Restoring the Original "Over the Rainbow"

81 years ago tomorrow, on October 7th, 1938, Judy Garland and the MGM studio orchestra recorded “Over the Rainbow.” The song was written for the film by Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg, and arranged by Murray Cutter. It was in the MGM scoring stage with its plywood walls, with Judy singing at the same time as the orchestra and Georgie Stoll conducting. They did eight takes that day, splicing together the beginning of take 5 with the rest of take 6 to be used in the film, and the rest is history.

Yes, it’s nice that it’s the 81st anniversary (and the 80th anniversary of the release of the film this autumn, too), but why bother to write this post? Well, because for a few weeks this summer, this particular arrangement of “Over the Rainbow,” which has loomed large in my life since I first heard it at age two, became a near-obsession. It all began on May 8th of this year, when in the middle of an email about another Garland arrangement I was restoring for an upcoming concert (more on that here), Michael Feinstein dropped the tantalizing tidbit that he might have found the original orchestral arrangement of “Over the Rainbow.” He couldn’t be sure until he received actual copies because he’d only gotten a brief glimpse of them among composer/bandleader/arranger David Rose’s files as he was helping David’s daughter, Angela Rose White, move some files from her Studio City office.

And then we waited…

….and waited….

….and waited.

My Judy! Judy! Judy! June

Pardon me for not writing in over a year. At the same time that we bought a new house, moved, then sold our old house, I was having to finish up the biggest project of my life at least 6 months earlier than I’d even dreamed was possible. To quote one of Judy Garland’s early songs from Love Finds Andy Hardy, “It Never Rains, But What It Pours!”

But, as in all my favorite MGM movies, there were some silver linings. I absolutely love my “new” 1941 house and friendly neighborhood right out of an Andy Hardy movie. And the aforementioned project — restoring the orchestral arrangements for Judy’s 1961 Carnegie Hall concert — culminated in one of the high points of my my life thus far.

Restoring Judy Garland's Carnegie Hall Concert

It’s been a few months since I’ve written, but I just had to come up for air to share some exciting news with you: Michael Feinstein has invited me to join the Judy Garland Carnegie Hall Concert Restoration Project team as Editor, for The Judy Garland Heirs Trust. As part of this project to preserve Judy Garland’s musical legacy, our aim is to restore all of the original symphonic arrangements from the 1961 Carnegie Hall Concert and make them available for live performance once again. Since late last summer I have been restoring and performing a handful of Judy’s original arrangements that the Trust, of which Michael Feinstein is a trustee, very graciously shared with me. But to get the chance to work on a preservation project like this is so exciting that I still have to stop and pinch myself. (And then I look at the long road ahead and it sobers me up in a hurry, but I digress…)

Stepping Into Judy's Palace Medley

“And all around me I hear voices that I can’t ignore,

The voices of the stars who played the Palace long before.

The stars who entertained you until the rafters rang —

You don’t need their names, for the whole world acclaims them

For the wonderful songs they sang…”

~Roger Edens, introduction to the "Judy at the Palace Medley"

As someone who spends a lot of her time listening to voices emerging from scratchy recordings and then trying to inhabit them, these lines were insistently reaching out to me every time I got to this point in Judy Garland's recording of her "Judy at the Palace Medley." It was some time back in the autumn of 2015, and I was trying to decide which tune to add next to my Garland repertoire — either to the second half of my Symphonic Pops concert or to my nascent cabaret show. I'd been “auditioning” a lot of numbers from her many post-1950 recordings, but this one was having the same dramatic effect on me every time I heard it...

…And I was resisting it tooth and nail.

How She Could Go On Singing

Last March, Mark and I were perched on the comfy bar chairs in the WCLV Ideastream studio waiting for our interview to promote the premiere of Get Happy! Judy Garland 1944-’54. Just before we went on-the-air, the host, Bill O’Connell, asked me whether Judy Garland’s singing technique was healthy. I replied, “Yes, but she wasn’t always healthy.” Then I had to add that her technique is very efficient, but also very athletic — so, essentially, “Don’t Try This At Home!” Just like you wouldn’t want to try to run a marathon without significant training and practice, you also wouldn’t want to try to sing the Carnegie Hall Concert at full tilt without thousands of hours of training and conditioning.

Judy After Oz and "The Boy from Oz"

By this time, it should go without saying that I am a lifelong card-carrying Judy Garland fan. But until fairly recently, I’d shied away from “Judy the Icon” — Judy post-Hollywood, even (mostly) Judy post-1944. I was always more drawn to the sweetness and vulnerability, the sunniness and unspoiled humor she brought to her film roles, recordings, and radio broadcasts circa 1936-1944, and found the later recordings and appearances I’d randomly run across brittle, edgy, and somehow off-putting and disturbing. Perhaps I just wanted her to stay Dorothy and Betsy Booth forever. And I’d heard a few recordings over the years in which she clearly had laryngitis, so I’d made the completely erroneous extrapolation (reinforced by some biographers and playwrights, I’m sorry to say) that it was all downhill, when in reality it just varied depending on her health and the tour or shooting schedule.

Joan EllisonOctober 20, 2015Judy Garland, Love Finds Judy Garland, The Boy from Oz, John Fricke, TheatreZoneComment