The Eagle and Me

Written: 1944

Music by: Harold Arlen

Words by: E. Y. (Yip) Harburg

Written for: Bloomer Girl
(show, 1944)

On the Main Stage at Cafe Songbook

Jane Monheit

performing

"The Eagle and Me"

with Michael Kanin (keyboard), Neal Miner (bass) and Rick Montalbano (drums)
at Quasimodo, Berlin October 26, 2010.
(Monheit recorded "The Eagle and Me"
on her 2010 album, Home.)
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More Performances of "The Eagle and Me"
in the Cafe Songbook
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(Video credit )

Cafe Songbook Reading Room

"The Eagle and Me"

Critics Corner || Lyrics Lounge

Bloomer Girl opened on Broadway as World War II was raging abroad. Perhaps as a means of acknowledging the strife of the nation abroad, the show focused on heroic themes of its present and its past at home including the Civil War, Slavery and Women's Rights. Despite these heavy issues, the show ran for over 600 performances, due in no small part to the fine Arlen/Harburg score.

The plot centers on Evalina Applegate who is made in the mold of her crusading aunt, Dolly Bloomer after whom is named the garment she invented to help women liberate themselves from Victorian restraints. Jeff Calhoun is the southern gentleman Evalina's father picks out for her and whom she refuses until he comes over to the Union side.

"The Eagle and Me," a classic freedom song, was introduced in Bloomer Girl by Dooley Wilson in the part of Pompey, a runaway slave, who surprises Jeff Calhoun, his former owner, when he emerges from a trunk at a way station of the Underground Railroad. Evalina has persuaded Calhoun to help her hide the trunk, but when Calhoun discovers what and who is in it, he is shocked and demands that Pompey explain how he could do such a thing as run away. Pompey explains by singing "The Eagle and Me."

Visit the Lyrics Lounge below to listen to the Dooley Wilson performance from Bloomer Girl from the cast album.

Harold Meyerson and Ernie Harburg in their biography of Yip Harburg comment on "The Eagle and Me as follows:

"The Eagle and Me" occupies a transitional place among what we might term the "black plight" songs of the American theater; that is at once its distinction and its limitation. There were serious ballads for black characters on the musical stage before that had dealt with the legacy of racism: "Ol' Man River" and Irving Berlin's "Supper Time" come to mind. But both "Ol' Man River" and "Supper Time" are lamentations that take the oppressed black condition as a given, as does Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. Also, [these] are works of the Twenties and Thirties. "The Eagle and Me" is a ballad of the Forties, when, for the first time, a nascent civil rights movement was beginning to direct public attention to the possibility of curtailing institutional racism. A lamentation would no longer suffice, and "The Eagle and Me" is not a song in the same vein as its predecessors. It is, rather, the first theater song of the fledgling civil rights movement (Meyerson and Harburg, p. 197, hard-bound Ed.).

Lena Horne performs "Love Me or Leave Me" and
"The Eagle and Me" live, 1965

Dooley Wilson and Bloomer Girl cast perform
"The Eagle and Me" -- with lyrics streamed.

Yip Harburg's biographers recount an anecdote from a 1977 Jonathan Schwartz radio show on which Stephen Sondheim states that a line from "The Eagle and Me" is his favorite "lyric line." The "line" is in fact the two lines that begin the
song's bridge:

Ever since that day
When the world was an onion.

Sondheim says, "What it is, is a resonant line that implies a whole ethos. But it's such an exhilarating and terrific line and it just sits there and lands so perfectly. It just feels so good." (Myerson and Harbaugh, p. 199)

The complete, authoritative lyrics for "The Eagle and Me" can be found in the following works:

Reading Lyrics, Edited and with an Introduction by Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball, New York: Pantheon Books, 2000.

and

Harold Myerson and Ernie Harburg with Arthur Perlman.
Who Put the Rainbow in The Wizard of Oz?: Yip Harburg, Lyricist.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993, p. 196 (hard-bound Ed.).

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