Ralph Blaine

That was really weird.

They sang it.

Oh, another beautiful one is, have you heard of this group called Celtic Woman?

Well, they're a bunch of Irish girls with beautiful voices, very high.

Well, first of all, I feel rather self-serving admitting this, but Ralph didn't really write it, honey.

We wrote our song separately, so it's words and music by me.

I can really tell the complete story.

Ralph was working in one room, and I was working in another on Meet Me in St.

Louis, and I played the first 16 bars of

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, over and over and over, and got stuck.

I couldn't find a bridge for it.

And so I just put it aside and decided not to work on it.

And Ralph, who had heard it through the walls, came to me the next day and said, whatever happened to that little magical-sounding melody that you were playing?

And I said, well, I couldn't make it work, Ralph, and so I discarded it.

And he said, well, you find it and finish it, because I have a

have a big feeling about it.

And so we did find it, and I did finish it, but the original version was so lugubrious that Judy Garland refused to sing it.

She said, if I sing that to little Margaret O'Brien, they'll think I'm a monster.

So I was young then and kind of arrogant, and I said, well, I'm sorry you don't like it, Judy, but that's the way it is, and I don't really want to write a new lyric.

But Tom Drake, who played the boy next door, took me aside and said, Hugh, you've got to finish it.