"Somewhere Over the Rainbow"

Somewhere over the rainbow way up high
There's a land that I've heard of once in a lullaby
Somewhere over the rainbow skies are blue
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true

Some day I'll wish upon a star
And wake up where the clouds are far behind me
Where troubles melt like lemon drops
Away above the chimney tops
That's where you'll find me

Somewhere over the rainbow blue birds fly
Birds fly over the rainbow
Why then, oh why can't I?
If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow
Why oh why can't I?

AMY GOODMAN: Who wrote the Wizard of Oz originally, the story?

ERNIE HARBURG: Frank L. Baum was an interesting kind of maverick guy who at one point of his life was an editor of a paper in South Dakota. And this was a time of the populist revolutions or revolts or whatever you want to call it in the Midwest, because the railroads and the eastern city banks literally dominated the life of the farmers and they couldn’t get away from the debts that were accumulated from these. And uh, Baum set out consciously to create an American Fable so that the American kids didn’t have to read those German grim Fairy stories where they chopped off hands and things like that. You know he didn’t like that, he wanted an American fable. But it had this under layer of political symbolism to it that the farmer, the scarecrow was the farmer, he thought he was dumb but he really wasn’t, he had a brain. And the Tin Woodman was a result…was the laborer in the factories who with one accident after another he was totally reduced to a tin man with no heart, alright, on an assembly line. And uh, the cowardly lion was William Jennings Bryan who kept trying, was a big politician at that time promising to make the world over with the gold standard, you know. And the Wizard was a humbug type was the Wall Street finances and the Wicked Witch probably the railroads, but I’m not sure. So it was a beautiful match-up here with Frank Baum and Yip Harburg. Okay? Because in the book the word rainbow was never once mentioned and you can go back and look at it, I did three times. The word rainbow is never once mentioned in the book. And the book opens up with Dorothy on a black and white world…that…Kansas had no color, just read the first paragraph on that. So when they got to the part where they had to get the song for the little girl, they hadn’t written it yet. They’d written everything else, they hadn’t written the song for Judy Garland who was a discovery by one of Yip’s collaborators, Bert Lane. And nobody knew the wonder in her voice at that time. So they worked on this song and at that time Ira, Yip, Larry Hart and the others thought that the composer should create the music first. Now they were both locked into it, the lyricist and the composer were locked into the storyline and the character and the plot development. So they both knew that at this point there was a little girl in trouble on the Kansas City environment, alright? And that she yearned to get out of trouble, alright? So Yip gave Hal what they call a “dummy title”, it’s not the final title but it’s something that more or less zeroes in on what the situation is all about and that this little girl is going to take a journey, alright? So Yip gave a title “I Want to get on the Other Side of the Rainbow”.

<following part is a summary of a video clip>
YIP HARBURG: Now here’s what happened, and I want you to play this symphonically! (Yip plays the tune to Somewhere Over the Rainbow) Okay, I said my god Harold this is a 12 year old girl wanting to be somewhere over the rainbow. It isn’t Nelson Eddy. (laughter) And I got frightened and I said I don’t…let’s save it, let’s save it for something else, but let’s not have it in. Well he felt…he, he was crestfallen as he should be. And I said let’s try again. Well we tried for another week; tried all kinds of things but he kept coming back to it, as he should have. And he came back and I was worried about it and I called Ira Gershwin over…my friend. Ira said to him, he said “can you play it a little more in a pop style?” I’ll play it. (Yip plays piano) Okay, I said oh well that’s great, that’s fine. I said now we have to get a title for it, I didn’t know what the title was going to be. And when he had (hums the verse “somewhere over the rainbow”)…I finally came to the theme, the way our logic lies n it, I want to be somewhere on the other side of the rainbow and I began trying to fit it (sings “on the other side of the rainbow”). When he had a front phrase like (hums the verse again)… Now if you sing “EEE” you couldn’t sing “EE-EE-” you had to sing “Oh” that’s the only thing that I had to get something with O in it, see. (Yip sings: “Over the rain”) Now that sang beautifully see, so the sound forced me into the word “over” which was much better than “on the other side”. Song: Somewhere Over the Rainbow, sung by Judy Garland.