"Need Her Love"

I recently got the album Gershwin Plays Gershwin: The Piano Rolls.  It's a collection of modern recordings of player piano rolls that Gershwin made in the 1910s and 1920s.  One of the tracks (the only one not played by Gershwin himself) is "An American in Paris."  While listening to this piano arrangement, one of the melodies caught my ear.  I found the score of the orchestral version and tracked down that melody.  In the middle of the piece, it's played by a variety of instruments at various times, but it's most prominent near the end (at about 15:44 in the recording I have by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra), where it's played by a solo violin:

I edited my image a bit to isolate the phrase.

I knew this phrase sounded familiar, but it took me a while to place it.  I was pretty sure it was on ELO's Discovery album, and I eventually narrowed it down to "Need Her Love."  After each "I need her love" (save for those at the end of the song), there's a choral section.  One of the voices has a phrase something like:

(I might have this in the wrong octave, but it makes it easier to compare the two phrases.)

Both phrases start with an arpeggiated C7 and then descend more or less diatonically (ELO's phrase has an accidental, and Gerswhin's phrase goes back up to G at the end).  Although the note values are different, the two phrases are even positioned within the measures in a similar way.

Of course, I'm not sure if this was intended as a quotation of Gershwin, but the phrases are pretty similar.  This wouldn't be the first time ELO quoted Gershwin either.  Like I pointed out a couple years ago, the violins in "Birmingham Blues" from Out of the Blue (the album before Discovery) quote a phrase from Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue."