Over the Rainbow

I can't carry a tune to save my life, but have an overwhelming appreciation for music and especially songs with great lyrics. Some of my favorite contemporary artists are women who write their own songs, sing them and play their own instruments-- women like Regina Spektor and Jill Sobule-- and their artistry is profound poetry. Will their songs endure the test of time or even make it into the mainstream of music? I don't know. But it occurred to me recently that while new music is exciting to discover and keeps things fresh, there are some songs/poems that have touched generations and provide a story so innately human it can be re-done in a variety of ways, from arrangement to artist.


Today I realized that I have not one or two, but three versions of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" on my iPOD recorded by different singers and set to different instruments. Turns out, three versions probably isn’t enough. I have found so many takes on iTunes alone that are beautiful. To get an idea of the diversity of genre and format in which the song has been recorded after the Judy Garland debut, here is a short list out of the hundreds who have given the song voice: Placito Domingo, Jewel, Patti LaBelle, Tony Bennett, Carly Simon, Grace Kelly, Eric Clapton, Kylie Minogue, Ella Fitzgerald, Tori Amos, Willie Nelson, and my two favorites, Eva Cassidy and Rufus Wainwright. Countless Philharmonic orchestras and even a tripped out version by the phunky band Phish have found this song a home in their repertoire.

Who was the poet behind the curtain? Turns out the music was written by Harold Arlen and the lyrics were penned by Y.E. Harburg. While I appreciate the music, it’s the lyrics I love and because of the words, the music has been changed and re-interpreted over the decades. Y.E. “Yip” Harburg not only wrote the Rainbow lyrics, but penned all of the lyrics for the Wizard of Oz as well as the classics “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” “April in Paris” and “It’s Only a Paper Moon.” He was a contemporary and long time friend of Ira Gershwin—the two met working on their high school newspaper—and it was Gershwin who persuaded him to start writing song lyrics after his personal business crashed with the Stock Market in 1929. Here is his masterful work:


Somewhere over the rainbow

Way up high,

There's a land that I 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.

Someday 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

Bluebirds 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?


One of my favorite writers of all time, Salman Rushdie, was so inspired by the movie and the song in particular after seeing it as a 10 year old in 1950’s Bombay, that the first short story he ever wrote was called “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Later in life he wrote a small book about the movie and how the song was his first literary influence. Recently, NPR’s Studio 360 played the audio of Rushdie speaking about this to an audience in Vancouver. This is what he has to say:

“Anyone who has swallowed the scriptwriter’s notion that this is a film about the superiority of “home” over “away,” that the moral of The Wizard of Oz is as sickly sweet as an embroidered sampler, “east west/home’s best,” “there’s no place like home” would do well to listen to the yearning in Judy Garland’s voice as her face tilts upward towards the skies. What she expresses here, what she embodies with the purity of an archetype, is the human dream of leaving. A dream at least as powerful as its countervailing dream of roots. At the heart of The Wizard of Oz is the tension between these two dreams. But as the music swells and that big clean voice flies into the anguished longings of the song, can anyone doubt which message is the stronger? In its most potent emotional moment, this is unarguably a film about the joys of going away, of leaving the grayness and entering the color. Of making a new life in a place where there isn’t any trouble. “Over the Rainbow” is or ought to be, the anthem of all the world’s migrants, all those who go in search of the place where “the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.” It is a celebration of escape, a grand paean to the uprooted self, a hymn, the hymn, to elsewhere.”

I couldn’t agree more with Rushdie’s idea that the song is a celebration of going away, being adventurous and finding a way to move forward in life. My “going away” in 1998 was into a land Rushdie wrote about in comparison with his native India: Ireland. Both former British colonies, home to great writers, were no strangers with being the “world’s migrants” as he calls them. Ironically, I went from the gray most of the year Oregon of my childhood to an Ireland, and then in 2000 Northern Ireland, which couldn’t have been any grayer. However, it was a place where everyone dreamed for a land they knew of once in a lullaby, and they sang about it. Here is one of my poems about that time:

Awakenings

The sun never sets in Belfast

in fact it hardly rises.

By chance you can catch it

a dim egg yolk on the horizon

breaking its way in fits and starts

through the blank sheets of night.



By mid-morning it has already begun

its cautious tiptoe through the sky

dipping in and out of the vast pool

gauging the pulse of the city below.



The sun never sets in Belfast,

but hovers eternally

in the damp blouses hanging

on pairs of sagging shoulders.



City shoppers and market goers

cut daily paths through faintness,

donned in gray cloaks, chatting of yesterday--

a habit like the drooping spittle of rain.



Does the weather breed skepticism

or do skeptics control the weather?

Maybe it has gone too long unnoticed

as a line of wash left battling the wind.



The sun never sets in Belfast

but erases like a spelling error,

corrected into memory by repetition

humbled in brief crimson,

embarrassment of unacceptance

the indefensible horror of being wrong.



This land harbors insomniacs,

and breeds ignorance in birds

who begin a chorus of morning songs

in the middle of the night.



The sun never sets in Belfast

in fact it hardly rises,

but if you’re are lucky you may see it ,

greet the dawn or whisper at dusk,



This is my new way of life,

learning to read the layers of the sky.


To listen to Kurt Andersen's Studio 360 audio click on this link: http://www.studio360.org/americanicons/episodes/2009/08/28