"Dear Mr. Gable/You Made Me Love You" by Judy Garland

Nearly seventy-five years separate us in the oh-so-cool present from the quaint, sentimental past represented by this clip; nowadays, of course, Judy Garland wouldn't so much be singing to a scrapbook full of Clark Gable's pictures as blogging about him with all the OMGs and WTFs and like, y'know's her little thumbs could muster. How better to bridge these two seemingly dissimilar eras, then, than to blog about this today, on what would have been her birthday?

Taken from Broadway Melody of 1938 - in which her mother is portrayed by none other than Sophie Tucker* - the touching number Dear Mr Gable/You Made Me Love You (I Didn't Want To Do It) was a key early element in Judy's rise to stardom. Originally arranged (by longtime Garland collaborator Roger Edens) for her to sing to Gable at a birthday party thrown for him by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer brass, so charmed were those present by her performance that the song was included in the movie. Later still it became the b-side of Garland's famous 1939 recording of Over the Rainbow, which she'd sung so famously in The Wizard of Oz.

*Very apt casting in this blogger's opinion, given the similarity in their singing voices.
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