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Yip Harburg
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Who wrote the songs to the Wizard of Oz? As events all over the world celebrate his Centennial, Laura Phipps profiles songwriter,
Yip Harburg:
The Lyric Wizard
Yip Harburg -- who wrote many hits including "Over the Rainbow" and "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?" -- is one of the unsung heroes of the American popular song.
He and his lyricist contemporaries, Larry Hartz, Oscar Hammerstein, and Ira Gershwin, gave the early 20th century popular song its bite and helped forge a new American art form, the musical.
Harburg's lyrics range from comical to romantic to satirical, though more often than not they reflect his political and social principles in subtle and clever ways. A child of desperately poor Russian Jewish immigrants living in New York's Lower East Side, Harburg never forgot where he came from.
"He was always on the side of the oppressed," says his son, Ernie Harburg. From the depression anthem "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?" to the musical Finian's Rainbow, he possessed a rare knack for wrapping the serious political message in a snappy, carefree package.
Because L. Frank Baum's book, The Wizard of Oz, presented social and political commentary veiled in fantasy, translating it to song was a fitting project for Harburg. His contribution to the film went far beyond simply penning the lyrics to favorites such as "If I Only Had a Brain," "Follow the Yellow Brick Road," and "Over the Rainbow" (1939).
He also integrated the songs into the script, wrote dialogue and in some cases implemented major changes. It was Harburg who created the surreal initial scene between Dorothy and the Munchkins celebrating the witch's death in a rhyming operetta, (You killed her so completely/That we thank you very sweetly) replete with Munchkin organizations, the "Lullaby League" and "Lollipop Guild." And he wrote most of the Wizard's dialogue at the end of the film. In fact, Harburg alone is responsible for the movie's central symbol, the rainbow.
Throughout his youth Harburg wrote light verse while concentrating on getting an education. A sample from the '20s demonstrates his penchant for the whimsical:
In the Spring a young man's fancy
lightly turns to thoughts of love,
and in Summer -- and in Autumn -- and
in Winter -- see above.
Harburg's career as a song lyricist began after the stock market crash in 1929, when the bottom fell out of his electrical appliance business. Lyric writing combined Harburg's long-standing love of the theater with his propensity for writing verse, and he had the perfect friend to get him started: Ira Gershwin.
Gershwin was born in the same year as Harburg -- 1896 -- and the two boys became friends in their early school days. They shared a mutual interest in a book of poems by W.S. Gilbert, which, as Gershwin later showed Harburg, were actually lyrics to Sullivan's music. Harburg enjoyed visiting the relatively wealthy Gershwin household with its piano, victrola, and magazine collection.
Having decided to go into the business of writing song lyrics, Harburg embarked on an apprenticeship lasting a little over three years, during which he learned and perfected his craft with Ira Gershwin's financial support and guidance. He worked with numerous composers including Johnny Green with whom he wrote his first hit, "I'm Yours," (1930) and Jay Gorney, who collaborated with Harburg on the depression era's compassionate anthem, "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?" (1932).
Although Harburg always insisted that song lyrics should be written after the lyricist hears the composer's tune, the process of creating a song was often highly collaborative. Harburg had a discriminating ear which allowed him to spot the tunes which would be equal to his lyricization, and often he and the composer would meet late into the night over the piano, exchanging musical and lyrical ideas in a kinetic collaborative process.
The composer with whom Harburg worked most frequently -- they created a total of 111 songs together -- was Harold Arlen. Their chemistry was clear from their first collaboration, which produced the classic "It's Only a Paper Moon" (1932).
In addition to composing the music to The Wizard of Oz, Arlen worked with Harburg on several large projects, including Vincente Minnelli's Cabin in the Sky, (1943) the first American film for a general audience to cast black performers in leading roles, and Bloomer Girl, (1944) a Broadway smash hit with feminist overtones which Harburg also directed.
Harburg's leftist politics are perhaps most evident in Finian's Rainbow, (1947) a musical he wrote with composer Burton Lane critiquing racism and capitalism. Although he was never associated with the communist party, he was blacklisted in 1950 because of his ties with socialist-leaning organizations. Barred from the movies, radio, and television for 12 years, he continued to work in the theater on such shows as Flahooley (1951) and Jamaica (1957).
The influx of rock music with its new songwriting ethos at first bewildered Harburg -- he worried, as his son Ernie notes, about the "destruction of lyrical thought" and the loss of "emotional nuance." But throughout the years he became more accepting of the new music, and he continued to write songs until his death in 1981.
Harburg was not only a fine artist and a seeker of justice, he was also an incurable optimist. Throughout all the varying social and political climates he witnessed during his life, Ernie says that his father never changed his political principles, and "he never lost hope." Like Dorothy, he pursued his dreams to their furthest reaches, because he never saw any reason not to.
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Alan Warner
