Democracy Now! Daily Digest: A Daily
Independent Global News Hour with Amy Goodman & Juan González – Thursday,
28 November 2013
Stories:
A Tribute to Blacklisted Lyricist Yip
Harburg: The Man Who Put the Rainbow in The Wizard of Oz
His name might not be familiar to many,
but his songs are sung by millions around the world. Today, we take a journey
through the life and work of Yip Harburg, the Broadway lyricist who wrote such
hits as "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" and who put the music into
The Wizard of Oz. Born into poverty on the Lower East Side of Manhattan,
Harburg always included a strong social and political component to his work,
fighting racism and poverty. A lifelong socialist, Harburg was blacklisted and
hounded throughout much of his life. We speak with Harburg’s son, Ernie
Harburg, about the music and politics of his father. Then we take an in-depth
look at The Wizard of Oz, and hear a medley of Harburg’s Broadway songs and the
politics of the times in which they were created. [includes rush transcript]
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not
be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Today, we pay tribute to Yip
Harburg. His name may not be familiar to many, but his songs are sung by
millions around the world, like jazz singer Abbey Lincoln and Tom Waits, Judy
Collins, and Dr. John from New Orleans, Peter Yarrow, that’s Al Jolson, and our
beloved Odetta.
"Brother, Can You Spare a
Dime?" may well be a new anthem for many Americans. The lyrics to that
classic American song were written by Yip Harburg. He was blacklisted during
the McCarthy era. During his career as a lyricist, Yip Harburg used his words
to express anti-racist, pro-worker messages. He’s best known for writing the
lyrics to The Wizard of Oz, but he also had two hits on Broadway: Bloomer
Girls, about the women’s suffrage movement, and Finian’s Rainbow, a kind of
immigrants’ anthem about race and class and so much else.
Today, in this Democracy Now! special, we
pay tribute to Yip Harburg’s life. Ernie Harburg is Yip’s son and biographer.
He co-wrote the book Who Put the Rainbow in The Wizard of Oz?: Yip Harburg,
Lyricist. I met up with Ernie Harburg at the New York Public Library for
Performing Arts at Lincoln Center years ago when they are exhibiting Yip
Harburg’s work. Ernie Harburg took me on a tour.
ERNIE HARBURG: The first place is
business about words, and one of them is that the songs, when they were written
back in those days, anyhow, always had a lyricist and a composer, and neither
one of them wrote the song. They both wrote the song. However, in the English
language, you know, you have "This is Gershwin’s song," or "This
is" — they usually say the composer’s song. I’ve rarely ever heard somebody
say, "This is Yip Harburg’s song" or "Ira Gershwin’s song."
Both of them would be wrong. The fact is, two people write a song.
So I’m going to talk about Yip’s lyrics
and then lyrics in the song. Now the first thing we’re looking at here is an
expression really of Yip’s philosophy and background, which he brings to
writing lyrics for the songs. And what it says here is that songs have always
been man’s anodyne against tyranny and terror. The artist is on the side of
humanity from the time that he was born a hundred years ago in the dire depths
of poverty that only the Lower East Side in Manhattan could have when the
Russian Jews, about two million of them, got up out of the Russian’s shadows
and ghettos, and the courageous ones came over here and settled in that area of
what we now know as the East Village. And Yip knew poverty deeply, and he
quoted Bernard Shaw as saying that the chill of poverty never leaves your
bones. And it was the basis of Yip’s understanding of life as struggle.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go back to how Yip got
his start.
ERNIE HARBURG: Yip was, at a very early
age, interested in poetry, and he used to go to the Tompkins Square Library to
read, and the librarians just fed him these things. And he got hooked on every
one of the English poets, and especially O. Henry, the ending. He always has a
little great ending on the end of each of his songs. And he got hooked on W.S.
Gilbert, The Bab Ballads.
