The Wizard of Oz: “If I Only Had a Verse”

(I hope no one is adverse to a story about verses.)

Jan 17, 2024

(Above: a youTube playlist for all eight tracks of the Decca Wizard of Oz “original cast” album. Apart from Judy Garland, it is NOT the original cast, but it’s great anyway.)

I’ve been meaning to write about this topic for a long time, and it was on my mind today because I’m doing a reprise tonight of my presentation on The Wizard of Oz (and the entire history of the Oz “Mega Franchise”) for the New York Adventure Club. (If you’re interested, it’s online at 7:00PM Eastern Time - info is here.)

I’ll start with a famous quote from the introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum:

“Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder-tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident. Having this thought in mind, the story of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was written solely to pleasure children of today. It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-aches and nightmares are left out.”

To take that at face value, well, the great author of children’s books is certainly overstating his case: yes, “wonderment and joy” are there in great quantity, but it wouldn’t be much of a story without “heart-aches.” And certainly the depiction of the Wicked Witch, both in the original novel and the many adaptations, have given nightmares to toddlers.

But Baum thoroughly achieves his stated goal: The Wizard of Oz is a thoroughly modern and completely American fairy story. In that, Baum may not have left out the nightmares but unlike tales for children in the old world, he also eliminated religion, spirituality, and any kind of a reference to death and dying. There’s certainly no one coming back from the dead, whether as a ghost or in a more tangible form: no zombies, no vampires, Frankensteins, no afterlife, or even reincarnation. As in the American constitution, there’s a separation of church and state here: no deities, no creator. (Gregory Maguire played with this idea in Wicked in which he offers different notions of religion.)

E. Y. Harburg is probably more responsible for the overall feeling of the classic 1939 MGM version of The Wizard of Oz than anybody else, as lyricist and uncredited screenwriter. It was Harburg who saw what was great in Baum’s story and characters and knew precisely how to make them work in dramatic form. “Yip” was also a conscientious humanitarian, and a tireless champion of social justice, diversity, and equality, and famously not what we would consider “spiritual.”

Yet even Harburg slipped a tiny bit, and somehow he’s responsible for two of the most important references to a Judeo-Christian tradition in the Oz canon. Perhaps not coincidentally, they’re both to be found in the verses to two of the most famous Oz songs, verses that were notably cut from the 1939 film - although one of them has been heard a lot since.

Judy Garland almost never sang the verse to “Over the Rainbow”; of the thousands of times she performed the song, there’s only one documented instance when she did. (This was on the radio show hosted by Hollywood columnist Louella Parsons in 1949. This only exists in rather murky audio, but the version below is cleaner than most.)

However, because Garland never sang the verse, a lot of the heavy hitters who have performed the song in the last 85 years have made it a point to include the verse as a means of differentiating their versions from Garland’s iconic performance: Ella Fitzgerald (on her Harold Arlen Songbook album of 1961), Frank Sinatra (on a 1945 Columbia single), and Tony Bennett (on his 1960 Tony Bennett Sings a String of Harold Arlen, and later on Here’s To the Ladies, 1995).

And that verse, as I say, contains that very rare reference to something specifically spiritual - it mentions “Heaven.”

When all the world is a hopeless jumble
And the raindrops tumble all around,
Heaven opens a magic lane.
When all the clouds darken up the skyway
There's a rainbow highway to be found,
Leading from your window pane
To a place behind the sun,
Just a step beyond the rain.

Harburg and Harold Arlen came up with the unique idea of having all three of Dorothy’s magical companions sing a variation on the same song: “If I Only Had a Brain.” (An idea that the composers of the score to The Wiz, almost 40 years later, made a point not to repeat; rather they wrote separate songs for the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion.) Three choruses are heard in the film. But Harburg and Arlen also wrote verses for all three characters and, as with “Rainbow,” those verses are in the published sheet music, but they’re not heard in the film.

The verses and the choruses deliberately echo each other; they’re meant to sound like they were all written from the same template. And in all three verses, there’s a specific reference to the assets and the liabilities of all three characters having come directly from God:

The Scarecrow:

"Oh, The lord gave me a soul,
But, forgot to give me common sense."

The Tin Man:

“Oh! The Lord gave me tin ribs
But forgot to put a heart inside”

The Cowardly Lion:

“Oh! The Lord made me a lion
But The Lord forgot to make me brave”

Not surprisingly, Michael Feinstein has given us what is probably the best known and most complete version of the entire song, or all three songs really, from 1989 The M.G.M. Album (1989)

Michael Feinstein:

From that sheet music, here are those verses:

“If I Only Had a Brain”

Said a scarecrow swinging on a pole,
To some blackbirds sittin' on a fence,
"Oh, The lord gave me a soul,
But, forgot to give me common sense. "
Said the blackbirds, "well, well, well.
What the thunder would you do with common sense? "
Said the scarecrow, "would be pleasin'
Just to reason out the reason
Of the wishes and the whyness and the whence"
If I had an once of common sense...

