Name the greatest golden-age songwriter you’ve never heard of. OK, well, you can’t. Alright then, think of the ones you can – Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Irving Berlin (after whom I named a pet hamster – long story), Hoagy Carmichael..between them they composed the majority of the great 20s, 30s and early 40s tunes, before the big bands and, eventually, their featured singers became bigger than the songs. If you were to then compile a list of which wrote which song, a somewhat gaping hole would appear: in the same way that warships with stealth technology are invisible to radar but betrayed by the hole they leave in the sea, there are half a dozen huge, iconic, emotive all-American songs that are to all intents and purposes orphaned. The songs are still engraved on the popular consciousness, but their originators all but forgotten – and this is partly a deliberate act.
The zenith of American popular music coincided with the nadir of its economy. As the Great Depression bit, and kept biting deeper, a trip to the picture house cost a quarter – a 78 rpm disc cost the same, and had the bonus of durability, as however physically fragile a record could be played over and again, and consequently sold in their millions. Some of the tunes were irreverent and jolly, aimed at taking the collective mind away from the very real privation that surrounded so many: but the ones that really struck didn’t offer distraction – they offered catharsis. They didn’t say “chin up” as much as “we know, it hurts, and we’re all hurting, so take comfort”, drawing on a strong tradition of predominantly Jewish folk-musical tradition (almost without exception the composers and lyricists were first- or second-generation immigrants from central and Eastern Europe, escaping war, servitude or pogrom in equal measure), the melodies strong and easily learnt, the lyrics heartfelt and threnodic and often laced with irony. Arguably the greatest of them all, the song that captured the anguish of an entire society and effectively heralded the sunset into a ten-year night of economic desolation, was “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”
Composed in 1932, “Dime” was one of the first collaborations between composer Jay Gorney, and lyricist Edgar Yipsel “Yip” Harburg. Gorney was born in Russia, and brought to the USA as an infant as his parents fled a pogrom, Americanising the family name from Gornetzki. He discovered a natural musicality playing the pianola in the local drugstore, and by 14 was playing for pay in saloons and theatres. He was befriended by Ira Gershwin, who in turn introduced Gorney in the late 20s to Harburg. Born Isidore Yipsel Hochberg in New York in the spring of 1896, Harburg’s parents were also Russian refugees. His father was passionate about workers’ rights, sickened by the exploitation he had witnessed under Romanov rule, and was determined that his own children would never experience such discrimination, and as a result Isidore, renamed Edgar but known to everyone as Yip, was brought up with a strong sense of social equality and justice: this would eventually, ironically, destroy his own career.
That was some time in the future however. For the moment, Gorney moved on and Harburg teamed up with composer Harold Arlen, and continued to tap into the American zeitgeist, supplying the whole score for numerous Broadway shows (including Lydia the Tattooed Lady for the Marx Brothers and featured in the film version of At The Circus) and stand-alone songs such as Paper Moon, Down With Love and April in Paris. Yip’s career was riding high – and then he and Arlen were approached to write the score for the forthcoming movie version of The Wizard of Oz.
From this came Arlen and Harburg’s greatest, best known and most durable number – “Over The Rainbow”. More than just a striking song, it became an American anthem: and just as “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime”, Harburg’s song of despair, had come to represent the opening bars to the Great Depression, his “Over The Rainbow” came to signify the end of it – an expression of hope, as the nation dared to dream once more.
Harburg’s reputation was thus cemented as the go-to lyricist for both Hollywood and Broadway, and he gained a good deal of influence over production values which could finally reflect his passionately-held belief in equality – his most successful show, Finian’s Rainbow, was the first on Broadway to have a racially-diverse cast all employed on the same terms. He was outspoken in his belief that talent should be rewarded regardless of gender or race, joined the American Socialist party, and once joked that the day Wall Street was abolished and its worth shared out the American people would all be beneficiaries. This joke was to alter his life irrevocably.
His views had not gone unnoticed. The man whose lyrics had bracketed the greatest social trial Americans had faced since the Civil War was hauled before the Un-American Activities Committee, accused of Communist sympathies. Yip protested, citing his authorship of “God’s Country” as evidence of his patriotism, but to no avail. McCarthy accused Harburg of wanting to sabotage the whole capitalist system. He was denounced and blacklisted, rendered unable to work in the USA for twelve years: even once the ban was lifted, he never was able to regain the kind of success he had previously enjoyed. His friends helped: many of Porter and Berlin’s minor numbers have a suspiciously Harburg-esque ring to them, and it was an open secret that he continued to “advise” on a number of Broadway and Hollywood musicals, but Yip was never again lauded for work under his own name. He died in 1981, not in poverty, but in near-obscurity.
And yet, one day in the 1950s, Groucho Marx made a guest appearance at the New York Stock Exchange, theoretically to ring the bell that signified the start of trading at the stroke of 9.30. Marx instead commandeered a microphone, and spent 15 minutes telling jokes, finishing with a rendition of Lydia The Tattooed Lady. Both Harburg’s joke and McCarthy’s fear had simultaneously came true: for twenty magical minutes, Yip Harburg’s work stopped Wall Street in its tracks: not with malice or emnity, but with humour, and warmth, and wit – and a genuine love of the American people.
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