We know we belong to the land, and the land we belong to is grand!

[fiona_grady]

Almost exactly 70 years ago, the musical "Oklahoma!" opened on Broadway.
Richard Rodgers agreed to adapt a play "Green Grow the Lilacs" into a Broadway musical but his long-time collaborator, the lyricist Lorenz Hart wasn't interested.  His general attitude to anything west of the Hudson River was summed up in his song "Way out West":

"I've roamed o'er the range with the herd
where seldom is heard an intelligent word."


Rodgers had to find a new lyricist and it was Oscar Hammerstein.

Unlike Hart, who found the hicks and their broncos, and their cows, and their corn uninspiring, Hammerstein loved the Territories.  So much so that his first draft calls the musical "Oklahoma".  That made the producers cringe: that was too depressing somehow, too much like the "Grapes of Wrath", and in 1943 depressing was not very lucrative on Broadway. The title was tentatively "Away We Go!", and that is how it was billed in the try-outs in Boston.

Back in Manhattan, the show's producer Theresa Helburn was riding in a cab with Oscar Hammerstein, they were on their way to dinner at Jules Glaenzer, the head of Cartier. I find it incredibly ironic but also moving that it is in this impossibly swank New York setting Terry Helbrun said to Hammerstein: "I want you to write a song about earth".  And when he asked her to explain, she said, "Oh, I don't know... something about the land".

-"This was one of the silliest and vaguest suggestions I had ever heard", Hammerstein wrote in his memoirs, "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

Unlike the partnership with Hart, when the words were composed to the music that Rodgers has written, with Hammerstein the words came first and Rodgers would set them to music.  The play was already in the try-outs at the Colonial Theater, when the boys took the train to Boston, hurriedly composing the orchestration on the way.  They rehearsed in the lobby of the Colonial, and that night the new number transformed the Second Act. The song "Oklahoma" became the show-stopper and the take-home tune that people kept humming on their way out of the theater.  Somebody suggested adding an exclamation mark to "Oklahoma", and that is how it started its life and became the first ever production on Broadway to run over 2,000 performances.

Musical theater premise has always been boy-meets-girl, but Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Oklahoma!" was about far more than that; it was about a young nation establishing itself, and about the community of people who turned the Territories into America, and it was about the land. It resonated in 1943, and it still resonates today:

We know we belong to the land
    And the land we belong to is grand!
    And when we say
    Yeeow!
    Aip-i-o-ee-ay!
    We're only sayin'
    You're doin' fine, Oklahoma!
    Oklahoma! OK!