Max's Musings

Get Happy

Get Happy

This is the final entry in challenge posed in "The Soundtrack of Your Life" . I puzzled a bit for what song to choose. It's over at last, so I considered the Hallejuh Chorus   from the Messiah, but that seemed too obvious. There are other great songs I'd like to put on my personal soundtrack, songs like Mad World  , for example, but they didn't fit for the final song on the list. Learning about the history of songs has also been interesting, which brings to mind this video and performance of Someone To Watch Over Me,  , but that's more effort than I want to put forth this morning. I admit, I'm klnd of sad it's over. In fact, it's making me downright melancholy  --that's Judy Garland singing "Melancholy Baby" if you don't want to follow the link.

Listening to Judy Garland's breathtaking performance of "Meloncholy Baby" made me think of another Garland standard, one less, er, melancholy. I finally settled on the one in the title to this blog. The link I chose--see the bottom of this post--is taken from her performance in the 1950 musical Summer Stock, her final MGM film. The song was actually written for the 1930 Broadway musical, The Nineteen-fifteen Reivew. This was the first collaboration between Harold Arlen and the lyricist, Ted Koehler. If Arlen's name sounds familiar, that's because he appeared previously in this set of blogs--he wrote "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," among many other masterpieces he penned for musicals in the three subsequent decades.

At least thirty artists have released versions of this song, but Garland's is still my favorite. A close second would be Rufus Wainright's Carnegie Hall performance--in drag as Judy!--which replicate's the choreography and staging of Summer Stock. I've listed a few others below, just for fun.

The song itself has gospel elements, both musically and in the lyrics, and can be read as an expression of religious ecstasy for salvation. Me, I think it's "just" an exuberant burst of joy at life and living. After all, as the teacher in Ecclesiastes might remind us, the judgement day is waiting for us all. We may as well get happy in the meantime.

I hope you've enjoyed this trather erratic journey through the soundtrack of my life. I've enjolyed writing this set of blogs, but I'm kind of glad they're done. I think I'll spend the rest of the day getting happy doing other things!

Links.
                                                 
Judy Garland in Summer Stock


                                                 
Rufus in drag at Carnegie Hall (compare the staging and costumes with Summer Stock)

 

                                                 
Sometimes the song is paired with "Happy Days Are Here Again," as in this memorable live performance by China Forbes and Storm Large, with Pink Martini providing the instrumentals
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DrYXdAB8H0d}

                                                 
Even Hugh Laurie gets happy in House, M.D.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X56GPTpgm04

                                                 
A bluesy version by Frankie Laine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jxCq7Rb0gs

Whichever version you like, get happy!!!

                                                 
Update
Mrs. Nixie Clause showed me how to embed YouTube videos into posts, so edited I the earlier version of this post. However, it does not seem to work with more than two embeds--all subsequent embeds just repeat the last one regardless of the link. The code is
{embed:<YouTube URL>}
No {/embed} is needed.