Beautiful Dreamer (Song)

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“Beautiful Dreamer” is a parlor song by American songwriter Stephen Foster (July 4, 1826 – January 13, 1864). It was published posthumously in March 1864, by Wm. A. Pond & Co. of New York. The first edition states on its title page that it is “the last song ever written by Stephen C. Foster, composed but a few days prior to his death.” However, Carol Kimball, the author of Song, points out that the first edition’s copyright is dated 1862, which suggests, she writes, that the song was composed and readied for publication two years before Foster’s death. There are at least 20 songs, she observes, that claim to be Foster’s last, and it is unknown which is indeed his last. The song is set in time with a broken chord accompaniment.

The song tells of a lover serenading a “Beautiful Dreamer” who is oblivious to worldly cares and may actually be dead. Foster’s works feature many dead young women, including his sister Charlotte and “Jeanie“. Helen Lightner writes, “This sentimental ballad is folk-like in character with its repetitious but lovely melody and its basic harmonic accompaniment … The quiet and calm of this mood is portrayed by the monotony of the arpeggiated accompaniment, by the repetitiveness of the melodic pattern, and by the strophic form itself.”

Lyrics

1.
Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me,
Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee;
Sounds of the rude world, heard in the day,
Lull’d by the moonlight have all passed away!
Beautiful dreamer, queen of my song,
List while I woo thee with soft melody;
Gone are the cares of life’s busy throng,
Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me!
Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me!

2.
Beautiful dreamer, out on the sea,
Mermaids are chanting the wild lorelei;
Over the streamlet vapors are borne,
Waiting to fade at the bright coming morn.
Beautiful dreamer, beam on my heart,
E’en as the morn on the streamlet and sea;
Then will all clouds of sorrow depart,
Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me!
Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me!

Recordings

“Beautiful Dreamer” by Currier and Ives

The song has been recorded by Bing Crosby with John Scott Trotter & his Orchestra (March 22, 1940); The Nutmegs;

Steve Conway with Jack Byfield & his Orchestra;

Thomas Hampson with Jay Ungar (mandolin), David Alpher (piano), and Molly Mason (guitar);

John Leyton (with revised lyrics by Ken Lewis and John Carter);

Jerry Lee Lewis;

Slim Whitman;

and Roy Orbison on the album In Dreams (a top ten Australian single in 1964).

The documentary Beautiful Dreamer: Brian Wilson and the Story of Smile is named after the song, and in the documentary Brian Wilson quips that the first letters of the words “Beautiful Dreamer, Wake” compare with his own initials, Brian Douglas Wilson. The song is also featured on Marty Robbins‘ posthumous album Long, Long Ago (1984) and on Ray Price‘s posthumous farewell album Beauty Is… Ray Price, The Final Sessions (2014).

Jim Reeves recorded a version while on tour in South Africa in 1962, sung in Afrikaans under the title “Bolandse Nooientjie”. (A brief translation is fraught; “lass of the hinterland” is one possibility). Although Reeves could not speak Afrikaans, this was remedied by South African composer and songwriter Gilbert Gibson, who stood behind Reeves and whispered the words of the song to him, who would then sing the same words into the microphone.

Bing Crosby included the song in a medley on his album On the Sentimental Side (1962).

Gerry Goffin and Jack Keller wrote a doo-wop version for Tony Orlando which took considerable liberties with the original; the opening quatrain, for instance is “Beautiful Dreamer/Wake unto me/Can’t you see me, baby/I’m on my bended knee.”

Orlando released this version as a single in 1962 and it quickly became a regular part of the Beatles‘ set list, from 1962 through the Beatles Winter 1963 Helen Shapiro Tour in early 1963. A recording of a 1963 Beatles performance of the song on the BBC was released in 2013 on their album On Air – Live at the BBC Volume 2.

Rory Storm and The Hurricanes also featured the song in their live performances.

This version has been recorded by Billy J. Kramer with The Dakotas.

Bobby Darin recorded a bluesy version of the song with all-new lyrics, but the song was unreleased until 1999 (on the album Bobby Darin: The Unreleased Capitol Sides). No attribution is given for the new lyrics; one possibility is that Darin might have written these himself. These lyrics tell about a lonely woman who dreams of a love of her own, and a lonely man who dreams of love too. The reference to a queen is retained in Darin’s version, asking if the woman is a “queen without a throne”.

