Michael Kantor: How did Yip choose his career and what happened in 1929?
Ernie Harburg: Okay, well, when he got out of City College and he so was against the war because he was a socialist that he went down to Uruguay for three years and learned Spanish and learned the guitar. And when he came back, Ira and George were already into Broadway development of the theater and he, Yip, however, was so. Responsible and frightened not to take care of his parents, that while he was getting money for Lightverse, it wasn’t enough to pay their rent. So he went into electrical appliance business with a friend of his from City College, and all the time he was an executive in that business, and it took off and became very successful. He spent every single night, practically, with Ira and… Going to all the musical and straight plays and theater in the world, that was then the developing of Broadway. And of course then just before the crash in the year 1929, however, he had decided to start writing and he actually did a radio show with Jay Gourney. But then the crash came, wiped all his fortune out, and he owed, you know, $7,500,000. And he did not want to go into bankruptcy like the rest of the partners. So he actually kept that debt and paid it off year by year later on. But he then decided to go full-time as a lyricist. He did an apprentice. In Ira’s book on the lyrics on several occasions, he estimates that to become a crafted lyricist would take you about four or five years. And that is steady ongoing. It isn’t like in the 60s where you grabbed a guitar and, you know, wrote a few lines. It wants you steeped in the forms of poetry from France and England and so forth. And he and Ira were that skilled. Yeah, the crash came and finally Ira said, okay, here’s a pencil and here’s $500 and start writing lyrics. And he introduced him to a guy named Jay Gourney. And Jay was a composer and working with films in Astoria at that time. And Yip actually wrote with over 25 or 30 composers, learning the craft of becoming a lyricist. And his first hit was with Johnny Green, I’m Yours, which was the, I think the only song in which he ever used the words I love you. In the end. He and Ira were both, how should I say, committed that they would never use those three words and they never did as far as I could tell except for that first one. That was a big hit. Billie Holiday put that out. And then the next big hit was Brother is very dying, which was the monster one.
Michael Kantor: Let’s go back on that.
Ernie Harburg: Oh, yeah, I blew it.
Michael Kantor: In a review called Americana and what have you.
Ernie Harburg: All right, well, let me say that years later when Yip looked back on the whole set of events at that time, he quipped to Max Wilk, I think it was, that he gave up the fantasy world of business for the harsh reality of musical theater. And those who labor and musical theater and showbiz, and Broadway showbizz know that there’s a lot of cruelty and a lot of hard knocks that you have to take before you get into the glamor products, you know. So that line always gets a laugh. All right, so when… At those times, the dominant format on Broadway was review. You had a song, you had a sketch, you anything else, but nothing was tied together except for the kinds of pioneering stuff that Kern and the Gershwins and a few others were trying to do to integrate Hammerstein. But mostly it was reviews. And the The opportunity that Yip had in 32 was when Schubert came to him. They wanted to do a review with a theme in it, with what Roosevelt called The Forgotten Man, because at the Depression at that time, you had, as Roosevelt said, one-third ill-housed, ill-clothed and ill-fed. And you had scenes of not only people. Digging food out of garbage wherever you went in Manhattan, but you had several people digging the food out. And you had the shanties built all around the riverfront. And it was a very, very hard existence for people who worked for wages. The middle class was a little better off, and the wealthy just went on with their life as if nothing happened. So this review was to talk about the Forgotten Man. It was supposed to be satirical and comedic and the usual review with chorus girls. And J.P. McEvoy was a political columnist at that time who took the world seriously and he was going to organize, put to write a comedic song there, Yip and Jay. And so When you look at Yip’s notes, the verses are satiric. Something, Rockefeller actually literally went around giving dimes to kids showing that you too can be a capitalist and make it, you know. And Yip had a line about can you share a dime with me or something. But then suddenly, right in the middle of the notes, it takes a turn. And the turn… Emerged out of Yip’s whole philosophy and outlook on life in regard to society, and that essentially the socioeconomic system was set up so that the rich always got richer and the poor always got the worse. He had been through it. He had lived in it. And Yip had worked in the sweatshops too. So that the the the whole background that he had accumulated, he started putting into this lyric, which changed it totally from a comedic to a more serious comment about the depression. And the first line was something about a man who worked in a steel mill. You saw the shift. Now, you have to understand that at that time, the