosophy of contentment, implying that joy is not dependent on wealth or status but on inner energy and human connection. In performance, the refrain’s swaggering certainty reads as both romantic declaration and self-affirmation: the singer claims a kind of emotional self-sufficiency, where love and creativity provide a complete answer to hardship or lack.

“I got rhythm, I got music, I got my man—who could ask for anything more?”