And then, when he went to Townsend High
School, they had them sitting in the seats by alphabetical order, so Yip was
"H" and Gershwin was "G", so Ira sat next to Yip. One day,
Yip walked in with The Bab Ballads, and Ira, who was very shy and hardly spoke
with anybody, just suddenly lit up and said, "Do you like those?" And
they got into a conversation, and Ira then said, "Do you know there’s
music to that?" And Yip said, "No." He said, "Well, come on
home."
So they went to Ira’s home, which was on
2nd Avenue and 5th Street which is sort of upper from Yip’s poverty at 11th and
C. And they had a Victrola, which is like having, you know, huge instruments
today, and played him H.M.S. Pinafore. Well, Yip was just absolutely
flabbergasted, knocked out. And that did it. I mean, for the both of them,
because Ira was intensely interested that thing, too.
That began their lifelong friendship.
Then Ira went on to be one of the pioneers, with 25 other guys, Jewish Russian
immigrants, who developed the American Musical Theater. And it was only after —
in 1924, I think, that Ira’s first show with George Gershwin, his brother, that
they started writing together.
AMY GOODMAN: The Gershwins’ Porgy and
Bess in 1940.
ERNIE HARBURG: Yip’s career took a kind
of detour, because when the war, World War I, came and Yip was a socialist and
did not believe in the war, he took a boat down to Uruguay for three years. I
mean, he refused to fight in the thing. That’s shades of 1968 and the Vietnam
War, right?
AMY GOODMAN: And why didn’t he believe in
World War I?
ERNIE HARBURG: Because he was a full,
deep-dyed socialist who did not believe that capitalism was the answer to the
human community and that indeed it was the destruction of the human spirit. And
he would not fight its wars. And at that time, the socialists and the lefties,
as they were called, Bolsheviks and everything else, were against the war.
And so, when he came back, he got
married, he had two kids, and he went into the electrical appliance business,
and all the time hanging out with Ira and George and Howard Dietz and Buddy De
Sylva and writing light verse for the F.P.A Conning Tower. And the newspapers
used to carry light verse, every newspaper. There were about twenty-five of
them at that time, not two or three now owned by two people in the world, you
know. And they actually carried light verse. Well, Yip and Ira and Dorothy
Parker, the whole crowd, had light verse in there, and, you know, they loved
it.
So, when the Crash came and Yip’s
business went under, and he was about anywhere from $50,000 to $70,000 in debt,
his partner went bankrupt. He didn’t. He repaid the loans for the next 20 or 15
years, at least. Ira and he agreed that he should start writing lyrics.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about what Yip is
most known for: Finian’s Rainbow, The Wizard of Oz. Right here, what do we have
in front of us?
ERNIE HARBURG: We have a lead sheet. We
are in the gallery of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and there’s
an exhibition called "The Necessity of Rainbows," which is the work
of Yip Harburg. And we are looking at the lead sheet of "Brother, Can You
Spare a Dime?" which came from a review called Americana, which—it was the
first review, which was—had a political theme to it: at that time, the notion
of the forgotten man. You have to remember what the Great Depression was all
about. It’s hard to imagine that now. But when Roosevelt said, "One-third
of the nation are ill-clothed, ill-housed and ill-fed," that’s exactly
what it was. There was at least 30 percent unemployment at those times. And
among blacks and minorities, it was 50, 60 percent. And there were breadlines
and—
Now, the rich, you know, kept living
their lifestyle, but Broadway was reduced to about 12 musicals a year from
prior, in the '20s, about 50 a year, OK? So it became harder. But the Great
Depression was deep down a fact of life in everybody's mind. And all the songs
were censored—I use that loosely—by the music publishers. They only wanted love
songs or escape songs, so that in 1929 you had "Happy Days Are Here
Again," and you had all of these kinds of songs. There wasn’t one song
that addressed the Depression, in which we were all living. And this show, the
Americana show, Yip was asked to write a song or get the lyrics up for a song
which addressed itself to the breadlines, OK?
