"OVER THE RAINBOW" (1938)

"Over the Rainbow" had to survive several pitfalls traveling its own yellow brick road on the way to becoming the theme song of The Wizard of Oz. When casting the film, Judy Garland wasn’t the immediate choice for the role of Dorothy. MGM originally considered casting Shirley Temple, the most popular child star at that time, but she was on contract to Twentieth Century Fox and unavailable. The songwriters weren’t MGM’s first choice either. Jerome Kern was supposed to write the score for the film, but when he suffered a mild stroke, MGM turned to Harold Arlen and E. F. "Yip" Harburg. Then, even with Judy Garland singing it, "Over the Rainbow" still almost didn’t make it into the final version of the film. When the Hollywood executives producing the film saw the preview, they didn’t want to use the song because they thought it was too slow and disruptive to the pace. The song was deleted three times, and each time the songwriters and Arthur Freed, the film’s associate producer, vigorously lobbied for its inclusion. Finally Louis B. Mayer, the MGM chief, rescued the song. William Hyland, in his book America’s Songs, describes Mayer as having a soft spot for songwriters. Mayer told Freed, "Let the boys have the damned song. Get it back in the picture. It can’t hurt."
Once Arlen and Harburg were signed, they were given only two months to produce a film score. After what Arlen called the "lemon drop" songs, "If I Only Had a Brain","We're Off to See the Wizard", "The Merry Old Land of Oz", and "Ding-Dong! The Witch is Dead", were completed, he felt that they needed to be balanced with a lush ballad for Judy Garland to sing. However, composing "Over the Rainbow" didn’t come easily. Harburg relates, "I can’t tell you the misery that a composer goes through when the whole score is written but he hasn’t got that big theme song that Louis B. Mayer is waiting for." Arlen wasn’t coming up with anything and getting increasingly anxious, until one night as he was driving along Sunset Boulevard the melody just popped into his mind. He said later "It was as if the Lord had said, ‘Well, here it is. Now stop worrying’."
When Arlen played the melody to Harburg, he played it with such embellishment and grandeur that Harburg told him it was more suited to light opera singer Nelson Eddy than to a little girl like Dorothy. At Ira Gershwin’s suggestion, Arlen toned down the harmonic embellishments so that the beauty of the melody could show through, and only then did Harburg agree to write the lyrics. Harburg later said "I confess with my head bowed, the song almost suffered extinction by me while it was still aborning." Harburg came up with the song’s title and attempted to scale down the song by writing lyrics appropriate for a child to sing. Although Frank Baum’s book The Wizard of Oz, upon which the film was loosely based, made no mention of a rainbow, Harburg used that image because it seemed to him that the only thing a little girl in barren Kansas could use to bring color into her life would be a rainbow. His rainbow image gave the film’s director the idea of filming the Kansas scenes in black and white (originally shown in sepia) and then switching to Technicolor when Dorothy entered the Land of Oz.
The Wizard of Oz was released in 1939 and cost nearly $3 million to make – a fortune for that time. When released, the film was critically acclaimed but was not a major commercial success because of its cost. It was only after the film received annual television screenings that it became widely beloved and ultimately one of the most watched films of all time. However, "Over the Rainbow" was an immediate success and within days of the film premier, recordings by Judy Garland, Glenn Miller, Larry Clinton and Bob Crosby appeared in the pop charts. It was Judy Garland’s first hit song and became her signature song. Since its film debut, the song has been covered by hundreds of artists across all genres, and appeared on the pop charts again in 1960 in a doo-wop version by the Demensions. The other songs in the film, even though well known to the general public and praised for their memorable melodies and lyrics, are so closely connected to the movie plot that they are viewed as novelty songs and aren’t routinely performed by jazz artists. "We’re Off to See the Wizard" did receive some independent notoriety when the Australian army adopted it as its marching song during World War II.
"Over the Rainbow" won the Academy Award for Best Song in 1939 and was on "Your Hit Parade" for fifteen weeks, occupying first place for seven weeks. The song was so popular that it was in first place on the "Songs of the Century" list compiled in 2001 by the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2004 the American Film Institute voted it the best movie song of all time – not bad for a song that almost ended up on the cutting room floor.