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Over the Rainbow
Written by Harold Arlen and E.Y. “Yip” Harburg, 1939
It’s hard to picture The Wizard of Oz without this song, but it very nearly didn’t make it into the film. Composer Harold Arlen and lyricist Yip Harburg wrote it for MGM’s 1939 musical, and Arlen later said the melody came to him while his wife, Anya, was driving them down Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. He asked her to pull over near Schwab’s Drugstore so he could jot the tune down before it slipped away.
Harburg wasn’t won over at first. He thought the melody sounded too grand and operatic for a young farm girl from Kansas. Their friend Ira Gershwin suggested Arlen play it a little lighter and brighter, and once he did, Harburg came around. Harburg imagined Dorothy’s world as dry and colorless, so a rainbow would be the most beautiful thing she had ever seen, and he built the song around her longing for a place like that.
After early previews, studio executives cut the song. They felt it slowed the movie down, and some thought it undignified for a star to sing in a barnyard. Associate producer Arthur Freed and others fought to have it put back, and they won. The song went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song, and it became Judy Garland’s signature for the rest of her life. She sang it at nearly every concert she gave for three decades.
The song did well on the radio in its own day, too. Glenn Miller and his orchestra took it to the top of the charts in 1939. Generations later, in 2001, the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts named it the number one song of the twentieth century. The American Film Institute gave it the same top spot among movie songs in 2004. Many younger listeners know it from Hawaiian singer Israel Kamakawiwoʻole, whose gentle ukulele medley, released in 1993, brought the song to a whole new audience.
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