Note that the middle section (NOT in italics) is actually not in the sheet music - it makes the “Brain” verse longer by a half than the other verses - but it’s performed by some singers. Michael skipped it, probably because he was doing all three verses and chorus and the track was long enough without it.

Surprisingly, the singer-songwriter Jackson Browne performed the complete verse and chorus on the 1995 TNT event The Wizard of Oz in Concert: Dreams Come True. Here’s an audio file of the complete number, with the full verse, and a low-res video of just the chorus (but you get to see Mr. Browne in full scarecrow drag, hey).

Jackson Browne (live video, no verse)

Jackson Browne audio only 1995

“If I Only Had a Heart”

Said a tinman rattlin’ his gibs
To a strawman sad and weary-eyed
“Oh! The Lord gave me tin ribs
But forgot to put a heart inside”
Then he banged his hollow chest and cried

“If I Only Had the Nerve”

Said a lion, poor neurotic lion,
To a miss who listened to him rave
“Oh! The Lord made me a lion
But The Lord forgot to make me brave”
Then his tail began to curl and wave

For the chorus, once again, Yip Harburg wrote a bunch of extra lyrics that didn’t make it into the film; fortunately Michael includes them all in his version, above:

Life is sad believe me missy
When you’re born to be a sissy
Without the vim and verve
But I could change my habits
Never more be scared of rabbits
If I only had the nerve
I’m afraid there’s no denyin’
I’m just a dandy lion
A fate I don’t deserve
But I could show my prowess
Be a lion, not a mowess
If I only had the nerve
Oh, I’d be in my stride
A king down to the core
Oh, I’d roar the way
I never roared before
And then I’d rrrwoof
And roar some more
I would show the dinosaurus
Who’s king around the forres’
A king they better serve
Why with my regal beezer
I could be another Caesar
If I only had the nerve

Here’s an excerpt from a televised concert, from the very end of Yip’s life, where he talks all-too-briefly about The Wizard of Oz, and “If I Only Had a Brain.” Yip’s account of the production is somewhat at odds with details of the accepted version, but I’m afraid there’s no denyin’ that Yip played a crucial role in the creation of this classic film.

Lastly, Judy Garland recorded both “Over the Rainbow” and “The Jitterbug” (there’s a lot to be said about that song as well) for Decca in 1939, and Decca included those two songs in their “cast album,” more fully titled DECCA presents the Musical Score from METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER'S Motion Picture Triumph, THE WIZARD OF OZ (Decca Album 74 - 2672-B). Garland’s two tracks have been widely reissued, as they should be, but the other six tracks have barely been heard. True, they’re not the actual original cast - no Bert Lahr, Ray Bolger, or Jack Haley - they’re the Ken Darby Singers, a familiar vocal group of the period, with Victor Young’s Orchestra. But the additional tracks are delightful, and nearly all of them, including “The Merry Old Land of Oz” and “Munchkinland” (this is a gorgeous, six minute medley) contain many extra lyrics, also not in the actual film.

The most notable of these is in “We’re Off to See the Wizard”: this is also essentially a medley in that, as in the film, it starts with “Follow the Yellow-Brick Road.” And that includes the following line:

Follow the rainbow over the stream,
Follow the fellow who follows a dream.

As everyone knows, these lines are nowhere to be heard (except on the Decca album) in the Wizard of Oz - but those words would famously serve as the central theme in Finian’s Rainbow eight years later. Yip Harburg was nothing if not consistent: he would essentially spend his entire career following the same rainbow. Harburg gave us what Baum himself somehow missed; there’s no Old or New Testament Deity to worship here, but people of all religions can put their faith in the power of the rainbow.

Here’s the complete playlist of Decca Wizard of Oz “original cast album” (in case you didn’t play all of it from above.)

Bonus track: Here’s a notable contemporary jazz version of “If I Only Had a Brain” with the (albeit truncated) verse by the very great Abbey Lincoln:

PS: For the 85th anniversary, the 1939 masterpiece The Wizard of Oz is coming back to theaters. Whatever you do, do NOT attend while Dave Weiner and I are in the house: we are going to be reciting the whole movie script line by line, as if it were our own version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Still More: here’s an essay on L. Frank Baum and OZ as seen in a new PBS documentary that I wrote for The New York Sun a few months ago. Enjoy! And here’s a piece of history which doesn’t require any further explanation:

Some illustrations, of course, do not require any kind of a caption. Courtesy Bryce Edwards (see him at Birdland on Monday January 22!)

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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