music publishers. Were total censors of every popular song that came out. Because if you couldn’t get it through the music publisher, you couldn’t get it out in the street. And they wanted only one thing, love songs and escape songs. And so, if you came in with anything serious, they’d throw it right out, okay? And the way this got through that censorship thing was because it was in a Broadway show, The Americana. And even there, Lee Schubert and Jay Schuvert were the brothers who were the producers. And at least in public, they never spoke to each other. And they would send messages to each. They’d sit in the dark at theater auditioning, okay, and send messages each other, but they wouldn’t talk to each others. So when Yip and Jay got up and sang their song, Thank you very much. J.J., who was like five foot tall, got up and said, you know, he shook his head and sent a message over to Lee. And they went back and forth. And finally, Yip’s story was that J. J. Said, I don’t like it because it’s too sorbid. So he put it all together in that one. But Lee, fortunately, was the lead producer of this show. And he allowed the song to, they were going to throw it out. And I remember in those days, you had a dozen lyric songwriting teams and it was rare to have the same team write a show. So putting songs in and out of a show is nothing and that song could have gotten thrown out like that. But Yip, it was always a very aggressive and passionate, committed to his art. And he and Jay knew this was a strong song.
Michael Kantor: First we’ll go through the song and then we’ll talk about what it meant.
Ernie Harburg: Okay.
Michael Kantor: So what was the song that out of this era, out of these shanties and bread lines that Yip came up with, ultimately, after all the revisions?
Ernie Harburg: Right. Well, what I can give you is the poetry, the printed lyric, okay? And it goes like this. Once I build a railroad, see, I’m wrong. They used to tell me. They used tell me, okay, it goes like this, yeah, okay. I could give you the poetry. The lyric. They used it tell me I was building a dream. And so I followed the mob. Where there was earth to plow and guns to bear, I was always there right on the job. They used to tell me that I was building a dream with peace and glory ahead. Why should I be standing in line just waiting for bread? I screwed something up. Words give you meaning and destination, and music gives you wings to the words. And together, they create a song which can take you places nothing else can. So that words make you think thoughts, and music makes you feel feelings, but a song makes you thoughts. It’s very difficult for people to understand the craft of a song, because most of the time they’re letting the feelings of the music dominate, and most of time it’s probably the only popular song that is all in minor key, and you have to understand that’s a sad, and on the tragedy side, it’s not an upbeat thing. It’s not in a major key, it’s a minor key. And, yips, the first… Musical phrase is actually in the language of music. It goes back to the 14th to the 16th century, where you have, once I built a railroad, you’re going up, okay? And this music is bringing you up. And what’s happening here is a worker, a guy. Women can sing a song, but usually they have a guy,
Michael Kantor: Set us up with it. What were those other songs you mentioned before? This was a time of
Ernie Harburg: Oh, sure.
Michael Kantor: Just take it from this.
Ernie Harburg: Well, the music publishing companies censored the songs so that you could only have upbeat songs. So you had happy days are here again and life’s just a bowl of cherries, and you had all the love songs. You know, the baby done left me, baby came to me, you know, all of that. But there wasn’t any song that addressed itself directly to the condition of life, which a couple 100 million people were experiencing. And when it went out, well, the first thing that happened was in the review, the reviewers all started their whole review critics with this song saying that it’s powerful, they never heard anything like it. And no sooner was the ink dried on the reviews that it spread just like wildfire around the country because contrary to what the music publishers… Would say, this song spoke to the hearts and to the minds and to emotions and thoughts of everybody who lived during that depression. And furthermore, what it did was it, if you look at the structure of the song, it starts off, they used to tell me I was building a dream, all right? And then, why am I? Standing in line waiting for, that is a universal question in an industrial society that has a depression. And then it then takes up that we went to war and we came back, half a million boots went slogging through hell and I was the kid with the drum. Now suddenly you got an eye in there and suddenly there’s a person standing there. You’re not having some lecture to you about large scale things. Suddenly you’re a hook. Emotionally into this singer. I was the kid with the drum. Say, don’t you remember I’m your pal. Bang, something happened now. Buddy, can you spare a dime, all right? So the whole structure of that thing is extremely artistic and goes from a social issue, which is impersonal, to a very very personal appeal from a person who’s being wiped out as a result of this depression.