And so, he, at that time, was working
very closely with Jay Gorney. Jay had a tune, which he had brought over with
him when he was eight years old from Russia, and it was in a minor key, which
is a whole different key. Most popular songs are in major. And it was a Russian
lullaby, and it was da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. And Jay had — somebody
else had lyrics for it: "Once I knew a big blonde, and she had big blue
eyes. She was big blue" — like that. And it was a torch song, of which we
talked about. And Yip said, "Well, could we throw the words out, and I’ll
take the tune?" Alright.
And if you look at Yip’s notes, which are
in the book that I mentioned, you’ll see he started out writing a very satiric
comedic song. At that time, Rockefeller, the ancient one, was going around
giving out dimes to people, and he had a—Yip had a satiric thing about
"Can I share my dime with you?" You know? But then, right in the
middle, other images started coming out in his writings, and you had a man in a
mill, and the whole thing turned into the song that we know it now, which is
here and which I can read to you. And if you do this song, you have to do the
verse, because that’s where a lot of the action is.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you sing it to me?
ERNIE HARBURG: Alright, I’ll try. It
won’t be as good as Bing Crosby or Tom Waits.
[singing] They used to tell me
I was building a dream,
And so I followed the mob,
When there was earth to plow
Or guns to bear,
I was always there
Right on the job.
They used to tell me
I was building a dream,
With peace and glory ahead,
Why should I be standing in line,
Just waiting for bread?
YIP HARBURG: [singing] Once I built a
railroad
I made it run,
Made it race against time.
Once I built a railroad;
Now it’s done.
Buddy, can you spare a dime?
AMY GOODMAN: Yip Harburg singing in 1975.
YIP HARBURG: [singing] Once I built a tower
To the sun,
Brick and rivet and lime;
Once I built that tower;
Now it’s done.
Brother, can you spare a dime?
AMY GOODMAN: When was this song first
played?
ERNIE HARBURG: In 1932. And in the
Americana review, every critic, everybody took it up, and it swept the nation.
In fact, paradoxically, I think Roosevelt and the Democratic Party really
wanted to tone it down and keep it off the radio, because playing havoc with
trying to not talk about the Depression, which everybody did. You remember the
Hoover thing, not only "Happy Days Are Here Again," but "Two
Chickens in Every Pot," and so forth. Nobody wanted to sing about the
Depression either, you know.
AMY GOODMAN: Yet, Yip Harburg was a
supporter of FDR.
ERNIE HARBURG: Yes. But politics are
politics, you know, and the thing was that, in fact, historically, this was, I
would say, the only song that addressed itself seriously to the Great
Depression, the condition of our lives, which nobody wanted to talk about and
nobody wanted to sing about.
AMY GOODMAN: Ernie Harburg, son of Yip
Harburg. When we come back from our break, we’ll talk about The Wizard of Oz,
Finian’s Rainbow and other shows.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We continue with our
Democracy Now! special, on our journey of Yip Harburg’s life with his son,
Ernie Harburg. Ernie talks about how Yip Harburg wrote the lyrics to The Wizard
of Oz.
ERNIE HARBURG: Actually, Yip did more
than the lyrics. When they were—when Yip and Harold Arlen were called in to do
the score of The Wizard of Oz, it was Yip who had this executive experience in
his electrical appliance business and also had become a show doctor, so he
was—that is, when a show wasn’t working, you would call somebody and try to fix
it up. He had an overview of shows and he had an executive talent. And so, he
was always what they called a "muscle man" in a show, alright? And
he’d already worked with Bert Lahr in a great song, "The Woodchopper’s
Song," and—
AMY GOODMAN: Wait a second. Bert Lahr,
the lion?
ERNIE HARBURG: The lion. Bert Lahr and
most of these people were from vaudeville and burlesque. And Yip knew them in
the ’20s, but he actually worked with Bert Lahr in this light — Walk a Little
Faster and another review. I forget that name, but he and—Yip and Arlen gave
Bert songs to sing, which allowed him to satirize the opera world, if you want,
or a send-off of rich, you know. And so, they had that relationship.
