For a few years in the late 1990s, he toured a concert version of "Porgy and Bess", partly in honor of his father, who sang the role for Sidney Poitier in the 1959 "film version", and partly "to preserve the score's jazziness" in the face of "largely white orchestras" who tend not "to play around the bar lines, to stretch and bend". McFerrin says that because of his father's work in the movie, "This music has been in my body for 40 years, probably longer than any other music."