On April 23rd 1961, when Judy Garland took the stage at Carnegie Hall, she didn't clip an American flag pin on her dress. She featured no patriotic songs. She didn't offer a single word about politics and not did she end her concert with the phrase, "God Bless America." Rufus Wainright was onto something when he explained why he performed his tribute to her triumph,
"After 9/11, when we first were going to war and the state of things looked pretty dismal, I bought the rerelease," Mr. Wainwright said, referring to the remastered double-CD recording of the 1961 concert. "Somehow that album, no matter how dark things seemed, made everything brighten."
This concert was democracy in action - participatory and celebratory of an American ideal.
Here is why:
Judy sang the Great American Songbook that night. This catalog of songs that celebrate everyday life in conversational English that is universally accessible. The melodies are hummable and the lyrics casual; "Do it again," "I can't give you anything but love." They range over the variety of human emotion from pure joy, "When you're smiling" to pure sorrow, "Stormy Weather."
Judy didn't make a big deal about her song selection. She never breathed the phrase, "Great American Songbook." She didn't talk about why she was featuring a song at a particular point in the concert. That wasn't her style. Judy just sang them. Songs that were closely tied to her - from movies and vaudeville, to jazzy numbers and a few from plays that never made it big. There is great variety in the music but all of it is in the best sense - popular.
She told stories too. Not about all the famous people she knew or her great movie roles but about being fat, sporting a laughable hairdo for a concert in Paris and getting a pin stuck so that it quickened her vibrato. They are funny but more importantly they are human - things that happen to everyone. She also flubs a lyric and calls attention to it. Someone calls out, "I love you!" and Judy responds with, "I love me too." She is one with her audience not above them.
And they hold up their end of the participatory bargain too. They clap and yell not just after songs but during, when they get excited about what's to come. They also become absolutely still - something you don't hear often in popular concerts. They are completely caught up in every moment.
Their love buoys Judy's voice as well. It was always an instrument of wide and nuanced emotional range and its true this night as well. But there is an extra quality too, her voice floated on a sea of love that held and celebrated the imperfection on display - the barely finished final word in "The Man that Got Away," the loss of steam at the end of "Zing went the strings of my heart" a warbling off key early on in her heart-wrenching, "Over the Rainbow. These "flaws" only added to the moment that was each moment of that two and a half hour long concert. The audience rode every note, breath, emotional tremor. And remember Judy had her foot to floorboard on each of the 26 songs. There was only Judy, her songs, the orchestra and the audience.
The concert ends with several encores and Judy takes requests from the audience. As well she should. This audience has participated all the way through and now she listens to them and what they want her to sing. The final number is Chicago, a song about that most American city, the lyric showing off that town's casual, slightly naughty but ever lively celebratory qualities. And when Judy finishes she does say "God bless" but democracy isn't about America in that moment but about the people who sat, sweated, yelled, stood on chairs and ran to the front of the stage to help her produce a concert that neither they nor Judy would ever forget.
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