• Sheryl Crow – “Beautiful Dreamer”

• 101 Strings – Beautiful Dreamer

• The Irish Tenors – Beautiful Dreamer

• Louis Armstrong “Beautiful Dreamer” on The Ed Sullivan Show

• Mary Beth Nelson | Foster: Beautiful Dreamer

• The Mantovani Orchestra – Beautiful Dreamer 

• Bill Shepherd & His Border Brass – Beautiful Dreamer

Film

The song appeared in An American Tail in the scene of the cats underground hideout being played on the piano.

The song was central to the plot of the film Mighty Joe Young, as it is used throughout the film to calm the title character, a large gorilla.

In the 1952 biopic of Stephen Foster entitled I Dream of Jeanie, there is a scene where Stephen Foster, played by Bill Shirley, sings this song as a serenade to one of his two love interests in the film.

In the climax of the cult pageant film Drop Dead Gorgeous, a rendition of the song by Mandy Barnett can be heard over the chaos of beauty queens destroying a building.

In The Little Rascals Save The Day, Alfalfa sings the song on the last day of school.

The song is used in the 1994 movie “Cabin Boy” starring Chris Elliott and directed by Adam Resnick.

The song is used in the 2018 movie “Winchester” with Helen Mirren.

The song is used as a theme song in the 2020 Netflix movie Lost Girls.

The song is pivotal to E. B. White‘s 1970 novel The Trumpet of the Swan. Louis the trumpeter swan learns the tune during his long journey to find his voice via a stolen trumpet and a chalk slate. In a climactic scene, he belts out its poetry on his trumpet at dawn, declaring his love in the Philadelphia Zoo to the beautiful swan Serena, the object of his long unrequited love. White also includes the public domain sheet music in the novel, perhaps to encourage similarly dramatic loving gestures.

Television

• the song was sung by Hale Appleman as Eliot Waugh in Season 4, Episode 10 of The Magicians.
• The song was sung by Rodger Bumpass as Squidward Tentacles over the credits of the SpongeBob SquarePants episode Truth or Square.
• the song was in an episode of Gunsmoke in which Kitty meets her father, approximately 1957. Episode was called “Daddy-O” season 2 episode 36.
• It was played by a female pianist in a saloon at Little Joe’s request in the 1966 “Credit for a Kill” episode of “Bonanza.”
• Weasel from The Animals of Farthing Wood (TV series) sings the first part of this song to wake up Adder.
• The song was played on the harmonica and the piano many times by Jon Walmsley as Jason Walton on the 1970s television show The Waltons.
• Toby Noe (Ray Bolger) played and sang the song in the Little House on the Prairie episode Dance with me from season 5 episode 17 in order to court a woman
• Colonel Paul Foster (Michael Billington) sings the song in the closing moments of the UFO episode, ‘Ordeal’ after recovering from a hallucination caused by passing out in the sauna whilst hungover at SHADO’s Research Centre/health farm.
• The song was performed by Drake Bell and Alec Medlock during the credits of the Drake and Josh episode Eric Punches Drake.
• In “The Talent Show” from the 2003 The Berenstain Bears, Brother Bear discovers Too-Tall Bear singing this song and recruits him as his “showstopper” for the school talent show.
• In an episode of Rugrats, Didi sings this song to Dil as a lullaby.
• In an episode of Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, the Library Monster sings this song as Beautiful Screamer.
• In an episode of “The Care Bears” Grams tells a story of a broadway star who gives a young washer woman the confidence to go on-stage and perform in a show.

This article is about the 1949 film.

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Mighty Joe Young (also known as Mr. Joseph Young of Africa and The Great Joe Young) is a 1949 American black and white fantasy film distributed by RKO Radio Pictures and produced by the same creative team responsible for King Kong (1933). Produced by Merian C. Cooper, who wrote the story, and Ruth Rose, who wrote the screenplay, the film was directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack and stars Robert Armstrong (who appears in both films), Terry Moore, and Ben Johnson in his first credited screen role. Animation effects were handled by Ray Harryhausen, Pete Peterson and Marcel Delgado.

Mighty Joe Young tells the story of a young woman, Jill Young, living on her father’s ranch in Africa, who has raised the title character, a large gorilla, from an infant and years later brings him to Hollywood seeking her fortune in order to save the family homestead.

Plot

In 1937 Tanganyika territory, Africa, eight-year-old Jill Young is living with her father on his ranch. While in her yard, two Africans come by with an orphaned baby gorilla; Jill so wants a pet that she trades her toys and money for him, vowing to always care for the gorilla.