Michael Kantor: That’s the personal side now put in the big picture that among all these happy happy songs. This was like the only yeah
Ernie Harburg: Yeah, yeah, this was, I could say again, the only song that addressed itself seriously to the depression and what it was doing to our nation and to our workers and asked the question, why am I standing in line just waiting for bread? Now, Yip would say that this question really means. I went to war. I plowed the, when we have, you know, the song sung at events, the audience just rises with standing ovation. It still hits you hard. Now, an interesting thing about the music is that Jay Gourney was raised in a Russian chattel where the Jews were. When I said that… Brother against Faraday would never have gotten out if it was through the music publishing circuit. Broadway allowed the vehicle for it to get out. And years later, during the McCarthy oppression in the United States, Yip was blacklisted from film, TV, and radio, but Broadway, he could do whatever he wanted, provided he could raise the money for the show. But in fact… Broadway was always and I hope continues to be the artistic bastion of freedom for artists in the United States. I hope they never give in. CIA, FBI, you know, crazed president or anything else. I hope they continue to stand up because that’s been their history. And a very successive Broadway, by the way, not only in the development of an art form, the American Musical Theater, but it’s never been dominated by a monopoly. It’s always been a confederation of free-spirited artists. And independent entrepreneurs, so that at any given time, you may have, you know, 100 producers in the League of Producers and Theaters, but they are independent entities. There isn’t any party line in the Broadway industry, if you want to call it that. And this allowed the kind of freedom for the Gershwins and the Kearns and the Hammersteins to start experimenting with the art form. And I just hope that Broadway will continue that when the Schubert’s and the other dominant houses on Broadway turn over to the next generation.
Michael Kantor: Why do you think Broadway, the street, is linked to the music?
Ernie Harburg: Well, in the history of the development of New York City from the time that, you know, the Dutch first came over here, Manhattan was a key geographical economic, political center for commercial and immigration and all the rest of it. It just, Broadway was, there was a Broadway back in. And that territory that is now Broadway between whatever you want, 42nd, 39th Street up to 52nd Street and from 7th to 9th Avenue, that territory in there became the place where Well, the Hammerstein grandfather had an opera house, okay, and there was the entrepreneurs built buildings, and like any kind of professional group, they tended to hang together, but the buildings, the theaters, which were all built, the same ones we have today, in the teens and 20s, all right? And, uh, The word Broadway was taken from that territorial… Accident of history. But the theaters that were put in there became a small movement and the experimentation that took place in those theaters was given the freedom to develop But even with the commercial burden that any show would have, the mix of art and commerce.
Michael Kantor: Pick it up right where you were talking about. Immigrants are different kinds of people.
Ernie Harburg: That’s correct, and any ethnic group.
Michael Kantor: Now, but give me the lead sentence. Immigrants.
