Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall (and the Manhattan Center)

Several months ago, I was looking through a box of photographs from the Friedman-Abeles collection that came to the Library a short while after the initial acquisition in the early 1990s. While flipping through the envelopes in which the studio had placed their original photographs, a handwritten label caught my eye: “Garland, Jody [sic]" and "Carnegie Hall.”

Born June 10, 1922, this year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Judy Garland, the famed film star probably best known for her role as Dorothy in the 1939 MGM movie version of The Wizard of Oz. It has also been 61 years since her celebrated 1961 concert at Carnegie Hall (recorded live for commercial release). The concert was the New York stop of a North American tour that was something of a "comeback" for Garland after many personal difficulties. The New York show on April 23, 1961 brought the most famous celebrities of the day to Carnegie Hall along with legions of adoring fans. Around a year later, in April of 1962, she performed again at the Manhattan Center. The envelope I found in the unprocessed Friedman-Abeles box contained a wealth of photographs of both events, some familiar, many new to me, documenting not just the event itself but the audience and events backstage.

Today, in honor of Judy Garland’s centennial, we offer here a selection of those photographs as a quick, relatively low-resolution preview of the full materials I hope will soon be available in our reading room and eventually in our Digital Collections. “Shout "hallelujah", c'mon get happy!”