Reviving Judy Garland's "Merry Christmas"

In her 1949 MGM film, In the Good Old Summertime, Judy Garland sings a lovely but oft-overlooked Christmas song appropriately titled, “Merry Christmas.” Fred Spielman, who had been a prominent cabaret pianist in pre-Anschluss Vienna, wrote the music and Yale-drama alumna Janice Torré wrote the lyric — a partnership that later produced the songs for The Stingiest Man in Town, a musical version of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

It was released on an MGM Records album but, to my knowledge, Judy never sang it again after she recorded it for the movie on November 16th, 1948. Perhaps the song’s passing similarity to her earlier hit, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” prevented it from becoming more widely known. Nevertheless, the arrangement had long been on my wishlist for restoration, so when Joelle Graves, the Executive Director of the Rogue Valley Symphony in Ashland, Oregon, asked me to create a holiday pops concert for them entitled A Judy Garland Christmas for December 2025, I knew the time was at hand.

"Next Year All Our Troubles Will Be Out of Sight": A Song for 2020

Although written for Judy Garland to sing in the 1944 film Meet Me in St. Louis, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” seems like it could have been written today. Back then, America was knee-deep in World War II, and now we’re nine months into another world-wide crisis, in many cases without even the comfort of friends and family to help us get through it. Here’s hoping that “someday soon we all will be together” and that 2021 will be much brighter than 2020. And in the meantime, Merry Christmas.

(Song by Hugh Martin & Ralph Blane; Original orchestral arrangement by Conrad Salinger; Piano arrangement by Joan Ellison based on the original orchestration.)

“Yes”: My Journey into the Wonderful World of Orchestration and Meeting Some Wizards

During the past five months I’ve been on a very steep learning curve — actually, more like something involving tornadoes and the yellow brick road — but on January 21st I’m going to get to share with 2000 people some of the results of the arduous journey: I’m going to get to sing two of Judy Garland’s original arrangements onstage with a symphony orchestra.

Of course, I’ve been singing Judy’s tunes with orchestras for a few years now, in wonderful arrangements based on the originals by two terrific arrangers (see an earlier post, "Getting Happy"). But for someone like me who loves time travel and Judy, suddenly having access to the actual note-for-note arrangements that we’ve all heard on her albums was an incredible stroke of good fortune that I’d never even allowed myself to hope for.

Here’s how it happened: