E. Y. Harburg

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Yip Harburg
Born Isidore Hochberg
April 8, 1896(1896-04-08)
New York City, New York
Died March 4, 1981 (aged 84)
West Los Angeles, California

Edgar Yipsel Harburg (April 8, 1896 – March 4, 1981), known as E. Y. Harburg or Yip Harburg, was an American lyricist who worked with many well-known composers. He is best known for writing the lyrics to The Wizard of Oz, including those of "Over the Rainbow".

Contents

[edit] Background

Harburg was born Isidore Hochberg to immigrant Jewish parents on the Lower East Side of New York City. His nickname was "Yipsel" often shortened to "Yip". Contrary to popular belief, "Yipsel" is not a Yiddish word, but rather the pronunciation of "YPSL", which, in turn stood for Young People's Socialist League. After he adopted the name Edgar Harburg, He was best known as Edgar "Yip" Harburg. He attended Townsend Harris High School, where he and Ira Gershwin, who met over a shared fondness for Gilbert and Sullivan, worked on the school paper and became life-long friends. They went on to attend City College (later part of the City University of New York) together.[1]

US stamp honoring Harburg
US stamp honoring Harburg

After graduating from university, Harburg spent three years in Uruguay to avoid involvement in World War I, which he opposed as a committed socialist. There he worked as a factory supervisor. After the war he returned to New York, married and had two children and started writing light verse for local newspapers. He became co-owner of Consolidated Electrical Appliance Company. The company went bankrupt following the crash of 1929, leaving Harburg "anywhere from $50,000 - $70,000 in debt,"[2] which he insisted on paying back over the course of the next few decades. At this point, Ira Gershwin and Yip Harburg agreed that Yip should start writing song lyrics.

Gershwin introduced Harburg to Jay Gorney, who collaborated with him on songs for an Earl Carroll Broadway review (Earl Carroll's Sketchbook): the show was successful and Harburg was engaged as lyricist for a series of successful reviews, including Americana in 1932, for which he wrote the lyrics of Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? to the tune of a lullaby Gorney had learned as a child in Russia. This song swept the nation, becoming an anthem of the Great Depression.

A good example of his clever lyrics is in the "Riddle Me This?" (music by Lewis Gensler) (a song sung in a Casino setting) from Ballyhoo of 32;

Love a little, sin a little;
play the game and win a little;
only to lose.

Listen to the money jingle;
isn't it a funny jingle;
ending with blues.

Harburg and Gorney were offered a contract with Paramount: in Hollywood, Harburg worked with composers Harold Arlen, Vernon Duke, Jerome Kern, Jule Styne, and Burton Lane, and wrote the lyrics for The Wizard of Oz for which he won the Academy Award for Best Music, Original Song for Over the Rainbow.

Another excellent example of his lyric brilliance is the obscure song "Down With Love" from the 1937 show 'Horray For What?" (music by Harold Arlen):

Down with love, flowers and rice and shoes.
Down with love, the root of all midnight blues.
Down with things that give you that well-known pain.
Take that moon and wrap it in cellophane!

Down with love, let’s liquidate all its friends:
Moon and June and roses and rainbow’s ends.
Down with songs that moan about night and day.
Down with love, just take it away, away.

Away.
Take it away.
Give it back to the birds and bees and the Viennese!

Down with eyes, romantic and stupid,
Down with sighs, down with cupid.
Brother, let’s stuff that dove! Down with love!

Of his work on The Wizard of Oz, his son (and biographer) Ernie Harburg said,[3]

“ So anyhow, Yip also wrote all the dialogue in that time and the setup to the songs and he also wrote the part where they give out the heart, the brains and the nerve, because he was the final script editor. And he — there was eleven screenwriters on that — and he pulled the whole thing together, wrote his own lines and gave the thing a coherence and unity which made it a work of art. But he doesn’t get credit for that. He gets lyrics by E. Y. Harburg, you see. But nevertheless, he put his influence on the thing. ”

Working in Hollywood did not stop Harburg's career on Broadway. In the 40s he wrote a series of book musicals with social messages, including the very successful Bloomer Girl (1944) (about temperance and women's rights activist Amelia Bloomer) and his most famous Broadway show, Finian's Rainbow (1947) (perhaps the first Broadway musical with a racially integrated chorus line, featuring Harburg's "When the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich").

