More Deep Cuts for D-Day: "In Times Like These"
The greatest song by Yip Harburg & Sammy Fain that you probably have never heard
“The Gayest Musical” MGM Pictures Celebrates Pride Month!
Here’s a genuine souvenir from D-Day, 80 years ago. Apparently German radio was already announcing that the Allied Invasion of Normandy had begun even before the American media was aware. Many Americans learned about the start of the Invasion while listening to Harry James and his Orchestra, in the middle of a vocal by Kitty Kallen. This is Tuesday, June 6, 1944:
Harry James
Appropriately, the song that got interrupted by this news was “In Times Like These” by Yip Harburg and Sammy Fain. This was a kind of an “As Time Goes By”-like meditation on the state of the world and how it relates to love, the basic messages is that woman needs man and man must have his mate (as Bugs Bunny says, “ain’t it the truth?”) and “love will always find a way” no matter what’s happening politically or militaristically.
The song was written by Harburg and Fain for a 1944 MGM musical called Meet The People, which, by MGM standards, was almost a B-movie. It features Dick Powell, in one of his last roles in a musical, opposite Lucille Ball. Way before her television breakthrough, Lucy was already a leading lady if not quite a full-on movie star although she always seemed to be playing a movie star, as in the “Maisie” series as well as Best Foot Forward. (Okay, here in Meet The People, she’s actually playing a “Broadway star - Julie Hampton” if you want to get technical.) It’s also virtually the only time Harburg joined the ranks of Jule Styne and Arthur Schwartz (not to mention the very successful Arthur Freed and Buddy DeSylva) as a movie producer.
It’s a forgettable, minor musical though at kind of a crossroads for Harburg, who not only produced but brought in all of his most important collaborators to write the score with him, including Harold Arlen (“Heave Ho,” sung by Bert Lahr), Burton Lane (“It’s Smart To Be People”), and Fain; Fred Saidy, who would write the book of Finian’s Rainbow with Yip, wrote the screenplay. (If there’s ever a revival or concert production of Flahooley, “In Times Like These” and some of the other Harburg-Fain songs from Meet The People should be interpolated.)
Meet The People is full of sentiments that were then perfectly in step with the egalitarian mood of the wartime era: that all Americans - and everybody else - are created equal, and even movie / Broadway stars are just plain folks when you get right down to it. Alas, it was notions like these that would get Harburg blacklisted just a few years later.
Here’s the song, as introduced by Powell and Ball (via the singing voice of Gloria Grafton) in Meet The People (this montage contains all of Ball’s numbers, although not Lahr, Virginia O’Brien, or Spike Jones. You will however briefly see June Allyson, not yet Mrs. Dick Powell.) (Above, the USA & UK editions of the published sheet music.)
Surprisingly few singers have done this over the years; the most famous relatively recent version is by the late Susannah McCorkle on her 1980 Harburg songbook album:
And here’s one that I particularly like by the formidable Jane Scheckter with Tedd Firth, Jay Leonhart, and Joe Cocuzzo, from 2003:
Just because I can’t resist, here are two of the specialty numbers from Meet The People. This was the fifth project that Harburg (usually with Arlen) had worked on with Bert Lahr, after Life Begins at 8:40 (1934), The Show is On (1936) The Wizard of Oz (1939), and Ship Ahoy (1942). This number does for the life aquatic what “Song of the Woodman” (in The Show is On) did for the robust life of the lumberjack. (He’s a lumberjack, and he’s okay!) How can you help but laugh at the site of Lahr in HMS Pinafore drag?
I’m Saving Virginia O’Brien (for a future post on torch song parodies), but here’s the Spike Jones sequence, which weaves in and out of the famous sextet from Lucia DiLammermoor (1835), then brings on Mussolini (apparently sung by one Beau Lee), and proceeds into “Shicklegruber” (by Harburg & Fain) crooned by Il Duce in pidgin Italian to a monkey in Hitler drag.
coming next: Sinatra! and his epochful broadcast from the Day after D-Day, 1944!
Very Special thanks to the fabulous Ms. Elizabeth Zimmer, for expert proofreading of this page, and scanning for typos, mistakes, and other assorted boo-boos!
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June 8: Honoring The 80th Anniversary of D-Day : Music from June 1944
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One correction: Lucille Ball did not play Maisie; that was Ann Sothern (who was friends with Lucy).