Twelve years later, Max O’Hara and sidekick Gregg are on a trip to Africa looking for animals to headline in O’Hara’s new Hollywood nightclub. The two men have captured several lions and are about to leave when gorilla Joe Young appears, now 12 feet (3.7 m) tall and weighing 2,000 pounds (910 kg). When a caged lion bites Joe’s fingers, he goes on a rampage. Visualizing Joe as their big nightclub attraction, Max and Gregg try to rope him, but he throws both men from their horses and breaks free of their ropes. A grown Jill Young arrives, calming Joe down. She is furious with both men and storms off with Joe.

Both later meet with Jill, and Gregg becomes hopelessly smitten with her. Having now calmed down, Jill hears out Max’s nightclub proposal, as Gregg also tries to dissuade her. Max tells her that she and Joe will be a huge Hollywood hit and will be rich within weeks. Needing the proffered income, she agrees to take Joe to Hollywood.

On the crowded opening night, on stage Joe lifts a large platform above his head, holding Jill playing Beautiful Dreamer on a grand piano. Following that, Joe has a tug of war with “the 10 strongest men in the world”, which he easily wins. Famous Italian heavyweight boxer Primo Carnera tries to box with him, but Joe playfully tosses him into the audience; laughter follows.

Joe’s popularity grows, and by the 10th week he is Hollywood’s biggest nightclub attraction. Joe and Jill, however, are beginning to miss Africa; Jill tells Max and Gregg that she is having second thoughts. Gregg tries to convince Max to let them go, but thinking only about more profit, he is able to talk her into staying.

By the 17th week, Joe is miserable; he has grown tired of performing and is homesick. To make matters worse, his next act is a humiliating performance playing an organ grinder with Jill, acting as a little girl, turning the handle. When a thrown bottle strikes Joe, his rage surfaces, roaring at the crowd, while Jill shouts for the audience to stop. Later, during dinner, Gregg and Jill express their feelings for one another, with Gregg agreeing to return with her to Africa.

In his cage, an unhappy Joe tries to ignore three drunks who have sneaked backstage; they offer Joe an open whiskey bottle, and he becomes intoxicated after two more open bottles are consumed. Taunting him, the drunks burn Joe’s fingers with a cigarette lighter. Roaring with pain and rage, he breaks out, smashing through a nearby wall and wrecking the nightclub’s interior. He also smashes the glass of the lion habitat, allowing the lions to escape into the crowded nightclub, where Joe beats down several of them. Jill and Gregg return and find the nightclub in chaos. Jill manages to get Joe back to his cage, while arriving police shoot the remaining lions.

A court decree orders Joe be shot, and Jill’s pleas to save his life are denied. Gregg, O’Hara, and Jill devise a plan to get Joe out of California using a moving van, then a cargo ship. When Joe’s executioners arrive, they find his cage empty and themselves locked inside the nightclub. As the van is leaving, Joe is spotted by an itinerant worker, who is later questioned by police. On the way to the ship, police spot the moving van and give chase, but Joe has been cleverly transferred to a covered truck; the moving van, driven by Max, is just a decoy. The police eventually stop the van and arrest Max.

Driven by Gregg and carrying Joe and Jill, the truck gets stuck in heavy mud. With Jill’s encouragement, Joe pushes the truck free, and the police then get stuck in the same mud as the truck drives away while Joe taunts the police. Before reaching port, they witness a tall orphanage engulfed in flames.

Jill and Gregg help the caretakers save the children. They escort most of the children, but the flames spread quickly, and a last group, along with Jill and Gregg, are trapped on the top story. At Jill’s urging, Joe braves the raging fire by climbing an adjacent tall tree, carrying Jill to safety, while Gregg lowers each child by rope to the ground. One child is left behind, so Joe climbs up again, grabbing the frightened and crying little girl, then he and Gregg climb down. A wall of the burning orphanage collapses as they near the ground, nearly killing Joe as he shields the little girl from the falling wall. Max assures Jill that, because of Joe’s heroism, his life will now be spared.

Much later, Max receives home movies from his friends. Jill and Gregg are now married and living on their ranch with Joe, who has made it safely back to Africa. Joe waves “goodbye,” along with Jill and Gregg, to Max.