During the McCarthy era, from about 1951 to 1962, Yip Harburg was a victim of the Hollywood blacklist when movie studio bosses blacklisted industry people for suspected involvement or sympathy with the American Communist Party. No longer able to work in Hollywood, he nevertheless continued to write musicals for Broadway, among which was Jamaica, which featured Lena Horne.

[edit] Awards

In 1940 Harburg won an Oscar, shared with Harold Arlen, for Best Music, Original Song for "The Wizard of Oz", (1939). In addition, he was nominated for an Oscar for Best Music, Original Song, along with Arlen, for "Cabin in the Sky", (1943) and Best Music, Original Song for "Can't Help Singing", shared with Jerome Kern in (1944).[4]

Harburg was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972; nine years later (1981) he died in a Los Angeles car accident. In April 2005, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp recognizing his accomplishments. The stamp is drawn from a portrait taken by photographer Barbara Bordnick in 1978 along with a rainbow and lyric from Over the Rainbow. The first day ceremony was held at the 92nd Street Y in New York.

In 1998 Harburg received a pop culture credit by having a ship's captain named after him in the Wizard of Oz-themed X-Files episode entitled "Triangle".

[edit] Songs

[edit] Broadway revues

  • Earl Carroll's Sketchbook of 1929 (1929) - co-composer and co-lyricist with Jay Gorney
  • Garrick Gaieties (1930) - contributing lyricist
  • Earl Carroll's Vanities of 1930 (1930) - contributing songwriter
  • The Vanderbilt Revue (1930) - contributing lyricist
  • Ziegfeld Follies of 1931 (1931) - featured lyricist for "Mailu"
  • Shoot the Works (1931) - contributing composer and lyricist
  • Ballyhoo of 1932 (1932) - lyricist
  • Americana (1932) - lyricist. The Revue include "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?"
  • Walk A Little Faster (1932) - lyricist
  • Ziegfeld Follies of 1934 (1934) - primary lyricist (for about half of the numbers)
  • Life Begins at 8:40 (1934) - co-lyricist with Ira Gershwin
  • The Show is On (1936) - featured lyricist
  • Blue Holiday (1945) - all-Black cast - contributing composer and lyricist
  • At Home With Ethel Waters (1953) - featured lyricist for "Happiness is Jes' a Thing Called Joe"

Post-retirement or posthumous credits:

  • A Day in Hollywood / A Night in the Ukraine (1980) - featured lyricist for "Over the Rainbow"
  • Jerome Kern Goes to Hollywood (1986) - featured lyricist to music by Jerome Kern
  • Mostly Sondheim (2002) - featured lyricist

[edit] Broadway musicals

[edit] Films

  • Moonlight and Pretzels - 1933
  • The Singing Kid - 1936
  • Golddiggers of 1937 - 1936
  • The Wizard of Oz - 1939
  • At the Circus - 1939
  • Babes on Broadway - 1941
  • Ship Ahoy - 1942
  • Cabin in the Sky - 1943 Harburg's song "Aint It The Truth" expressing religious skepticism was removed[5]
  • Can't Help Singing - 1944
  • Gay Purr-ee - 1962
  • Finian's Rainbow

[edit] Books

  • Rhymes for the Irreverent (1965)
  • At This Point in Rhyme (1976)

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Spotlight on E. Y. Harburg
  2. ^ Democracy Now article 25, November, 2004
  3. ^ Democracy Now article 25, November, 2004
  4. ^ Awards for E.Y. Harburg. IMDB. Retrieved on 2007-07-16.
  5. ^ *April 29, 2006 - Somewhere Over the Rainbow . . . Rhymes for the Irreverent Freedom From Religion Foundation's Podcast 22:10

[edit] References

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