Why ‘Over the Rainbow’ was the perfect closer for Ariana Grande’s Manchester tribute
AFTER all the musicians - including Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber, Coldplay and Pharrell Williams - left the stage Sunday night at One Love Manchester, Ariana Grande walked back out, blowing kisses to the crowd.
She began to sing “Over the Rainbow,” an optimistic coda for a tribute concert to the 22 killed and more than 55 injured by a terrorist attack at her May 22 show in Manchester. Halfway through, her voice faltered with emotion.
The concertgoers, so recently touched by tragedy, remained mostly silent as they waved their lit phone screens in the night sky, just as people held lighters 20 years earlier. Several audience members cried as Grande’s voice soared with lyrics that have stood for hope for some eight decades. Someday I’ll wish upon a star And wake up where the clouds are far Behind me Where troubles melt like lemon drops
The song was fi rst written for the 1939 fi lm “The Wizard of Oz,” and sung by Judy Garland’s Dorothy before visiting the enchanted land of Oz.
Prolific American composer Harold Arlen wrote the music. And Yip Harburg - a liberal so outspoken on issues of gender, race and worker’s rights he earned the nickname “Broadway’s social conscience” - penned its brief but everlasting lyrics.
Harburg, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, was born as Edgar Yipsel Harburg into extreme poverty in 1896 on New York City’s Lower East Side. Like so many Jewish immigrant children in New York, he attended City College, along with high school classmate Ira Gershwin. The pair often wrote poems together.
But Harburg considered writing something done “for fun, a sideline,” and decided to go into the electrical supply business to claw his way out of poverty. He mostly succeeded until the Great Depression, which fi nancially devastated him.
“For the next few years we made a lot of money and I hated it,” Harburg once said.
“But the economy saved me. 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 fi nally had to write for a living. As I told Studs Terkel once, what the Depression was for most people was for me a lifesaver!”
He began writing song lyrics, and most of them, especially “Over the Rainbow,” carried political messages speaking to what he perceived of as a better world.
“No one wrote about more controversial subjects, from poverty and racism to women’s rights and the atomic bomb, than Harburg. Yet he did it with pixie-like glee, using laughter to make his pointed observations about the nightmares of the modern world,” Thomas S. Hischak wrote in “Boy Loses Girl: Broadway’s Librettists.”
“We worked for in our songs a sort of better world, a rainbow world,” Harburg once said. “Now, my generation unfortunately never succeed in making that rainbow world, so we can’t hand it down to you.
“But we could hand down our songs, which still hang on to hope and laughter . . . in times of confusion.”
That particular song has indeed become an anthem of hope, particularly in the face of hatred, fear and death.
Though its original lyrics spoke to the struggle Americans faced in the Great Depression, they were malleable enough to connect with any cause.
As part of the public-private V-Disc programme, a recording of the song by Judy Garland and the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra was shipped to soldiers serving in World War II, the Times Union reported. Meanwhile, it became an “anthem” for the LGBT community, even partially inspiring the rainbow fl ag. — WP-Bloomberg