Ernie Harburg: Immigrants are different kind of people from the community from which they come, because they have to dare to leave their old life and with or without their family, take a journey with this totally unknown, the promise of gold on the streets, which Yip said was nothing but the yellow brick road, and lured them on, the economic and then the freedom from religious oppression and from political oppression. In regard to the Jews who were always marginal in whatever country they were, the two million or so that got up and came literally to the Lower East Side, all right, were poor but were adventurous and were risk-takers. And as a group were remarkably, I want to say literate or interested in literacy. They started their own newspapers immediately, The Jewish Daily Forward, which was a socialist paper, and their Yiddish theater was prominent. And the misery that they had to sustain in their sweatshops and in their lives were poured into the Jewish theater and into, well, into the films. All the moguls of Hollywood that started the major studios were Jewish. And they in turn got in Jewish So it became an occupational outlet or an industrial outlet for Jews particularly, just as blacks are teaming into athletic groups at this point. At the time of severe anti-Semitism at the beginning of the century in America, this was an opportunity. And it’s no accident that they flooded into it, all right, plus the artistic base of the Jewish culture, plus the daring, the risk taking of a small group of men, literally men, Jewish immigrant first generation men. There was one woman, Dorothy Fields, thank goodness, And they felt the freedom. Being second generation, they did not have the fear that was in the hearts of their parents. And furthermore, the English language was an incredible adventure for them. Ira became, you know, an absolute master of words. He used to go around with a diary listening to conversations and inevitably some of them got into his lyrics. Okay. Because there was a big shift in lyric writing for songs that the Americans did for the world scene in that songs had the imprint of upper class language, very highfalutin, very, you know, artificially poetic. The rhetoric of the Victorian age in England was, you, you know monstrous. And what the artists and Jewish artists were doing at the turn of the century was using colloquial lyrics, the words, in the songs, okay? So that this was a revolution also. The development of the structure A-A-B-A for popular songs was also an invention that carried this whole incredible thing. And then. The development of Broadway up to what I call the R&H template. Rodgers and Hammerstein were so great in terms of their collaboration and in terms of the issues they dealt with in their shows that the whole structure of the musical became dominated by the R& H template. Well, yes, it is a gamble, but one has to understand that that’s not a pejorative word. That’s a very exciting word, all right, for those who gamble. And the non-gamblers are aghast, you know. But the risk-takers are always there every generation. Plus, musicals always dominated the gross income. The public responded to musicals more than to straight plays. Thank you very much. So that songs became the driving force of the thing, as in The Wizard of Oz. Those songs drive that film. Even though the marvelous story is there and the great characters are there from the book by L. Frank Bow, still, it was a collaboration across time with Harold Arlen, music, Yip Harbrick, words, and Bow’s storyline.
Michael Kantor: But in your book, you point out how many shows… Yeah.
Ernie Harburg: All right, well.
Michael Kantor: I found that.
Ernie Harburg: All right, well, being a, yes. Being a researcher, okay, I like to put things into quantitative expression. And so I took all the musicals each year from 1945 to 1990 and Variety has a way which they won’t tell anybody of saying whether it was a hit. They made their money back. Or it was a flop. The investors did not make their money back. So hits and flops are not artistic thing, although there’s a heavy overlap. I mean, you can have, you know, any, either one, high artistry that flops and low artistry that succeeds, but in 1980s, there was at least 80% of all the Broadway musicals failed to get their moneyback, okay? And when you look historically, I’m doing some more research now. Back in the 50s, that success rate was more like almost 45%. So that the success flap ratio changes decade to decade. What happened in the 80s was the sudden release of money into these mega spectacles so that you had something. Broken open by David Merrick called 42nd Street, in which he said, I don’t want to do any of this R&H stuff. I don’t want to any story plots or anything. I’m just going to have walkovers, you know. Not quite a review, but still something like that. And he refused to allow anybody to invest in it. And he wouldn’t even give the director, Gower Champion, a piece of the net profit, right. He had it all to himself. Well, everybody, everybody. People on the street who know about a project developing, they all give you their free advice, it’s not going to work. If I can’t have a group of people tell me it’s not going work, I won’t do it. That’s the way with Merrick, of course. In one year, he had four touring companies and he was netting $600,000 a week. All right, so when you hit the big one… You can retire for life, all right? That saying goes, you can’t make a living on Broadway, but you can make a killing, all, right? All you need is one. And the thing is that the investors will always be there, no matter what the gambling odds are. And they don’t even know, and they don’t care either. And so that, and furthermore, You know, the media creates a celebrity class. And there is a quote glamor about the celebrities, the stars, and so forth. I don’t know what that means personally, all right? But nevertheless, I understand that people are enthused by this kind of material. This, the wonder of a musical which works is so astounding to the people who participated because it’s all chaos in there, you know? And suddenly this thing emerges, let’s say, two out of ten times, all right? It’s worth all the, you, know, neurotic interactions, the screamings, the yellings, the running out of money, the… You know, everything that happens to it, it just blows people away. And then if the thing lasts for 10 years, like cats or these, the new phenomenon of lasting for years, started in the 80s, set off by the American thing. And then there was cats and then there were, you know… Well, I don’t know the order, but Cameron McIntosh, a new energetic producer, dominates the scene. Phantom of the Opera and Miss Saigon and whatever, Les Mis, that’s right. But you don’t hear about Cameron anymore these days because he burned himself out. I would have to narrow in on the vintage period, which was somewhere in the late 30s to the middle 60s, all right?