Also, Yip knew Jack Haley, the tin
woodman. And Yip also worked with Bobby Connolly as a choreographer in the
early '30s on his shows, who was also the choreographer for The Wizard of Oz.
So he had a cast here with Arlen who were, you know, sort of Yip's men. You
know what I mean? So, when Yip went to Arthur Freed, the producer, who was too
busy to work on this musical, and Mervin LeRoy had nothing to do with it,
practically, because he had never done a musical before, so it became a vacuum
in which the lyricist entered, because he was all ready to do so. Yip was
always an active, you know, organizer.
And so, the first thing he suggested was
that they integrate the music with the story, which at that time in Hollywood
they usually didn’t do. They’d stop the story, and you’d sing a song. They’d
stop the story and sing a song. That you integrate this—Arthur Freed accepted
the idea immediately. Yip then wrote—Yip and Harold then wrote the songs for
the 45 minutes within a 110-minute film. The munchkin sequence and into the
Emerald City and on their way to the wicked witch, when all the songs stopped,
because they wouldn’t let them do anymore. OK? You’ll notice then the chase
begins, you see, in the movie.
AMY GOODMAN: Why wouldn’t they let them
do anymore?
ERNIE HARBURG: Because they didn’t
understand what he was doing, and they wanted a chase in there. So, anyhow, Yip
also wrote all the dialogue in that time and the setup to the songs, and he
also wrote the part where they give out the heart, the brains and the nerve,
because he was the final script editor. And there was eleven screenwriters on
that. And he pulled the whole thing together, wrote his own lines and gave the
thing a coherence and a unity, which made it a work of art. But he doesn’t get
credit for that. He gets "lyrics by E.Y. Harburg," you see? But,
nevertheless, he put his influence on the thing.
AMY GOODMAN: Who wrote The Wizard of Oz
originally, the story?
ERNIE HARBURG: Yeah, Frank L. Baum was an
interesting kind of maverick guy, who at one point in his life was an editor of
a paper in South Dakota. And this was at the 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 absolutely dominated the life of the
farmers, and they couldn’t get away from the debts that were accumulated from
these. And Baum set out consciously to create an American fable so that the
American kids didn’t have to read those German Grimm 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 underlay 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 the
result—was the laborer in the factories. With one accident after another, he
was totally reduced to a tin man with no heart, alright, on an assembly line.
And 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, who was a humbug type, was the Wall Street
finances, and the wicked witch was probably the railroads, but I’m not sure.
Alright?
So it was a beautiful match-up here with
Frank Baum and Yip Harburg, OK, 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 in it.
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 had
written everything else. They hadn’t written the song for Judy Garland, who was
a discovery by one of Yip’s collaborators, Burton 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—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 Harold 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 what—this little girl is going
to take a journey, alright? So Yip gave him a title: "I Want to Get on the
Other Side of the Rainbow."
YIP HARBURG: Now, here’s what happened,
and I want you to play this symphonically! OK, I said, "My god, Harold!
This is a 12-year-old girl wanting to be somewhere over the rainbow. It isn’t
Nelson Eddy!" And I got frightened, and I said, "I don’t—let’s save
it. Let’s save it for something else. But don’t—let’s not have it in."
Well, he felt—he was crestfallen, as he should be. And I said, "Let’s try
again." Well, he 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?" And I played it, with
rhythm.
OK, 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 [sings]
dee-da-dee-da-da-da-da, [talking] I finally came to the thing, the way our
logic lies in it, "I want to be somewhere on the other side of the
rainbow." And I began trying to fit it: "On the other side of the
rainbow." When he had a front phrase like daa-da-da-da-da — now, if you
say "eee," you couldn’t sing "eee-ee." You had to sing
"ooooh." That’s the only thing that would get a—and I had to get
something with "oh" in it, see: "Over the rain" — now, that
sings beautifully, see. So the sound forced me into the word "over,"
which was much better than "on the other side."
