"Over the Rainbow" (Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg, 1939)
The octave leap at the opening of the chorus of "Over the Rainbow" is maybe the most significant combination of two notes in the entire American songbook. The contrast between the two notes perfectly captures the sense of yearning and escape the song conveys. We'll hear that octave leap on two other songs in this series, neither of which I chose for that reason and both of which were written after this one, so we'll give "Over the Rainbow" the bulk of the credit. That same motif also shows up in David Bowie's "Starman," which I guess is a spoiler that "Starman" isn't going to end up on this list.
The octave leap is not technically the opening of the song, though. Like many of the songs of the 1930s, "Over the Rainbow" has an introductory verse that is usually dropped in modern renditions of the song. Indeed, Judy Garland doesn't even include the verse on the version she sings in The Wizard of Oz.
To back up for a second, "Over the Rainbow" was composed by Harold Arlen, nee Hyman Arluck, who already had a stunning string of songs behind him - "Stormy Weather," "Let's Fall in Love" - when producer Arthur Freed asked him and lyricist Yip Harburg to whip up a batch of songs for The Wizard of Oz. ("Yip" wasn't really a nickname, by the way - Harburg's middle name was Yipsel.) The two of them made $25,000 on a contract that lasted 14 weeks.
The pair had already completed "We're Off to See the Wizard," "The Merry Old Land of Oz," and "Ding-Dong! The Witch is Dead," when Arlen decided to focus on a big ballad for Judy Garland to sing. Harold and his wife were driving down Sunset Boulevard to Grauman's Chinese Theater when the melody struck him, and he pulled out a pad of paper and wrote it down right there in the car: "It was as if the Lord said, 'Well, here it is, now stop worrying about it!'" (In 1981, Harburg was killed in a car wreck on Sunset Boulevard.)
When Arlen played it for his lyricist the next day, Harburg didn't care for it, finding the melody too grandiose for a young girl from small-town Kansas. Arlen turned to Ira Gershwin for a second opinion, and when Gershwin liked it, Harburg grudgingly wrote lyrics for it.
"We have this little girl, a girl yearning to be out of this little damn little place, this Kansas," Harburg said shortly before his death in 1981. "She wants to get somewhere, anywhere. Where shall it be? Kansas is a dry, arid place, and the only colorful thing in her life is a rainbow. The rainbow was good enough for Noah, and it's good enough for me."
The song was nearly cut from the film, as the studio felt it made the Kansas sequence drag on too long, but Freed and Arlen fought to keep it in. There was supposed to be a reprise of the song, sung by Dorothy in the witch's castle to remind her of being home in Kansas, but people felt it was too sad. Both Garland and the crew cried when she recorded it.
The Wizard of Oz came out in August 1939, and Garland's single version of "Over the Rainbow " was released that September. There weren't pop charts yet, but by all accounts, the song was a huge smash from the beginning, and it's never gone away. It was named the greatest song of the 20th century by the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts, and who am I to disagree?
"Over the Rainbow" also lived on in a classic story told by Pete Barbutti on The Tonight Show, one of the few jokes about a song that pivots on the melody rather than the lyrics:
Thank you for this. As a long time rocker You would think this song would do nothing for me but you're right. It has to be one of the 10mgreatest of the century. Judy's version is so perfect that I don't like anyone else singing it. The only other version I like is by the late Hawaiian vocalist Iz. you should post his version.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your kind words, I appreciate it. I didn't realize Israel Kamakawiwo'ole had passed away, but from the looks of him, he was never going to be long for this world.
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