[Marxism] "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?"

[Walter Lippmann]

"Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" remains relevant in today's climate

By Margie Boule 
The Oregonian, Nov. 9,2008
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/margie_boule/index.ssf?/base/living/1226004916281680.xml&coll=7&thispage=1

It's a funny thing about the song "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?"

When times are good, it goes away. Royalties drop, no new recordings
are made of the old song, the anthem of the Great Depression in the
1930s.

Then times get hard again, and the song returns.

When the euphoria over last week's election fades, Americans will
wake up to discover we've landed in what some are calling the "New
Depression." Unemployment, homelessness, hunger, foreclosures, the
stock market plunge -- America faces a huge task regaining its
balance and its strength.

And here it comes again: "Brother, can you spare a dime?"

Veteran reporter Daniel Schorr sang the song on NPR in July as he
remembered the Great Depression of his youth.

On KINK radio here in Portland, Les Sarnoff has played both the Tom
Waits and the Boz Scaggs versions recently.

And on Oct. 23 in The Oregonian, readers picked the 76-year-old song
as most representative of our times. We printed the lyrics.
Unfortunately, we did not credit the lyricist.

And that bothered Tom Harburg.

That's because Tom's grandfather, Yip Harburg, wrote the lyrics to
"Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" and a lot of other old songs people
still sing today. Who doesn't know the words to "Somewhere Over the
Rainbow"? Or recognize the song at the end of the film "The English
Patient" -- "It's Only a Paper Moon"? Or "April in Paris," "Old Devil
Moon," "How Are Things in Glocca Morra?"

Tom, a Portland physician, grew up in Michigan and visited his
grandfather Yip every year in New York City. "He had a great
apartment on Central Park West, overlooking Central Park. As kids we
loved going there and running around in the living room," Tom says.
"It wasn't until much later that I realized who he was . . . I still
don't know all the people I met who were other famous composers,
writers, the editor of The New York Times. I was just saying hi to
all these people."

Although he does remember "one day wandering around in Yip's
apartment and going into his study when I was 10 and finding his
Oscar on the shelf. That was a thrill for me."

Yip won his Academy Award for writing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow"
with composer Harold Arlen for the film "The Wizard of Oz." Yip wrote
all the lyrics for that 1939 film and some of the dialogue.

Tom also remembers, when he was older, "running into Carly Simon,
working on a song with Yip."

By that time Tom understood his grandfather was one of America's most
talented lyricists. Yip wrote more than 600 songs with more than 100
of America's most famous composers.

Many of those songs are remembered today. Some say it's because Yip's
lyrics dealt with more than simple stories.

"He was known to be the social conscience of Broadway," says Tom. The
musical "Cabin in the Sky," also written with Harold Arlen, "had all
black stars. 'Bloomer Girl,' in 1944, was about women's equality."
And "Finian's Rainbow," written in 1947 with Burton Lane, introduced
the character of a racist Southern senator who suddenly turns black.

"I try to make my songs put these ideas in an entertaining way," Yip
once told a reporter.

Tom remembers his grandfather's sense of humor. "He was a very witty
guy," Tom says, the life of parties, "always making puns. He was into
words." When Yip was writing a lyric, "every single word -- whether
it was 'they' or 'we' or 'you' -- he would go over and over until he
found the right combination."

When Yip was writing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," Tom says, "it took
him a long time to come up with the first word, 'somewhere,' for that
first octave. That's what he'd do; he'd craft every word to fit the
music. It was a talent, and an art."

Tom is 55 today; he grew up when "The Wizard of Oz" was shown once a
year on CBS as a special family event. That may be why "Somewhere
Over the Rainbow" is one of his favorite of his grandfather's songs.
"I sort of grew up with it," he says

The song was voted the No. 1 song of the 20th century in a 2001 poll,
and in 2004 it was chosen best film song of all time by the American
Film Institute.

It's quite a family legacy. Unfortunately, Tom admits, he did not
inherit the Harburg gift for music or lyric writing. "But I have two
daughters, and Margret plays the piano and Rebecca plays the violin.
They like to write songs. And from a young age, whenever they'd hear
a song, they'd always remember the words. It was uncanny."

Or it was genetics.

Hearing Yip's song "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime" these days is a
reminder of Tom's family heritage. Yip came by his social conscience
honestly. The son of immigrants, Yip grew up in poverty on New York's
lower east side. He went to work at 12, lighting street lamps at dusk
and turning them off at 3 a.m.

When the Great Depression hit, Yip's successful appliance store
failed, which made him turn to lyric writing. As Yip later told Studs
Terkel, "the Depression for me was a lifesaver!"

"Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" started out, with different lyrics,
as a love song "called 'Big, Blue Tears,' " Tom says. Composer Jay
Gorney set the words to the melody of an old Russian lullaby. But Yip
felt the lyrics were wrong for the tune.

Tom says Yip then wrote a set of lyrics lampooning the millionaire
John Rockefeller. "The lyrics went, 'Once you drilled an oil well,
made it gush. . . . ' " But those lyrics didn't work, either.

"So Yip took a walk in Times Square and saw the bread lines. That's
what inspired him to write the last version. The final outcome was a
song that was very, very powerful."

It was an instant hit.

Imagine writing a song that would still be performed 76 years later.
This and others of Yip's songs are still popular because he
understood a secret about songwriting. "Yip said, 'Words make you
think thoughts, music makes you feel a feeling, but a song makes you
feel a thought.' "

People recognize his last name sometimes, Tom says, "and come up to
me and tell me their stories about how one of Yip's songs touched
them. It's just amazing."

He's protective of his grandfather's legacy and glad to share his
memories. "It's nice to keep each generation a little educated about
what a lyricist is," he says, "and to give some credit."

Margie Boule: 503-221-8450; marboule at aol.com


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     WALTER LIPPMANN
     Los Angeles, California
     Editor-in-Chief, CubaNews
     http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/
     "Cuba - Un Paraíso bajo el bloqueo"
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