JUDY GARLAND: [singing] Somewhere over
the rainbow
Way up high,
There’s a land that I heard of
Once in a lullaby.
ERNIE HARBURG: Anyhow, Yip—Arlen worked
on it. He came up with this incredible music, which, if anybody wants to try
it, just play the chords alone, not the melody, and you will hear Pachelbel,
and you will hear religious hymns, and you will hear fairy tales and lullabies,
just in the chords. No one ever listens to that, but try it, if you play the
piano.
And at any rate, on top of these chords,
then Harold started the thing off with an octave jump: "Somewhere" —
OK, and Yip had no idea what to do with that octave jump. Incidentally, Harold
did this in Paper Moon, too, if you remember. Let’s see how did that start?
YIP HARBURG: [singing] It’s only a paper
moon
Sailing over a cardboard sea
But it wouldn’t be make-believe
If you believed in me
ERNIE HARBURG: And Harold was a great
composer. So Yip wrestled with it for about three weeks, and finally he came up
with the word. You see, this is what a lyricist does: the word, to hit the
storyline, the character, the music. It’s an incredible thing. "Some-where."
Alright, and then when you put in an octave, you get "some-where,"
OK, and you jump up, and you’re ready to take that journey. Alright? Where?
"O-ver the rainbow." OK? And then you’re off!
It’s not a love song. It’s a story of a
little girl that wants to get out. She’s in trouble, and she wants to get
somewhere. Well, the rainbow was the only color that she’d see in Kansas. She
wants to get over the rainbow. But then, Yip put in something which makes it a
Yip song. He said, "And the dreams you dare to dream really do come
true." You see? And that word "dare" lands on the note, and it’s
a perfect thing, and it’s been generating courage for people for years
afterwards, you know?
JUDY GARLAND: [singing] Somewhere over
the rainbow
Skies are blue,
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true.
ERNIE HARBURG: That’s the way that the
whole score came.
AMY GOODMAN: Was it a hit right away?
ERNIE HARBURG: No, it wasn’t. This was
supposed to be an answer, MGM’s answer to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and
of about 10 major critics at that time when The Wizard of Oz came out, I would
say only two liked the show. The other eight said it was corny, that it was
heavy, that Judy Garland was no good, and so forth. Oh, yeah. You could read
again in the book, Who Put the Rainbow on The Wizard of Oz?, by Harold Meyerson
and Ernie Harburg. But it persisted, you know? And then, in 1956, when
television first started saturating the nation—
AMY GOODMAN: More than 20 years later.
ERNIE HARBURG: More than 20 years later.
I don’t think they even had their money back from the show, see? MGM sold the
film rights to CBS, who then put it on. And it hit the top of the—it broke out
every single record there was, and it’s been playing every year since then.
And, of course, it went around the world, and it’s become a major artwork,
which is, I must say, an American artwork, because the story, the plot with the
three characters, the brain, the heart, the courage, and finding a home is a
universal story for everybody. And that’s an American kind of a story, alright?
And Yip and Harold put these things into song.
AMY GOODMAN: Who did the munchkins
represent?
MUNCHKINS: [singing] We represent the
Lollipop Guild
The Lollipop Guild, the Lollipop Guild.
And in the name of the Lollipop Guild...
ERNIE HARBURG: Oh, you mean political
thing? I think they represent the little people, you know, the people. And
that’s they way they were—it came on in the book. You see, the book, if you’re
a purist, you wouldn’t like the film. It’s just like anything else. There are
societies of people who meet and discuss the books. OK, there’s even a society
for the winkies, which are the guards around the wicked witch’s, you know,
castle. There really is! They meet once a year. And they’re serious! They don’t
like the picture, because it didn’t follow the book, see, because Yip and the
writers changed it, as Hollywood will.
AMY GOODMAN: Was the book a little bit
more favorable to the winkies?
