Musical Selections in The Wizard of Oz - 1940 Decca Studio Album

1940 Decca Studio Album

The first record album of music from the film was not a soundtrack album in the sense that the term is used today, or even an original cast album, although it is sometimes erroneously called so. It was, instead, a U.S. Decca four-record 78 RPM studio cast album of songs from the film released in 1940, featuring Judy Garland as Dorothy, but with the Ken Darby Singers in other roles. (Darby had also been one of the actual film's music arrangers.) This album was about twenty minutes long. There was no overture included, only the songs, and most of them were not placed in the same order that they were heard in the film. The album also used some introductory song verses which had not been included in the motion picture. Two songs heard in the film as finally released were omitted from the album - Optimistic Voices and If I Were King of the Forest; however, the album did include the song The Jitterbug, which had been deleted from the film. It also used, oddly enough, dialogue which never appeared in the movie - at one point, during "The Merry Old Land of Oz", Dorothy says: "We can't go to see the Wizard like this! We're all dirty!", after which the group supposedly enters the Wash and Brush Up room in the Emerald City. The reprise of Over the Rainbow and the Triumphal Return sequence were also not included.

The orchestra on the album was conducted by Victor Young, and the orchestrations were completely different from those used in the film, as were some of the vocal arrangements. In the "Munchkinland" medley, the Ken Darby Singers provided the voices of the Munchkins, but they were not altered to sound "chipmunk"-like, as in the film. The role of Glinda was sung by an unnamed soprano with an operatic voice, and in the song "If I Only Had A Heart", the role of the Tin Man was sung by a tenor whose voice bordered on falsetto. The two songs Garland sang on the album, Over the Rainbow and The Jitterbug, had already been released as a 78-RPM single in 1939 only a month after the film's premiere, and were incorporated into the album. (This single had nothing to do with the Brunswick Records recording that had been suppressed by MGM.) On the rest of the 1940 album, an unnamed soloist took the role of Dorothy.

This album was quite a success, and after being reissued in a 45-RPM version and as a 10-inch LP, it was finally re-released in 1956 as one side of a 12-inch 33⅓ RPM LP, the other side occupied by cover versions of songs from Disney's Pinocchio (1940), with Cliff Edwards, the film's Jiminy Cricket, as lead soloist. (Perhaps not so coincidentally, this is also the year that MGM Records first released an authentic soundtrack album of The Wizard of Oz.)

The 1940 Decca "cover album" stayed in print throughout the 1950s, even after MGM Records' authentic soundtrack album of The Wizard of Oz was released. Judy Garland's 1939 cover versions of Over the Rainbow and The Jitterbug were released years later on the 1994 Decca box set The Complete Decca Masters (plus), which featured all of Garland's Decca singles and several alternate takes. The Decca single of Over the Rainbow has been released on an MCA compact disc entitled 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection - The Best of Judy Garland, among various other compilations; the rest of the 1940 album of The Wizard of Oz has yet to be issued on CD, however.