"They Call the Wind Maria"

Lerner and Loewe

Today Sometimes a Song revisits one of the most successful songwriting teams of the 20th Century, Jay Lerner and Fritz Loewe, with a moving song from one of their hit Broadway musicals, Paint Your Wagon (1951), later adapted for a Hollywood film of the same name (1969). Jay Lerner got the idea for his lyric to a song about the wind from a 1941 book by George Steward called, Storm. The protagonist of Steward’s novel was a natural element, a storm named Maria, which the author insisted be pronounced Ma-RYE-ah, because his storm was so powerful as to demand a stronger-sounding name. Storm was a best seller in its day and also inspired the military’s practice of assigning women’s names to storms they were tracking in the Pacific during WWII. By the early 1950’s, this practice of personifying wind storms by naming them had become standard procedure among meteorologists.

And dare I say it? “They Call the Wind Maria” literally took the music world by storm in 1951, when it became the most frequently requested single in America and in that year alone was covered by seven different artists and orchestras, including those of Vaughn Monroe and Victor Young. The song was among the most requested by servicemen during the Korean War. It enjoyed great popularity during the great folk music revival and was recorded by a range of folk singers from Burl Ives to the Kingston Trio to the Smothers Brothers!

Today I am offering you the version of the song as it was presented, sung and performed brilliantly by the classically trained singer, Harve Presnell, in the film version. I confess that I have never cared much for the film and was not surprised to learn that for many reasons it disappointed theater critics and moviegoers, who perhaps were hoping for a big-screen reprise of the Lerner and Loewe Broadway play. But the film adaptation veers far from Lerner’s original libretto, even eliminating the main love story which redeems to some extent a morally disturbing plot. That Fritz Loewe declined to work with his longtime partner on the new music which had to be written for the revised story lines says a lot, and ultimately the collaboration of Lerner and Andre Previn for this film proved disappointing.

Reviewers of the day were not kind to the film, but they were universally star-struck by Harve Presnell’s singing performance. One described Presnell’s artistry as “one of the film's few pleasing moments … lovely to hear". In a notice that otherwise panned the film, another noted that "Harve Presnell [stole] both stars' thunder with [his] knockout version of the [film’s ]best song.” I hope to have a chance to discuss Harve Presnell more fully another day, but for now I give you his “elemental” version of what has become an American classic song.

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