ERNIE HARBURG: No—well, yes! The winkies
were good people, and they were played up there. If you go back and read the
book, you will see that they were a lovely, decent kind of people, yes. That
was one thing. I guess it wasn’t PC there, you know?
But, nevertheless, when you read a good
novel, and you see the film, there’s hardly any relationship between the two.
All these lines from the film have entered the American language in a way that
people don’t even know where they came from. You know, "Gee, Toto, looks
like we’re not in Kansas anymore." Or, you know, "Come out, come out,
wherever you are," which in the ’70s started taking on, when the gay
movement started, this line started meaning different things, you see?
GLINDA: [singing] Come out, come out,
wherever you are
And meet the young lady, who fell from a
star.
ERNIE HARBURG: So the songs keep growing
with the times. People interpret them, you know?
AMY GOODMAN: How did Yip feel in the late
1950s, when it was a hit, when people started hearing it all over the world?
ERNIE HARBURG: Well, I think they were
quite surprised, along with the film moguls, you know, and the fact that—years
and years later, he and Harold both said that they did not know what depth and
strength that that song "Over the Rainbow" had. And also, one other
one, the song "Ding! Dong! The Witch Is Dead" is a universal
liberation, a freedom, cry for freedom, you know, which isn’t seen like that,
but it—one time, when some tyrannical owner of an airlines company stepped
down, all the employees started singing "Ding! Dong! The Witch Is
Dead."
So people use these words. And during the
war, World War II, "We’re Off to See the Wizard" was sung by troops
marching, you know? But nobody knows that Yip wrote the words, you see. Now,
Harold wrote the music, and the songs were Yip and Harold. That’s it.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!,
democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. If you’d like a copy of today’s
show, you can go to our website at democracynow.org. Back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We continue on our tour
through the life of lyricist Yip Harburg with his son Ernie Harburg.
ERNIE HARBURG: We’re walking through the
gallery here at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, which has "The
Necessity of Rainbows," dedicated to the works of Yip Harburg, the
lyricist. And we’re now looking at the various exhibitions.
And while we’re looking for Finian’s
Rainbow, I want to tell you that in 1944, Yip conceived and co-wrote the script
and put on a show called Bloomer Girl, which was way ahead of its time, because
Bloomer Girl was Dolly Bloomer, who was an actual suffragette in 1860 who stood
up and invented pants. And it was radical in those days. And the show was about
Dolly Bloomer, and she ran an underground railroad, bringing slaves up, and she
had an underground paper, and she was an incredible woman. And this was a
political show. Some great songs in there. Maureen McGovern does "Right as
the Rain" in a great way. Lena Horne does "Eagle and Me," which
was the first song on Broadway that wasn’t a blues lamentation about the
black-white situation. It was a call to action. "We gotta be free, the
eagle and me." OK? And Dooley Wilson, who was in Casablanca, sang that.
So, again, Yip managed to get his
philosophy into his show, which was the second truly integrated American
musical after Oklahoma. And while, you know, it hasn’t been played around, it’s
still marked that historically. After that came Finian’s Rainbow.
AMY GOODMAN: You mean blacks and whites
playing in the cast.
ERNIE HARBURG: No, not in there. In
Finian’s Rainbow, I mean that it was a political statement. Bloomer Girl was a
political statement, and it was a smash hit. In 1946, Yip conceived the idea,
the story, the script for Finian’s Rainbow, which was meant to be an
anti-racist and, in a certain sense, anti-capitalist show also.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s find it.
ERNIE HARBURG: Alright, let’s go.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s find Finian’s Rainbow.
ERNIE HARBURG: Here’s Cabin in the Sky,
which is the first all-black Hollywood film in the '40s, which Yip and Harold
did also. "Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe." Here's Bloomer Girl
that I’m talking about. So, we should be, somehow, coming onto Finian’s
Rainbow. But here’s Yip here. There’s a video of Yip talking, if you want to
meet the man.
