Latest / Timeless Songs with Eileen Ponich / Why “Over the Rainbow Still Moves Us”

Transcript

Why “Over the Rainbow Still Moves Us” · Timeless Songs with Eileen Ponich

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: Why can a song sung by a girl on a Kansas farm still bring us to tears,
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: even after we have heard it hundreds of times?
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: Judy Garland sang Over the Rainbow at 16, then again 23 years later at Carnegie Hall.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's the same song, but I hear a different kind of longing.
• 0:28
  [music]
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Timeless Songs, where great songs live on.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Eileen Ponich.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: Today, let's listen to what the years brought to Judy's voice.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: I first heard Over the Rainbow when I was six or seven.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: The television broadcast of The Wizard of Oz was an event, and I was swept away.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: I even imagined it being carried off by that tornado if it meant arriving somewhere
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: as colorful as Oz.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: Only later did I hear the longing beneath the dream.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: Dorothy's wish for a different life.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: As adults, we may understand that feeling even better.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: Judy Garland was 16 when she first recorded the song for The Wizard of Oz in October of 1938.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: The film came out the following year.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: Listen to the clarity of her voice in the film.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: She does little to force the emotion.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: Dorothy's wish sounds sincere, and the place she imagines still seems possible.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg wrote the song for Dorothy,
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: who feels unheard on the Kansas farm and imagines somewhere beyond it.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: Arlen gives that wish on the first two syllables.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: The melody rises an entire octave.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: In one breath, we travel with Dorothy toward the place she hopes might exist.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: The song nearly disappeared from the movie.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: The story goes that MGM executives thought it slowed the film,
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: but Arthur Freed fought to keep it.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: It stayed, won an Academy Award, and became inseparable from Garland.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: It was written for Dorothy.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: No one could have known what it would mean when Garland sang it again After living
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: so much more of her own life,
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: Garland's success came with illness,
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: dependence on prescription drugs,
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: and the demands of an industry that had controlled much of her life since childhood.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: In late 1959, she was hospitalized with acute hepatitis.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: She became seriously ill, and doctors reportedly told her she might never
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: perform again.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: But she did.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: She returned to the concert stage in 1960.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: On April 23, she walked on the stage of a packed Carnegie Hall.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: You can hear the audience responding to her throughout the recording.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: The album spent 13 weeks at number one and swept the Grammys, including Album of the Year.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: Garland was the first woman to ever win it, but the recording tells us something more intimate.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: Her audience understood how much it had taken for her to be there.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: Late in the concert, Garland returned to Over the Rainbow.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: I have linked that performance and the film version in the show notes
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: so you can hear them together.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: At 16, her voice is intimate and full of possibility.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: At Carnegie Hall, the tempo feels more deliberate.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Her voice is richer, rougher, and weighted by the intervening ears.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then I hear something else, anguish.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: At times she sounds close to tears.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: I hear it in the strain of a phrase,
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: the tremor of a note, and the way she lingers over words that seem difficult to say.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: In the film,
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: Dorothy Dreams of Another World,
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: at Carnegie Hall,
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: Garland sounds like someone who knows how far
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: away that world can feel.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: The words have not changed.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: Everything she brings to them has.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: The Carnegie Hall performance brought tears to my eyes.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: I heard the song I loved as a child and what time and disappointment had placed inside it.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: One of my mentors, Johnny Knapp, once told me,
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: beautiful voice is a dime a dozen.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: A voice that makes you feel something is truly special.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: Judy's voice was beautiful at both ages.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: What stays with me is how deeply she makes me feel the song.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: At thirty-eight,
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: Garland knew longing in a way Dorothy could not, yet she kept singing the song.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: Perhaps it offered more than escape,
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: a way to carry an old wish through difficult years without giving it up.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: Endurance dressed as a lullaby.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: In the Carnegie Hall performance, That endurance sounds painfully close to breaking.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: Most of us learn that somewhere else does not arrive as we imagined.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: Dreams change.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes hope becomes something we have to fight to keep alive.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: But the desire for something better remains.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: Harold Arlen was in the audience that night.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: 23 years after writing the melody for Dorothy,
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: he heard Garland sing it with the weight of a life he could not have imagined.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: Garland once described the song as a reflection
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: of everyone wondering why change can't be a little better.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: That simple, stubborn wish still reaches us.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: At six or seven, I wanted to be transported to another world.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: Now I hear the hope that life can still become better.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: In her Carnegie Hall performance, I hear the dream and the cost of continuing to dream.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: What do you hear in Over the Rainbow, now that you could not have heard as a child?
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: When you're back at a screen, Come tell me at timelesssongs.substack.com.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: I read every note.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: If this story moved you, I hope you'll join me for the next one.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: Follow Timeless Songs on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: Or subscribe to my Timeless Songs blog on Substack,
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: and the stories will come straight to your inbox.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: You'll find the links in the show notes.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: Choose the way you like to listen or read, and join me in keeping these beautiful songs alive.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Eileen Ponich with a song in my heart.
• 9:10
  [music]