Today happens to be Oscar Hammerstein II's 125th birthday (he was born in New York City on July 12th 1895) and last week the US Supreme Court gave him a helluva present by chopping his song in half:
We know we belong to the land
And the land we belong to is grand!
Except you've only got half as much land to feel grand about. When the wind comes sweepin' down the plain, the plain's a lot narrower to go sweepin' down. Thank you, Neil Gorsuch. But as the song and the license plate say: Oklahoma - OK! Oklahoma may be the post-Habsburg Austria of the Lower Forty-Eight, but "Oklahoma!" remains not merely an OK song, but a great song and also a great state song. Quite a few state songs are great songs but they're not great state songs: "Georgia On My Mind" and "My Old Kentucky Home" aren't exactly made for bellowing out en masse at state functions. But "Oklahoma!" is made to bellow. If you get a little lost in the lyrics, the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization helpfully provide a lyric guide:
As longtime readers know, I'm not the greatest fan of Garrison Keillor (well before he got #MeTooed), but I caught him at the Apollo Theatre in London years back and I very much agreed with his assessment of "Oklahoma!" as one of the all-time great singable songs, a wonderful pep-up number to start the day with. Not the first part:
Oohhh-klahoma
Where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain
And the wavin' wheat
Can sure smell sweet...
Keillor could take or leave that stuff: "It's just images," he told us that night at the Apollo. "It don't amount to a hill o' beans. It's the second part that makes you feel good: 'And when we SAY (Yee-OW!) A-yip-i-o-ee-AY!..." And within seconds he'd coaxed a characteristically recalcitrant West End audience into a rousing singalong. It's hard to resist:
We know we belong to the land
And the land we belong to is grand!
And when we say
Yeeow!
A-yip-i-o-ee-ay!
We're only sayin'
You're doin' fine, Oklahoma!
Oklahoma OK!
Oklahoma! the show is thirty-six years younger than Oklahoma the state. The latter dates from 1907, the former from three-quarters of a century ago: The musical opened at the St James Theatre on March 31st 1943, and the title song was born in a taxi cab in Manhattan en route to the home of Jules Glaenzer, the head of Cartier's - a long way from wavin' wheat and winds sweepin' down the plain. Richard Rodgers had agreed to adapt a play called Green Grow The Lilacs into a Broadway musical. But his longtime lyricist Lorenz Hart wasn't interested: It was hick stuff - settlers in Indian Territory at the turn of the century, and, even without Hart's personal demons lowering him ever deeper into an alcoholic swamp, it wasn't a milieu that interested the guy who wrote "The Lady Is A Tramp" and "Where Or When". His general attitude to anything the far side of the Hudson was summed up in his song "Way Out West", "where seldom is heard an intelligent word". So Rodgers went looking for for a new writing partner and settled on Oscar Hammerstein II. Unlike Hart, Hammerstein did like the territory, so much so that his first draft of the script calls the musical Oklahoma. The producers thought that was a terrible title evoking Grapes Of Wrath and Okies and dustbowls and the Depression. So Hammerstein was overruled and the show was named instead Away We Go!
You can see their point. In 1943, if you'd wanted to pinpoint a place on the map that was as far off-off-off Broadway as you could get, that was the very antithesis of Broadway values, Broadway sensibility, Broadway smarts, if you'd wanted in fact to win First Prize in a Least Likely Title For A Hit Broadway Musical competition, then Oklahoma was the perfect choice. It sounds like an American version of an old British joke: Inquiring of the local cinema manager as to how his film Goodnight, Vienna was doing in Streatham, Eric Maschwitz was told, "About as well as Goodnight, Streatham would do in Vienna." The notion of Oklahoma on Broadway is only marginally less ludicrous.
In 1943, a Broadway musical was just that: a musical about Broadway, about a world whose farthest horizons were delineated in Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart's very first hit song:
We'll have Manhattan
The Bronx and Staten
Island too...
