A man and his rainbow appeared Thursday on a new 37-cent stamp. "Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue," reads the text, alongside the portrait and name of its author: Yip Harburg.
There was no reference to a rainbow in L. Frank Baum's classic novel, "The Wizard of Oz." But Harburg, the lyricist whom producer Arthur Freed had hired along with composer Harold Arlen to write the score for the MGM picture, was trying to square the demands of the character ("a little girl who had never seen anything beyond an arid Kansas," he was to say later) with those of a production that began in black and white and segued into glorious Technicolor.
As if that weren't challenge enough, Arlen then presented him with a melody of exquisite yearning, in emotional overdrive.
Arlen had been agonizing over the song for weeks. When the melody finally came to him, he called Yip to hurry over -- it was midnight, but that's standard for songwriting hours -- and Arlen "played it," Yip later recalled, "with such symphonic sweep and bravura that my first reaction was, 'Oh, no, not for little Dorothy!' " Composer and lyricist were at an impasse until they asked their mutual friend Ira Gershwin to hear the tune. Gershwin told Arlen to play it less operatically, and Yip heard in it a poignant ballad, mixing childish imagery with grown-up longing, that has lost none of its poignancy in the 67 years since.
Part of Harburg's genius -- a genius he shared with Ira Gershwin and Larry Hart, contemporaries and fellow lyricists who, as he did, always set the lyric after the music was composed -- was to hear the meaning in the notes.
In 1932, the bottom of the Depression, composer Jay Gorney had a tune that was a kind of shtetl blues, intended as a ballad for a woman who'd lost her man. Harburg heard it and promptly turned it into the breadline anthem "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?"
In 1946 composer Burton Lane, working with Yip on a show that was to become "Finian's Rainbow," was running through melodies he'd jotted down in his sketchbook in search of a tune suitable for a comic number. After one particular musical phrase, Yip asked him to play it again, and as Lane did, Yip started singing the words -- made up on the spot -- to the quasi-palindromic "When I'm Not Near the Girl I Love, I Love the Girl I'm Near."
For a number of years now, the Postal Service has been placing the authors of the American songbook -- the theater and film songs of the 1920s, '30s, and '40s; a glory of its time -- on its stamps. The lyricists of that era -- Gershwin, Hart, Oscar Hammerstein, Johnny Mercer, Dorothy Fields -- tend to be less well known than their composer partners, and that's certainly true of Yip, who remains generally as obscure as his work is famous (the biography I co-authored with his son Ernie a decade ago notwithstanding). But those lyricists were major talents with distinct perspectives. Of his cohort, Yip was at once the most playful and the most socially conscious (combine the two in a film for children and you get "Ding, Dong, the Witch Is Dead"), shaped in equal measure by W.S. Gilbert and Bernard Shaw. The one socialist among the great Broadway songwriters, and the one blacklistee during the McCarthy era, Harburg fell in and then out of love with communism, but he never could bring himself to name names.
Ultimately, Harburg's great subject wasn't just love and its anguishes -- Topic A Through Z for songwriters of that era -- but belief and its crises.
"They used to tell me I was building a dream," the wised-up guy in the breadline sings in the opening line of "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" One month later another Broadway show opened with the Arlen-Harburg song "Paper Moon," which ended with paper-moonstruck lovers singing, "It wouldn't be make-believe, if you believed in me." Relationships and entire social systems in Harburg lyrics depend on suspension of disbelief. Harburg the Marxist and the wit demystifies belief; Harburg the romantic celebrates it, and the rainbow that he first found in Oz became his symbol for the necessity of dreaming.
"Look to the rainbow," he wrote in a later song, "Follow the fellow who follows a dream."
He knew full well what it felt like when the dream, the affair, died.
There's no deeper chill in the American songbook than in the Arlen-Harburg ballad that Frank Sinatra made indelibly his own, "Last Night When We Were Young:"
"To think that spring had depended/On merely this, a look, a kiss/To think that something so splendid/Could slip away in one little daybreak . . . ."
Fortunately, somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue.
Harold Meyerson is editor-at-large of The American Prospect. A version of this column appeared in The Washington Post.
