May 2024 Cherry Creek Chorale Concert Archives

(Note: My choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, is singing a medley of Harold Arlen songs for their May 2024 concert, including “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Make plans to attend if you live in the area! The following post deals only with the lyrics by Yip Harburg.)

Not at all. I don’t have space to deal with the lyrics as a whole, so let me start with the opening phrase and go on from there. The lyricist himself, a son of Jewish immigrants who had taken the name of “Yip” Harburg, had been writing as a sideline while running a successful business which tanked in 1929. He said, “The capitalists saved me in 1929, just as we were worth, oh, about a quarter of a million dollars. Bang! The whole thing blew up. I was left with a pencil and finally had to write for a living… what the Depression was for most people was for me a lifesaver!”

(Note: My choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, is singing a medley of Harold Arlen songs for their May 2024 concert, including “Get Happy.” Make plans to attend if you live in the area!)

This will be yet another of my long, meandering posts telling you more than you ever wanted to know! This time it’s about the song “Get Happy.”

First off, I remember seeing Judy Garland sing it in the famous clip from the 1950 movie Summer Stock. It was some kind of television retrospective on Garland and her career, and I can hear the narrator’s voice saying, “Everyone agrees that this performance was one of her very, very best.” The song, which comes at the end of the movie, also marked the end of Garland’s career at MGM. She had been struggling with drugs and depression and had been let go from the movies The Barkleys of Broadway in 1948 (and replaced with Ginger Rogers) and Annie Get Your Gun in 1949 (and replaced with Betty Hutton). It’s hard to imagine those two movies with Judy in the lead, for me anyway. I don’t think of her particularly as a dancer. She was given another chance with Summer Stock and managed to get through the filming with lots of sympathy and help from her co-stars, but MGM had had enough. Her contract was terminated “by mutual consent” after the film was finished. The final number, though, was filmed two months after the rest of the movie was completed, after Garland had lost a fair amount of weight by means of hypnosis. (That’s the story, anyway.) Observers have noted that she’s thinner in that final sequence than she is in the rest of the film.