There were, in those days, 47 other states, but they were mostly off the map: if musical comedy characters ever did leave town, it was to nowhere burgs with names like Stopgap, New Mexico, where Rodgers & Hart's Too Many Girls takes place. The only point to venturing "Way Out West" was to make jokes about city slickers in cow country. Thus, the big hit in 1943 was supposed to be a show called Something For The Boys, produced by Mike Todd, the man who famously dismissed Oklahoma! as " No gags, no gals, no chance." Something For The Boys had gags, gals, Cole Porter songs, Ethel Merman belting, and all the usual flim-flam you'd expect from a plot about three guys from back east inheriting property in Texas. Unlike Mike Todd, Rodgers & Hammerstein were proposing to take the hayseeds seriously, to write the show from their point of view. Oklahoma! is set one state north of Cole Porter's Texas, but it's another world. Not until R&H's chorus hollered it out from the footlights in the theatre's all-time greatest 11 o'clock number did the Broadway musical belatedly discover that it knew it belonged to the land beyond the Hudson River, and the land it belonged to was grand! Here's Hugh Jackman, either playing Curley in the National Theatre's West End production of Oklahoma! or Wolverine in Professor X's end-of-term mutant variety show in X-Men 47:
As is often said, this landmark of American musical theatre is basic boy-meets-girl. Plot-wise, it isn't about anything except who'll take Laurey to the picnic - Curley or pore Jud. But Oklahoma! is also about Oklahoma, a young territory trembling on the brink of statehood, and in the triangular relationship between Laurey and her two suitors Hammerstein's book quietly reflects all the awkward choices a society makes to civilize itself. Almost all his best work is about community - what binds it, what breaks it. If it's not too fanciful a thought, that's what he and Rodgers brought to musical theatre construction: community. Just as the farmer and the cowman should be friends, so should the lyricist and the choreographer, pooling their different strengths for the common good. Before Rodgers & Hammerstein, musicals weren't much interested in community: they were closer to a rundown high-rise project, where each component sits in its own apartment barely aware of its next-door neighbors - here's the catalogue song, here's the dance chorus, here's the comedic sub-plot. Oklahoma! changed that. As Richard Rodgers liked to put it, "In a successful show, the orchestrations sound the way the costumes look." With Larry Hart, Rodgers gave the crowds what they call "take-home tunes" — the songs you whistle the morning after; with Hammerstein, he gave us take-home shows.
Even so, neither Rodgers nor Hammerstein ever planned to write a song called "Oklahoma!" That notion arose during the writing of the show, on that Manhattan cab ride over to the Cartier guy's pad. Theresa Helburn, the producer, said out of the blue to Oscar Hammerstein, "I wish you and Dick would write a song about the earth." Hammerstein wasn't sure what she meant, so he asked her to explain. "Oh, I don't know," she said. "Just a song about the earth... The land..." And the traffic lights changed in midtown and the taxi continued on its way. Terry Helburn's idea, said Hammerstein later, was "one of the silliest and vaguest suggestions I had ever heard... Two days later I wrote a lyric I never intended to write":
Oklahoma!
Where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain
And the wavin' wheat
Can sure smell sweet
When the wind comes right behind the rain
Oklahoma!
Ev'ry night my honey lamb and I
Sit alone and talk
And watch a hawk
Makin' lazy circles in the sky...
How many states get a state song this good that's explicitly about becoming a state? Rodgers & Hammerstein's verse (mostly unsung outside the show and Oklahoma state occasions) lays out pretty much all the territory's bountiful blessings apart from the oil:
Brand new state!
Brand new state
Gonna treat you great!
Gonna give you barley, carrots and pertaters,
Pasture fer the cattle, spinach and termayters!
Flowers on the prairie where the June bugs zoom,
Plen'y of air and plen'y of room...
Well, not so much since ol' Gorsuch chopped it in half, but, if everyone bunches up, there should still be enough room for a title song:
Plen'y of room to swing a rope!
Plen'y of heart and plen'y of hopeOaaa-klahoma...
And away we go, to quote the show's original title. At the time, Richard Rodgers had never been to the state. So Hammerstein gave him a book of Oklahoman history, to help him get a feel for the atmosphere. Rodgers opened it up, took one look at it, and then put it away. "The only thing I could do," he told Max Wilk, "was what any self-respecting artist would do: I put on music paper my idea of how Oklahoma sounded in 1906. The way Indian Territory sounded at the beginning of the century." The score has a folk spirit, but it's unmistakeably Rodgers - and the Western Writers of America voted "Oklahoma!" one of the Top 100 Western Songs of all time.
