Song no6: “Do It Again” by George Gershwin and Buddy Da Sylva, performed by Judy Garland.
On April 23 1961 Judy Garland gave the most celebrated concert in the history of popular song.
Ignore Frank Sinatra’s ‘comebacks’, which came round as frequently as England batting collapses. Judy at Carnegie was a return, of sorts, but it was so much more. It was a demonstration of her unmatched gifts after a period of illness and doubt. When she left the stage that Sunday night not many people in a hall swelled by the great and good were left in any doubt. Indeed, they might have seconded Fred Astaire’s proposition that they had seen the greatest entertainer of all.
She was 38, no age really, yet she had been a star from childhood, exploited by the Hollywood hit factory. Orson Welles, who loathed the place, recalled to Michael Parkinson a decade later that ‘I’ve seen so many people destroyed there’, and they did their best to squash Judy while fattening her up as a cash cow. When you have conquered the world at 17, singing Over The Rainbow, what is left?
That wasn’t her finest performance. Nobody has sung Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas like Judy. In other hands it can sound mawkish. She made it a double-hankie wringer. In A Star is Born she lit up the screen with The Man That Got Away, by Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin. Arlen of course supplied the melody for Over The Rainbow, which she also sang that night in Carnegie.
The first thing you notice about the recording is how live it was. The response is immediate, overwhelming, and sustained. It represented an outpouring of love for a stupendous performer who would be dead by the end of the decade. Her final appearances, in June 1969, were at the Palladium in London, where she died of an accidental drugs overdose between shows.
The second thing you notice is the vast gap between the nonsense she spoke between songs, and the magnificent way she handled the material. It brings to mind something Robert Hughes, the superb art critic, said of Piet Mondrian: ‘he may have talked balls; he painted none’.
Judy’s patter was third division stuff. She sounded in a fog, like someone in thrall to prescription drugs. But when she launched into the songs, guided by Mort Lindsey, who was conducting the band, then we enter wonderland. And if her voice seems to crack at times, it makes the performance, and the recording, more dramatic. We forgive her even when she forgets the words to an up-tempo reading of You Go To My Head.
There are so many winners. The medley of Almost Like Being In Love and This Can’t Be Love immediately fills the sails with a salty wind, and there cannot ever have been a more impassioned cover of Stormy Weather, yet another Arlen melody. Noel Coward gets a look-in, with If Love Were All, and there is a lovely nod to Rodgers and Hart: You’re Nearer is one of their most handsome songs. How tempting it was to choose that as one of ‘Hendo’s Dozen’!
Yet the temptation was resisted, partly because the Rodgers and Hart performance I have selected is one it is impossible to ignore – you won’t have long to wait. Partly also because, even on a record so splendid, Do It Again has a particular sheen.
George Gershwin wrote the melody in 1922. Buddy Da Sylva, who was standing by the piano, apparently said ‘do it again’, and that’s how the song was born. We think of Gershwin writing songs with his brother Ira, and so we jolly well should, but here is a masterpiece which requires no special pleading.
There’s a fair amount of playing to the gallery on this record, as Judy aims for the back wall of Carnegie. On this song, as on You’re Nearer, she presents her gentler side, and the contrast is touching. There is stillness in the hall, as though she had cast a spell, and the way she picks up the lyric after four bars of orchestral detail with ‘turn out the light’ may prompt sensitive souls to shed a manly tear.
What a way to start the song, too!
‘You really shouldn’t have done it,
You hadn’t any right…’
This is a performance to return to, again and again, as Da Sylva’s lyric would have us. Do it again, Judy. There’s another Gershwin song on the record, the more familiar How Long Has This Been Going On?, written with Ira, and she does justice to that. But Do It Again , coming as it does, early in the act, is the choice cut on this superlative LP.
Gershwin died in 1937, at the age of 38, though, as John O’Hara said, ‘I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to’. Da Sylva went on to set up Capitol Records with Johnny Mercer. They didn’t push many balls back to the bowler.
Hendo’s Dozen, so far.
Judy Garland, Do It Again by George Gershwin and Buddy Da Sylva
Bobby Darin: Once Upon A Time, by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams.
Fred Astaire: I’m Old Fashioned; Jerome Kern and Johnny Mercer.
Lena Horne: It Could Happen to You; Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke.
Tony Bennett: I Walk A Little Faster; Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh.
Peggy Lee: Then I’ll Be Tired of You; Arthur Schwartz and Yip Harburg.