Yip Harburg: Legendary Lyricist and Human Rights Activist by Harriet Hyman Alonso (review)

It is difficult not to fall in love with Yip Harburg (1896–1981) as Harriet Hyman Alonso illuminates his life and work in her new biography. Part of the Wesleyan University Press’s Music/Interview series, the book’s charm lies in Alonso’s narrative arrangement of Harburg’s lectures, interviews, and lyrics. The result is a compelling life history that blends archival research with the methods of an oral historian. Alonso organizes the book chronologically, detailing how Harburg’s political activism during the 1930s and ’40s landed him on Hollywood blacklists, interrupting his career and burying his name under an avalanche of McCarthyist propaganda. She crafts a critical commentary of early-twentieth-century US popular entertainment through seemingly whimsical chunks of Harburg’s stories and songs. The book is not a source of falsifiable historical facts; rather, Alonso mines her subject’s imperfect memory for connective tissue that makes Harburg’s life story a people’s history, an intergenerational communication template, and an exploration of nostalgia and nationalism.

For Alonso, Harburg’s anonymity in the context of twenty-first-century American culture can be attributed to a combination of politics and forgetfulness. Harburg’s legacy survives in the songs that have become canonical to American music, and so Alonso includes the lyrics to such popular tunes as “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” and “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” and many others. Harburg also wrote lyrics and books for many mid-century American musicals and films, including The Wizard of Oz (1939), Finian’s Rainbow (1947), and The Happiest Girl in the World (1961).

Alonso’s biographical methodology prioritizes the subjective memories of an underrepresented figure in American musical history. Masking her analysis in a writing style matched to Harburg’s breezy, autobiographical narration, Alonso’s critique intermingles with Harburg’s storytelling to create a balanced picture of the lyricist’s life. For instance, Alonso introduces the musical Hooray for What! (1937) as notable, but considers Harburg’s “contribution to the antiwar voice [as] a bit on the late side, during a period when war fever was growing” (62– 63). Harburg’s recollection inflates his antiwar role as a “first,” which Alonso parenthetically corrects: “Hooray for What! was the first anti-war musical that I know of that was done in the United States, that was done on Broadway, or in a musical comedy” (63). (Actually, Strike Up the Band [1930] could make this claim.) Harburg’s story continues for another two pages, and Alonso concludes the tale with the complete lyrics from the play’s eponymous song.

Harburg’s stories often concern his collaborators, many of whom remember things a bit differently than he. Alonso amends Harburg’s contradictions with “pauses”: mini-chapters, interspersed between larger chapters dedicated to Harburg’s biography, give his collaborators the opportunity to argue their side of the story. The resulting conversational tone—it includes selections of oral histories from figures like Jay Gorney, Harold Arlen, and Agnes de Mille—paints a robust and complex picture of the early-twentieth-century US entertainment scene. These “pauses,” although not necessarily more accurate than Harburg’s memories, allow readers to empathize with many of the entertainment figures mentioned by Harburg throughout the book.

Alonso curates out of her source texts a portrait of an artist and activist who represents a generation whose voice is disappearing from the American soundscape—an intervention that is both historically significant and generationally pointed. Harburg’s pacifism and patriotism might seem paradoxical from a twenty-first-century perspective, but Alonso capitalizes on oral history’s capacity to communicate discrepancies in generational understanding, helping early-twenty-first-century readers, whose values tend to be rooted in a post–World War II sense of American individualism, comprehend early-twentieth- century patterns of behavior that, under FDR’s leadership, could be simultaneously patriotic and peaceable. Harburg continued to function as a voice for his generation after the McCarthy era and up until the...