You've Got to Be Carefully Taught Lyrics – South Pacific

Song Overview

Personal Review

This is a brisk, necessary gut-check of a showtune whose plain words cut louder than brass. Hearing William Tabbert deliver the lyrics, you feel the musical pause to point a finger at the root cause, not the symptom. The lyrics make no metaphysical detours, just a clear claim: prejudice is learned.

Here the theme is simple - a Marine officer admits what culture drills into children. One sentence snapshot: a soldier names the machine that made him, and dares the audience to turn it off.

Song Meaning and Annotations

The message lands because the music doesn’t crowd it. Rodgers writes a compact, marching groove in a bright major key, almost nursery-rhyme clear, while the lyric lists how bias seeps in. That contrast is the trick: sweet surface, serious core.

The emotional arc moves from clinical naming to moral alarm. It starts almost like a recitation, then tightens as Cable insists when the damage happens - ages six, seven, eight - and the rhyme feels like a ruler tapping a desk.

Historically, the number was a lightning rod. Producers and critics urged cutting it; Rodgers and Hammerstein refused, insisting it was the reason to write South Pacific in the first place.

On tour in the U.S. South in 1953, Georgia legislators even floated a bill against works with a so-called Moscow-inspired philosophy, citing this song as a threat because it “justified interracial marriage.” That pushback explains why the lyric’s directness mattered.

In the 1958 film, actor John Kerr plays Cable while studio singer Bill Lee provides the voice for this song. The camera keeps him still, underlining the text-first design of the piece.

Message

“You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear… It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear.”

Hammerstein frames prejudice as pedagogy: adults repeating lessons until they stick. The rhyme of taught/thought is dodged on purpose - action over abstraction.

Emotional tone

Not angry - exact. The blunt diction feels like field notes. By the last quatrain, the tempo of consonants does the scolding for him.

Historical context

South Pacific premiered in 1949 and spoke into a U.S. culture just before Brown v. Board and well before the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The show carved out space on Broadway for social argument, and this song was the wedge.

Production and instrumentation

On the 1949 original cast album, orchestrations by Robert Russell Bennett keep the palette lean - winds, strings, and soft percussion under a speech-like vocal line. It’s theatre craft: support the syllables, don’t gild them.

Analysis of key phrases

“Oddly made” and “diff’rent shade” use childlike phrasing to mirror the childishness of the lesson. The lyric’s repeated “You’ve got to be…” functions as imperative anaphora, a drill sergeant cadence.

About metaphors and symbols

There’s almost none, by design. The symbol is the list itself - a catalog of taught reflexes. Hammerstein lets the syntax be the cudgel.

Creation history

Recorded April 18–19, 1949 at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio, produced by Goddard Lieberson, the cast album would become a landmark - and yes, the song stayed in against advice.

Verse Highlights

Verse 1

Built on tight end-rhymes, the verse sketches how elders pass down fear. The gentle harmony undercuts any chance to dismiss it as a sermon.

Chorus

The refrain isn’t a sing-along hook - it’s an instruction repeated until the audience hears their own childhood echoes. That’s the sting.

Key Facts

• Featured: William Tabbert as Lt. Joe Cable (Original Broadway Cast)
• Producer: Goddard Lieberson
• Composer: Richard Rodgers
• Lyricist: Oscar Hammerstein II
• Release Date: May 9, 1949 (cast album)
• Genre: Show tune, Broadway
• Instruments: pit orchestra - strings, woodwinds, brass, percussion
• Label: Columbia Masterworks
• Mood: candid, confrontational, clear-eyed
• Length (OBC track): approx. 1:16
• Track #: 14
• Language: English
• Album: South Pacific (Original Broadway Cast Recording)
• Music style: classic musical theatre with march-like pulse
• Poetic meter: mixed accentual line with anapestic push
• © Copyrights: © 1949 Williamson Music Company (ASCAP) c/o Concord Music Publishing

Questions and Answers

Who produced “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” on the original cast album?

Goddard Lieberson produced the 1949 Columbia Masterworks recording sessions.

When was the song first released on record?

It appeared on the original cast album issued May 9, 1949.

Who wrote the music and lyrics?

Music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II.

Was the number controversial at the time?

Yes. It faced calls to be cut, and even provoked a 1953 Georgia bill targeting works with “Moscow-inspired” ideas during the tour.

Who sings it in the 1958 film?

Actor John Kerr appears as Cable; Bill Lee dubs the singing voice for the number.

Awards and Chart Positions

The song itself wasn’t a standalone chart single, but its home album became a juggernaut: the 1949 original Broadway cast recording spent a record-setting 69 weeks at number one on Billboard’s popular albums chart, later added to the U.S. National Recording Registry. The stage production swept the 1950 Tony Awards and earned the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; the 1958 film adaptation won the Academy Award for Best Sound.

How to Sing?

Range and key: published charts place the original key around F major; accessible performance guides peg the typical vocal span near D3–D4 for Cable’s setting. That’s a compact tenor/baritenor window.

Tempo and breath: keep it measured and speech-forward. Prioritize diction over vibrato; let consonants carry the pulse. Breathe at line ends - the syntax invites rests. Avoid overselling the melody; the authority is in the plain phrasing.

Tone color: start neutral and dry, then let urgency rise on the “before you are six or seven or eight” line. Think “clear testimony,” not croon.

Acting note: treat each “You’ve got to be…” as a court exhibit. The repetition is the casework.

Songs Exploring Themes of Prejudice and Tolerance

“Children Will Listen” - Into the Woods (Stephen Sondheim) - A lullaby that warns how adult choices imprint on kids. While Hammerstein’s lyric names the lesson bluntly, Sondheim circles it with cautionary poetry. Both trust the audience’s memory of childhood, but Sondheim leans empathetic, where Cable’s lyric is forensic in tone.

“Blowin’ in the Wind” - Bob Dylan - A folk catechism that frames moral inertia as unanswered questions. Compared to Cable’s straight diagnosis, Dylan’s lyric spreads out like a horizon, inviting the listener to supply the verdict. Different roads, same destination: responsibility is learned, and can be relearned.

“Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” - Avenue Q - Satire as solvent. The comic mode exposes micro-bias without absolving it. Where Cable pins the timeline of harm - “before you are six or seven or eight” - Avenue Q spotlights the residues that adulthood must scrub. In contrast to Rodgers’s sober march, the groove is pop-vaudeville, which lets the medicine slip in sideways.