Unlike the partnership with Hart, in which he composed the music first, with Hammerstein the words came first, and then Rodgers set them - brilliantly. Away We Go! was already in its out-of-town try-out by the time the boys wrote "Oklahoma". It was at the Colonial Theatre in Boston, and Robert Russell Bennett hurriedly took a train up from New York and orchestrated the song in his seat as they chugged through Connecticut and on to Massachusetts. They rehearsed it in the lobby of the Colonial, and that night it transformed the show's hitherto underpowered Second Act. The scene begins with folks gathering for Curly and Laurey's wedding, and yoking their good fortune to that of the territory:
AUNT ELLER: They couldn't pick a better time as that in life
ANDREW: It ain't too early and it ain't too late
LAUREY: Startin' as a farmer with a brand new wife
CURLY: Soon'll be livin' in a brand new state...
Doesn't seem anything terribly special, does it? But it builds and builds and builds. I called it an "eleven o'clock number" up above. That's from the days when Broadway curtains went up at 8.30pm and two-and-a-half hours later you tried to give audiences a big showstopper that would send them home with a spring in their step and a song in their hearts. There's none like "Oklahoma!" and by the time the farmers and cowmen and girls in gingham came down to the edge of the orchestra pit to sock it across the footlights, Rodgers, Hammerstein, Helburn, Rouben Mamoulian, Agnes de Mille and the rest of the team knew they had not just a hit but a phenomenon:
Okla-homa-Okla-homa-Okla-homa
Okla-homa-Okla-homa-Okla-homa...We know we belong to the land
And the land we belong to is grand!
They still didn't have a title. Away We Go! was lame, but they had reservations about calling the show Oklahoma. Somebody proposed sticking the exclamation from Away We Go! on the end of the state, and Oklahoma! was in business. The exclamation was well deserved: It was the first American musical to run over 2,000 performances, and to play all over the world, and to produce a smash cast album. "People Will Say We're In Love" was the hit of the year, and, if the title song didn't generate quite the same interest from the big balladeers, that's mainly because it seemed like an instant folk anthem, one of those songs that sounds so inevitable it's as if it must always have been out there in the air floating around waiting for someone to write it down. Ten years later, in 1953, Oklahoma made it the state song.
Larry Hart, who turned down Oklahoma! because he thought it was dull, understood. Alan Jay Lerner, the author of My Fair Lady and Camelot, once told me of an evening he spent with Hart and Fritz Loewe a few weeks after the show opened. It was wartime and suddenly, in mid-conversation, there was a blackout. Loewe switched on the radio: it was playing something from Oklahoma! and Hart's cigar glowed brighter and brighter as he puffed furiously in the dark. Loewe tuned to another station: another song from Oklahoma! A third station: still Oklahoma! and Hart's cigar puffed brighter and faster. Eventually, Loewe hit a station playing some other tune, and Hart's cigar subsided. When the lights came on, he resumed the conversation as though nothing had happened, but Lerner knew better; he described it to me as a man confronting his own obsolescence. Eight months after Rodgers and his new partner opened their first hit show, Lorenz Hart was dead.
Did Rodgers and Hammerstein know they were re-inventing the musical? I don't think so - at least not until they got out of town, saw how the audiences loved it and decided to change their title from the bland, non-specific Away We Go! to the boldly declarative Oklahoma! "Musical play" was a term that had been fitfully used for the previous 40 years, but R&H made it their own, fusing the naturalism of the straight play, the musicality of operetta, the color and imagery of musical comedy lyrics and the emotional intensity of dance - and then they threw in, almost as an afterthought, one helluva title song:
We know we belong to the land
And the land we belong to is grand!
And when we say
Yeeow!
A-yip-i-o-ee-ay!
We're only sayin'
You're doin' fine, Oklahoma!
Oklahoma O-K-
L - A - H - O - M - A
Oklahoma!
Whether Oklahoma is still OK post-Gorsuch is not strictly a musical question. But a state with a song that's all about space is now a lot more cramped.
~Mark writes about Oklahoma!, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and one hundred years of the American musical in his critically acclaimed classic Broadway Babies Say Goodnight. You can order your personally autographed copy exclusively from the SteynOnline bookstore - and it goes even better with Mark's Frank Loesser centenary celebration in our Broadway Double-Bill. Also: if you're a member of The Mark Steyn Club, remember to enter your promotional code at checkout to receive special member pricing on our Broadway Double-Bill and over forty other products.
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