Michael Kantor: What do those musicals reflect about us as an American?
Ernie Harburg: Well, if you look at the dates, you see that it started at the time of World War II. And anybody who did live through that can remember that the nation was a unified populace and that the war was a dominant reality in the minds of people, particularly when you had two and a half million males usually going over to be killed. And the beginning shows. Starting from Oklahoma, which was an R&H thing which burst on the scene. And then Bloomer Girl, which Yip and Harold did, and Annie Get Your Gun in South Pacific, okay? These were Americana.
Michael Kantor: You gotta try and be concise.
Ernie Harburg: Yes, yes.
Michael Kantor: Why was Yip unusual? Among the broadway.
Ernie Harburg: Yes. Well, I think it’s clear that he was driven by political ideas in which he felt that songs and theater should not only entertain, but also educate so that the audience should leave not only feeling good, but thinking about something. And he was labeled the you know, a lefty and a commie and anything you want to call all the way through his career because he wanted to get the issues in. And when he started becoming a book writer and he collaborated with Fred Sadie for most of it, but the first show, Hooray for What, was an anti-war song and the lead song was Hoorah for What. There’s a lot of yelling going on, what is the hurray for? You can do that for every war, right? And then the next thing was Bloomer Girl, which was in 1944, was a story about an actual woman suffragette who invented the bloomers and who was also an abolitionist who ran slaves through the underground railroad and did a private. Paper and it’s an anti-war show also. Every single one of Yip’s efforts that he had control over had a political message, all right? So the other, you know, Berlin and Hammerstein and the Gershwin and all the rest of that were as Burt Lahr summed it up, you that Yip was foibed, you and actually Arlen wouldn’t do Finian’s Rainbow because it was too political and Arlen didn’t want to mess with that. But Yip to the end in 1962 when he did a thing with Judy Garland and Robert Goulet called Gay Paris which is a cartoon with cats as the hero. He even got a little political song there called The Money Cat which can stand by itself as a political. But that’s one thing that he dared to come out. In Phineas Rainbow, which is his masterpiece, that was no question an anti-racist show for the first time. But Yip also did it with, as one reviewer put it, compassion and humor. Because most of the times the black-white thing in the straight shows were stark drama, okay? But this was with humor, you know? And that distinguished Yip all the way through, too, even his treatment of love songs. So, and the other thing was that he could collaborate. Variety, he wrote songs with over 65 composers. And when you’re talking about Julie Stein, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Jay Gourney, he could fuse himself psychologically with his partner so that they could bring out the essence of the song, all right? And that’s a skill that a lot of people do not have. And uh…
Michael Kantor: In the Broadway world, it’s usually the composer you were talking about, like the quarterback.