Cast

• Terry Moore as Jill Young
• Ben Johnson as Gregg
• Robert Armstrong as Max O’Hara
• Frank McHugh as Windy
• Douglas Fowley as Jones
• Denis Green as Crawford
• Paul Guilfoyle as Smith
• Nestor Paiva as Brown
• Regis Toomey as John Young
• Lora Lee Michel as Jill Young, as a girl
• James Flavin as Schultz
• Primo Carnera appears as himself
• Phil Olafsson as The Swedish Angel

Uncredited performances with dialogue:

• Irene Ryan as Southern belle at the bar
• William Schallert as gas station attendant
• Ellen Corby as nurse at the burning orphanage

Production

Willis O’Brien, who created the animation for King Kong, was the supervisor of the film’s stop-motion animation special effects. Ray Harryhausen was hired in 1947 on his first film assignment as an assistant animator to O’Brien. O’Brien, however, ended up concentrating on solving the various technical problems of the production, delegating most of the actual animation to Harryhausen; Pete Peterson and Marcel Delgado also animated a few sequences in the film.

The models (constructed by Kong’s builder Marcel Delgado) and animation are more sophisticated than in King Kong, containing more subtle gestures and even some comedic elements, such as a chase scene where Joe is riding in the back of a speeding truck and spits at his pursuers. Despite the increased technical sophistication, this film, like King Kong, features some serious scale issues, with Joe noticeably changing size between many shots (the title character is not supposed to be as large as Kong, perhaps 10–12 feet tall). Harryhausen attributed these lapses to producer Cooper, who insisted Joe appear larger in some scenes for dramatic effect.

Buoyed by the enormous success of King Kong in 1933 and its profitable theatrical reissues in 1938, 1942, and 1946, RKO had great hopes for Mighty Joe Young. Upon its release in 1949, the film was honored with an Academy Award for Special Effects (a category that did not exist in 1933 for King Kong). The film was unsuccessful at the box office and recorded a loss of $675,000. As a result, plans to produce a sequel (tentatively titled Joe Meets Tarzan) were quickly dropped.

The film has become a stop-motion animation classic. Special effects artists consider it highly influential, with the elaborate orphanage rescue sequence lauded as one of the great stop-motion sequences in film history. It was remade in 1998 with Charlize Theron playing Jill, Bill Paxton as Greg, and creature suit performer John Alexander as the title character. Joe was created through a mixture of gorilla suits and full-sized animatronics created by Rick Baker and digital effects by DreamQuest Images and Industrial Light & Magic.

Reception

Film critic Thomas M. Pryor in his review for The New York Times said that Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, as producer and director, “… are endeavoring to make all the world love, or at the very least feel a deep sympathy for, their monstrous, mechanical gorilla”. The review in Variety had a similar opinion: “Mighty Joe Young is fun to laugh at and with, loaded with incredible corn, plenty of humor, and a robot gorilla who becomes a genuine hero. The technical skill of the large staff of experts (led by Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen) gives the robot life”.

Awards

Mighty Joe Young won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects; the only other nominee that year was the film Tulsa. At the time, the rules of the Academy dictated that the producer of the winning film receive the Oscar. However, in recognition of his work on this picture and on King Kong, producer Merian C. Cooper presented the award to Willis O’Brien.

Mighty Joe Young exhibition

A rare album featuring original artwork and documentary photographs of the production was first publicly displayed in the exhibition Recapturing Mighty Joe Young: The Movie! The Memory!! The Make-believe!!! (School of Art, Aberystwyth University, UK, 20 Nov. 2017 – 2 Feb. 2018). The album commemorates the collaborative efforts that earned Mighty Joe Young an Academy Award for Special Effects. Showing off the tools and tricks of the trade, it contains behind-the-scenes photographs as well as production stills, drawings, and watercolor paintings by Willis “Obie” O’Brien, the film’s “Technical Creator”. The album also records the work of Obie’s apprentice, Ray Harryhausen, whose name became synonymous with pre-CGI fantasy film and stop-motion animation. The album was bequeathed to Aberystwyth University by the film historian Raymond Durgnat (1932–2002).

Also featured in the exhibition was a board, signed in January 1948, by forty-five members of the cast and crew. However, as curator and art historian Harry Heuser points out, “[n]ot all of the names listed here appear in the credits on screen. Some have never been associated with the film”. The board, illustrated by Disney cartoonist Scotty Whitaker, is a “unique record of a production underway”.

The exhibition opened in November 2017 with a presentation from The Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation‘s collections manager Connor Heaney. He presented a history of the film’s production and surviving models and artworks held in the Foundation’s archive, before introducing a screening of the movie.

Watch the movie

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