The date of this performance is December 13th, 1963. Three weeks earlier, the young President John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, TX. The nation was mourning even as the holidays approached. The ever-talented Judy Garland gave this remarkably powerful and passionate performance that garnered her a standing ovation in the studio, and to the audience nationwide.
Judy Garland could have performed this on November 21st, 1963, but she would not have been able to invoke the passion, the emotion, the reality that she did on December 13th. In our lifetime, the feeling of the nation at that time can be equated to our emotions that Tuesday morning on September 11, 2001 as more than 3000 of our fellow citizens, our neighbors, associates, perished in the battlefield that we refer to now as “Ground Zero”!
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September 23, 2010 at 9:26 pm
Darrell
I think she’s drunk as a skunk…or high as a snake! Pretty good performance nevertheless.
Similar emotions were felt by those of us of the British Commonwealth when Princess Diana died. Amazing what death can do!
September 24, 2010 at 4:13 pm
JAMES
Judy typically performed in that “state” in the last decade of her life.
June 3, 2011 at 11:52 am
BFC Cpl Jack
Darrell, we are so appreciative of your stating the obvious. Maybe some things are better left unsaid as they do not gain any body any thing in saying them, except a smug sense of superiority that the speaker gets by deriding the person scorned.
James, in reality a good bit longer than a decade. As a child she had a hellacious work schedule and a lot of people made their fortunes off her innocence.
June 3, 2011 at 4:33 pm
JAMES
Sadly, many of the talented youth are mistreated by the adult world and become the money trough.
April 28, 2012 at 8:01 am
Lisa
I’ve had her version on my ITunes for years; this is the best I’ve ever heard. I would like to find a recording with all 6 verses so if anyone here knows of such I would love it. But I don’t want the silly version where they change “as He died to make men holy let us die to make men free” to “live to make men free”. I’ve even heard military bands use this. It is nonsense. Men were dying in the War Between the States.