Finding the Judy Garland Souvenir Songbook
The Judy Garland Souvenir Songbook has come out in several different printings over the decades, which makes tracking down a usable copy more frustrating than it needs to be. There isn't one single definitive edition. The most commonly referenced version was published in the late 1950s, typically listed under MCA Music Publishing or Robbins Music. It contains sheet music arrangements for many of her well-known numbers like Over the Rainbow, Have You Met Miss Jones?, and The Trolley Song, though the exact track listing varies by printing. Here is the thing most people miss when they start looking for this: there are at least three distinct editions floating around, and they are not interchangeable. The 1957 Robbins Music edition has piano/vocal arrangements that are generally closer to the original show orchestrations. The later reprints, sometimes issued under different imprints like Columbia House or through mail-order clubs, often have simplified arrangements. If you are a musician trying to play these accurately, that difference matters. The vocal lines in the reprints sometimes get transposed or stripped of important chromatic passages that Garland's arrangers originally wrote. I spent about three weeks last year trying to sort this out for a student who wanted to perform Garland material authentically. I ordered two copies thinking they were the same book. They weren't. One had the full four-page intro to Get Happy with the actual key changes intact. The other cut it down to two pages and flattened the harmony. I ended up using the Robbins edition and cross-referencing with original Decca master tape notes from the Museum of the Performing Arts archive to figure out where the simplifications had distorted the melody. That part took another afternoon.
The practical workaround I settled on was straightforward. I borrowed the 1957 Robbins volume from a collector on a vintage music forum, photographed every page with my phone at high resolution, and built a PDF with bookmarks for each song. That way my student could flip through it on a tablet during lessons without handling the fragile original. The images hold up well enough for reading the music, though the page numbers don't match the printed ones because I reordered them alphabetically by song title, which is easier to navigate. As for where to find one, the usual suspects are eBay, AbeBooks, and specialized music memorabilia dealers. Expect to pay anywhere from fifteen dollars for a worn paperback reprint to over a hundred for a near-mint first edition Robbins printing. Amazon rarely carries any of these anymore. They tend to be out of print or only available through third-party sellers who mark them up significantly. One edge case worth noting: some listings describe the book as containing "all her greatest hits," but that is marketing language. Many of the songbooks only cover material from her MGM period roughly between 1940 and 1951. If you need songs from her radio years or her later concert recordings, you will have to hunt for separate publications. There is no single comprehensive collection, and nobody seems to be making one now.
If you want digital versions, the Internet Archive sometimes has scanned copies uploaded by libraries, though the quality is hit or miss. HathiTrust has a few entries as well. Neither platform is ideal for performance use since you cannot print from them, but they work fine for reference or learning the songs by ear. The main downside to any of these songbooks is that the arrangements are intermediated at best. They were never intended as scholarly editions. The voicings are simplified for amateur players, and the lyrics sometimes contain errors that got carried through multiple printings. I have seen at least two songs where the second verse lyrics were swapped with a different composition entirely, probably due to a typesetter confusing similarly titled songs. Always verify against a recorded source before relying on the text for anything formal. For most people just looking to own a piece of Garland memorabilia or play through the songs casually, any decent copy will serve. The emotional content of the book does not depend on having the perfect arrangement. If you need performance accuracy though, plan to do some verification work regardless of which edition you end up with.
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