I Want to Go Back to Michigan is a song by Irving Berlin

Irving Berlin

Irving Berlin was an American composer and lyricist of Jewish heritage, widely considered one of the greatest songwriters in American history.His first hit song, "Alexander's Ragtime Band", became world famous...

 composed in 1914. It was a moderate commercial success when it was first released and afterward became a staple on vaudeville

Vaudeville

Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...

. Its most famous performance was by Judy Garland

Judy Garland

Judy Garland was an American actress and singer. Through a career that spanned 45 of her 47 years and for her renowned contralto voice, she attained international stardom as an actress in musical and dramatic roles, as a recording artist and on the concert stage...

 in the film Easter Parade.

Lyrics

The ballad

Ballad

A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads were particularly characteristic of British and Irish popular poetry and song from the later medieval period until the 19th century and used extensively across Europe and later the Americas, Australia and North Africa. Many...

's lyrics employ imagery of an idyllic rural childhood juxtaposed against less appealing city life, which was a theme among some popular songs during this period of rapid urban growth in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

.

You can keep your cabarets

Where they turn nights into days.

I'd rather be where they go to bed at nine.

I've been gone for seven weeks

And I've lost my rosy cheeks.

Composition

According to Charles Hamm in a biography of Irving Berlin, the songwriter composed "I Want to Go Back to Michigan" at a time when his ambitions were aiming past vaudeville

Vaudeville

Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...

 toward musical theater and he was exercising new styles. The nostalgic reminiscence here, along with "Happy Little Country Girl" composed during the same period, was previously unknown in his work. Billy Murray

Billy Murray (singer)

William Thomas "Billy" Murray was one of the most popular singers in the United States in the early decades of the 20th century...

, a popular singer during the period when the song was first composed, recorded it for Edison Records

Edison Records

Edison Records was one of the earliest record labels which pioneered recorded sound and was an important player in the early recording industry.- Early phonographs before commercial mass produced records :...

 in 1914.

Easter Parade

Although the song was not composed to be part of a larger work, it appeared in the 1948 film Easter Parade which was written around a mixture of ten older and eight newly composed Irving Berlin songs. Berlin's deal with MGM for the package of songs that included "I Want to Go Back to Michigan" was $500,000 plus a percentage of box office receipts, which was an unusually advantageous contract for a songwriter and amounted to twenty percent of the film's total budget of $2.5 million. The film won the 1948 Academy Award for Best Musical Score

Academy Award for Original Music Score

The Academy Award for Original Score is presented to the best substantial body of music in the form of dramatic underscoring written specifically for the film by the submitting composer.-Superlatives:...

.