Ernie Harburg: Yes. Well, it’s a leftover from European distortion that the composer has the true word with the high power. So that during the, you know, the Middle Ages, the mass was sung with magnificent music, but it was in Latin. So nobody knew the words anyhow. And then when the Renaissance came around when you had the secularization of the theater. And you had to pay for tickets, then the whole dominance of the composer added this inaccurate attribution of credit to the composer continued in the American musical theater so that people still talk about Kern Showboat. Now, Hammerstein took the book and wrote the lyrics. This is not Kern’s show, but… And it’s not any one person’s. And if you want to pick out the, you know, the songs, then you have to talk about Kern-Hammerstein or Arlen Harberg or Ira George. You can’t, what they do say is the Gershwin show. All right? And this is absolutely and totally inaccurate because you can’t write a song and you can do a musical except with a full collaboration. So. It’s just a cultural distortion. And then Yip points out another thing that as music feels to the heart and the feelings, it’s a much more primitive kind of thing. To get to the words, the language in the brain, you have to cross the heart to get to thought, you know. And you have be very good about bringing the thought outs of that. It rides with the feelings. And so that the lyricist always got the short shrift. And to this day, no one will do collaborative teams. They will do Arlen, they will do Yip, they will the individual artist. But nobody will take on a series of Rodgers and Hart, Arlen and Harbert, Kern and Hammerstein. Nobody, because they don’t understand what the process of collaboration is. And furthermore, it’s extremely sophisticated. You really have to work hard at getting an audience, a popular audience, to understand it.
Michael Kantor: Now what, you were talking about this earlier, what happened after the 50s when rock grew?
Ernie Harburg: Well, you go back and look at the Ed Sullivan show in 1964 when he had the Beatles on. And from that year, no Broadway song was ever on the top ten of the charts ever after. And before that, Broadway show songs dominated the charts, all right, so that the rock music. Was a revolution from the dominant template of Viennese kind of music which filtered into the main composers, even Rogers has that, the waltzes that you’re not going to hear that anymore. And Gershwin now was interesting because he used to, you know, pal around with and play with black musicians and. Pick the jazz thing. Gershwin was, you know, eclectic. He drew it in from all sides so that his music still lives. It’s large, you now? Arlen has some of that also. But the vintage music at that time now becomes a one of 32 genres in the ASCAP thing. You know, it’s known as the vintage.
Michael Kantor: Do you think Broadway can ever embrace rock pop music now?
Ernie Harburg: Well, Broadway essentially has to mix the commercial with the artistic, and furthermore, like all people with a lot of money, they’re conservative in terms of breaking the form that they’re going to use. So that even though Rock had been on since the early 50s, but broke open in the 60s, You didn’t have a show until here. And then you never had a hair after that. See, everybody tries to imitate. Thing about Broadway musicals, they’re unique. You don’t imitate the next one. You don’t have kiss of the spider woman’s husband. You just don’t. It’s unique and it hits and it’s original. And the rock thing, here we are in 1999 and just in the 80s they had a country music thing for the first time. And now, you know, you have Rent, and you have, well, you’ve got your nostalgia now with Smokey Joe and things like that. But the musical template or style changed in the United States, where Broadway, it always takes them sort of 10, 15 years to catch up to it. Tommy was another hit with the rock thing.
Michael Kantor: Broadway, the place, the culture have a myth.
Ernie Harburg: Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, in the first place, it’s Deems Taylor said that it’s one of the three major art forms that were developed in the last century or so, the Italian opera, the Viennese, and the American music theater. It appeals not only to our nation, but across cultures. Fiddler on the Roof had a big success in Japan because the immigrant story of leaving the community and going out was very close to Japanese history. And Katzen, we now know that the American musical is transcultural. It can cross the line. Now what happens to the lyrics when you translate to something else again? But the form, the art form, prevails. And it’s always been a place where the prices were high and that low income had to scrounge around if they want to get into it. The average price they keep taking, they, meaning the League of Producers and Theaters keep taking surveys every 10 years. And the average income, you know, is $80,000 and the average education is. Graduate who go as in the majority and that doesn’t mean lower income and let’s say they don’t but it’s dominated by that and it always has been because in order amount of production just get to the commercial side of it you have to pay the house just the rent on the theater is enough to you know start you’re thinking I can’t do this