INTERVIEWER: You got into political
trouble in this country at a time when a lot of people got into political
trouble, during the McCarthy years. Were you blacklisted?
YIP HARBURG: Thank God, yes.
INTERVIEWER: During that McCarthy period,
were they actually going through your lyrics with a fine-toothed comb looking
for lines that might be subversive, that might show Yip Harburg’s true
political colors?
YIP HARBURG: Yes. I wrote a song for
Cabin in the Sky, which Ethel Waters sang and was part of the situation in the
picture. Here was a poor woman who had nothing in life except this one man,
Joe, and she sang, "It seemed like happiness is just a thing called
Joe."
One of the producers, with not a
macroscope, but a microscope, found in this lyric that "Happiness Is Just
a Thing Called Joe" was a tribute to Joe Stalin. We’re kidding about it
now, but the country, this was the blackest, the blackest and darkest moment in
the history of this beautiful country.
ERNIE HARBURG: Now, here we are at
Finian’s Rainbow at last. And this was—Yip conceived this in 1946. And Fred
Saidy, who was his co-script writer—and Harold Arlen demurred from writing
this, because he felt that Yip was too fervent in his political opinions, and
he wanted—Harold wanted to do something else. So Yip got Burt Lane and then
came out with this great, great score from Finian’s Rainbow, "Old Devil
Moon."
"How Are Things in Glocca
Morra?" etc. But the theme of Finian’s was a total fantasy, and it was an
American fable in which an Irishman and his daughter come from Ireland, search
around and find Rainbow Valley in "Missitucky." OK? And he believes
that if he plants the crock of gold, which he stole from the leprechaun, in the
ground, that it will grow, just like at Fort Knox, right? The whole thing was fabulous!
And then, the Southern white senator, a
very stereotypic part, finds out that Finian has this land and tries to run him
out of town, because there’s blacks and whites living together, and, you know,
they’re sharecroppers. And they claim that Finian’s daughter is a witch, and
they’re going to burn her at the stake, and all sorts of incredible things that
say something about the American scene.
But the score was so great that people
who see it do not see it as a socialist tract, which the only one on Broadway; they
see it as a very, very entertaining musical and unique in American musicals,
because, in the first place, there are very, very few musicals which are
original. Most musicals are adapted from books, and this was just conceived by
Fred Saidy and Yip as a satiric sendoff on American society. So, you’ve got
this great song in here, "When the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich,"
how are you going to know who is who or who is which? OK, you know, like that.
And so, Finian’s Rainbow has become a
classic. Now, it’s interesting that Finian’s has not had a tour, a national
tour, since 1948. But they play it in every single high school in the United
States, three or four times a month in every state of the union.
So, Finian’s was, at the time, 1947, when
the Cold War was beginning and the House Un-American Committee was starting up,
and they were searching for lefties. And by 1951, Yip had been blacklisted from
any chance to do any of the wonderful shows that they did in Hollywood, Dr.
Doolittle, Treasure Island. He was blocked from working there. And then he was
blocked from going into radio and into TV.
So—and this is an historical fact which
Yip himself says—Broadway and the American theater in New York City was the
only place where an artist could stand up and say whatever he wanted, provided
he got the money to put the show on. So, for Finian’s Rainbow, they had to have
25 auditions, because they said it was a commie red thing. And finally, they
got the money up, and they put the show up. But by that time, Yip was blacklisted.
And his next show was Jamaica with Lena
Horne, with an all-black cast. One other thing, in terms of Yip’s drive for
race or ethnic equality, and that is that Finian’s Rainbow in 1947 was the
first show on Broadway where the chorus line consisted of blacks and whites who
danced with each other, and the chorus was an integrated affair.
AMY GOODMAN: What happened to him during
the McCarthy era?
ERNIE HARBURG: Well, he could not work on
any major film that they wanted him to work on from the major studios in Hollywood.
The setup was that Roy Brewer, who was the head of the IATSE union—I’m sorry to
say that—was the one who—
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?
