Michael Owen
speaker
246 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 26 Nov
Michael Owen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.
Appearances
Fresh Air · Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy · 6 Dec 2024
podcast
Were they close as children being so different from each other?
They were only two years apart and they were the first and second children of Morris and Rose Gershwin. So they grew up together, even though. Their interests were very separate. George was somebody who went out and got into fights and came home with a black eye. Iroh was back in his room reading newspaper articles and magazines and books.
So his life became more one of observation rather than activity, whereas George's life would have been a 180-degree difference from that.
When Ira was young, either in high school or college, he became friends with Yip Harburg, the lyricist probably most famous for writing the lyrics for The Wizard of Oz. And he also wrote the very famous lyric, Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? And not only were they friends and they often like talked about not only poetry and light verse, but also lyrics together.
Ira actually contributed a couple of lines to Over the Rainbow from The Wizard of Oz. What was Ira's contribution?
Well, all three of the writers who were friends, Harold Arlen, the composer, and Yip Harburg and Ira, who had been classmates and writing partners together before, when Arlen and Harburg had been hired to write the score at MGM for Wizard of Oz, they played the tune, Arlen's tune, that became Over the Rainbow for Ira because he was a sounding board.
I must say that that was the way it was with all these writers of that period. They were all generally friendly to each other. I don't think there was a lot of competition. I mean, there was competition, obviously, but there wasn't angry competition.
So when the song was finished, or at least when Harburg and Arlen thought the song was finished, they came over to Ira's house and Arlen sat down at the piano and played the tune and Harburg sang the song. And Ira liked it a lot, but he felt like that there was something missing at the end, a coda
And so Ira was the one who came up with the line about bluebirds flying at the end, which is one of the more famous lines from the song.
If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow, why oh why can't I?
Right. And I think that sums up the song in many ways. It sums up the film. It sums up Dorothy's journey. But I think he just was helping out his friends, and whether he got credit for that or not didn't really make that much difference to him.
And he did not get credit as a... He did not get credit, no, no. Why don't we just hear that coda, just hear the end of the song.
That was the end of Somewhere Over the Rainbow from The Wizard of Oz, and we heard those last couple of lines, which were actually written by Ira Gershwin. Ira read so many books and wrote light verse, and some of the lyrics have really fun, funny literary references in them. An example for that is But Not For Me, which is a beautiful song.
And it has a line, I found more skies of gray than any Russian play can guarantee. One of his famous lines. Can you talk a little bit about that song and how it originated?
Well, Banant for me was one of the songs that was written for the 1930 musical Girl Crazy, which featured a very young Ginger Rogers. That was a song that Ginger Rogers sang in the show Ballad that she sang. And it was also the show that brought Ethel Merman to everybody's attention. So I got rhythm as in the same show.
And it was perhaps the height of the Gershwin's silly shows by 1930 before they went into some of the political shows of the few years after and then Porgy and Bess. But not for me is it's a very romantic ballad and you can take it that way. But if you listen to the lyrics closely, you can hear both Ivor's influences because, as you say, he read a lot and he had a huge library.
But also his tricky rhymes about wedding knots and being that that was not for me.
Part of the lyric, and it's the end of the lyric, goes, when every happy plot ends with a marriage knot, and there's no knot for me. So it's a clever play on words.
Absolutely correct. And I think that one of the things that Ira complained about sometimes was that in a theater, Most people were never going to get that sense of the song. They were going to hear the two words and the two sounds, not and not, and they'd think they were the same thing.
And it was only the people who actually studied the sheet music or who sang the song professionally who might pick it up. But he did this on purpose, right?
Showing 141–160 of 246 · page 8 of 13
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