Partying Like It’s 1929

Tom Waits performs “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime” with lyrics by E.Y. Harburg. Photographs are scenes from the Depression of the 1930’s.

E.Y. (Yip) Harburg wrote the lyrics for “April in Paris” by taking an armload of travel brochures to a diner on 7^th Avenue. He’d never been to Paris. He wrote the lyrics for “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and the song, added to the soundtrack of “The Wizard of Oz” at the last minute, gives the movie its sense of magical hopefulness.

He hadn’t intended to become a songwriter. He’d made investments in the stock market that he expected to provide a healthy income for him, but when they were wiped out in the crash of 1929 he considered it a blessing in disguise.

“With the crash I realized that the greatest fantasy of all was business,” he told Studs Terkel in 1968. “The only realistic way of making a living was versifying, living off your imagination. We thought American business was the Rock of Gibraltar. We were the prosperous nation, and nothing could stop us now. A brownstone house was forever. You gave it to your kids and they put marble fronts on it. There was a feeling of continuity. If you made it, it was there forever. Suddenly the big dream exploded. The impact was unbelievable.”

During the Depression, walking along the streets of New York City, he’d hear men asking “brother, can you spare a dime?” These were men who’d made a contribution to society, they’d built the skyscrapers, and railroads, and fought for their country. Now they were struggling.

“In the song the man is really saying: I made an investment in this country. Where the hell are my dividends?” said Harburg. “Is it a dividend to say ‘Can you spare a dime?’ ‘What the hell is wrong?’ Let’s examine this thing. It’s more than just a bit of pathos. It doesn’t reduce him to a beggar. It makes him a dignified human being, asking questions – and a bit outraged too, as he should be.”

Yip Harburg told Studs Terkel that the song struck a nerve, and that coming into an election in America — which the Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt would win — the Republicans tried to suppress, or ban, the song. But it had already taken hold.

In office President Roosevelt halted a run on the banks and if he couldn’t feed his citizens he at least tried to nourish their spirits, creating federal works programmes in theatre, art, literature, photography and music.

from “Sullivan’s Travels” by Preston Sturges

The film tells of the ‘mission’ of ‘Sully’ (Joel McCrea), a big-shot Hollywood director of lightweight comedies to experience suffering in the world before producing his next socially-conscious film of hard times – an epic titled ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ about the common man. [Film-makers Joel and Ethan Coen paid homage to Sturges and his admirable film by naming their own 21st century film O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000)?] After some failed attempts dressed as a hobo and companionship on the road with an aspiring blonde actress simply called The Girl (Veronica Lake in her second picture following her work in I Wanted Wings (1941)) and wearing boy’s clothes, he succeeds in losing his freedom, identity and name, health, pride and money. Incarcerated in a prison work camp as the end result of his misadventures, and as part of an audience of chain-gang convicts watching a screening in a Southern black church of a Walt Disney cartoon (starring Mickey Mouse and Pluto), he retains one final ability – - to laugh. He succeeds in understanding that his attitude toward the poor had bordered on patronization. He finally realizes the uplifting power of laughter, and decides to return to his true calling – the making of entertaining comedies to entertain rather than to edify.

from filmsite.org