Interesting:
“HAVE YOURSELF A MERRY LITTLE CHRISTMAS”
The holiday standard debuted in the 1944 movie musical Meet Me in St. Louis. That film was based in and around the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, but because of when the song came out—and its painful lyrics about being apart from loved ones for the holidays—closely associates the tune with World War II. Judy Garland’s take from Meet Me in St. Louis included the line “until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow.” When Sinatra covered the song for his 1957 album A Jolly Christmas, he thought that line in particular made the song too somber, so he asked the original song’s co-writer Hugh Martin to “jolly up” the song. Martin’s solution: Out went the line about muddling and in came “Hang a shining star upon the highest bough.”