ERNIE HARBURG: Well, I mean this is a
stagehands’ union. I’d like to say good things about unions, but they get
bureaucratized, and they go right-wing, you know? They get bad. This was a bad
leader, and he terrorized all of the Jewish moguls who were being accused of
communism by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and they yielded to
whatever he said to them, out of fear that they would get branded as communists
or that they’d boycott the film, alright?
And so, when, you know, they called Yip
in to do Huckleberry Finn with Burt Lane, then Roy and the guys said, "No,
he’s on our blacklist, OK? And you can’t hire him." And then Yip went
away. And they wanted him to work on Dr. Doolittle. "No, you can’t hire
him." And the same thing for radio and TV. And that was known as a, quote,
"blacklist," which wasn’t — that wasn’t the first use of the term,
because in small towns we had company corporations going, if you did something
that the company didn’t like, you were blacklisted from town. You couldn’t get
a job in town. But this was the first time, due to the technology, that a
blacklist was national and accompanied by a loaded word, "communist,"
that could get you fired anyplace.
For Yip, it was horrible, because his
friends, who were artists, suddenly had no income. And there were suicides.
There was divorces. There were people who left the country. There were people
whose lives were just ruined. And so, Yip supported some of them. Dalton
Trumbo, who was one of the Hollywood Ten who were first picked out by the House
Un-American Activities Committee to go to jail for a year, a citation.
"Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?"
You know, Yip fronted him with money, and so forth. It was a horrible time.
AMY GOODMAN: How long couldn’t Yip work
for?
ERNIE HARBURG: For about from 1951 to
1962. He came back to Hollywood in 1962, when he and Harold Arlen did Gay
Paris, which is with Judy Garland. She asked them to come back. And it’s a cult
animated cartoon now, which you can get in your video. And I remember him
putting on a show at the Taber Auditorium. "Welcome Back, Yip," you
know? And he—in ’62.
AMY GOODMAN: But that means that The
Wizard of Oz made it big during the time that he was blacklisted. That was—and
when you consider the social commentary that it was making, that’s pretty
profound.
ERNIE HARBURG: Yeah, but I don’t think
hardly anyone knows the political symbolism underneath The Wizard of Oz,
because, again, it’s a thing that happens in Finian’s Rainbow, even though as
Peter Stone, a noted playwright on Broadway, said, "It’s the only
socialist tract ever on Broadway." Alright? People don’t hear the
political message in it, OK? They are vastly entertained. The same thing
happens with The Wizard. You know, nobody would even think of such a thing.
YIP HARBURG: My songs, like "When
the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich" and "Brother, Can You Spare a
Dime?" caused a great deal of furor during a period in Hollywood when a
fellow by the name of Joe McCarthy was reigning supreme. And so, they got
something up for people to take care of us, like me, called the blacklist. And
I landed on the enemy list.
And in order to overcome the enemy list
-– what was the enemy list? Well, it’s, one, that you were a red; another one,
that you were a bluenose; and the other one, that you’re on the blacklist.
Finally, I thought the rainbow was a wonderful symbol of all these lists. In
order to overcome the enemy list and this rainbow that they gave me the idea
for, I wrote this little poem:
Lives of great men all remind us
Greatness takes no easy way,
All the heroes of tomorrow
Are the heretics of today.
Socrates and Galileo,
John Brown, Thoreau, Christ and Debs
Heard the night cry "Down with
traitors!"
And the dawn shout "Up the
rebs!"
Nothing ever seems to bust them —
Gallows, crosses, prison bars;
Tho’ we try to readjust them
There they are among the stars.
Lives of great men all remind us
We can write our names on high
and departing leave behind us
Thumbprints in the FBI.
AMY GOODMAN: Today’s program was actually
produced for radio in 1996 with Errol Maitland and Dan Coughlin. Special thanks
to Gary Helm, Brother Shine and Julie Drizen.
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