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I Want to Go Back to Michigan is a song by Irving Berlin composed in 1914. It was a moderate commercial success when it was first released and afterward became a staple on vaudeville. Its most famous performance was by Judy Garland in the film Easter Parade.
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Lyrics
The ballad'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.
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 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, a popular singer during the period when the song was first composed, recorded it for Edison 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.