SONG OF THE DAY

“Beau­ti­ful Dreamer” by Marty Rob­bins (The Essen­tial Marty Rob­bins: 1951 to 1982, Legacy/ Colum­bia Records, 1991). Writ­ten by Stephen Foster.

INTERESTING FACTS (a la wikipedia)

- “Beau­ti­ful Dreamer” is a pop­u­lar Amer­i­can song, the last known song writ­ten by Stephen Fos­ter. It was pub­lished posthu­mously in 1864, the year Fos­ter died.

- Notable cov­ers include the following:

• Bing Crosby with John Scott Trot­ter & his Orches­tra, Decca 3118 (matrix DLA 1967-B)
• Roy Orbi­son on his album In Dreams (Mon­u­ment Records, 1963)

- An instru­men­tal ver­sion is woven into the score for Gone with the Wind, show­ing up, for exam­ple, dur­ing the inter­mis­sion.
- The song is also used by film com­poser Danny Elf­man in the 1989 score for the motion pic­ture Bat­man (directed by Tim Bur­ton). In the con­text of the film, it func­tions as the Joker’s twisted “love song” for the female lead, Vicki Vale.
- The song also recurs through­out the 1947 com­e­dy The Secret Life of Wal­ter Mitty, star­ring Danny Kaye and Vir­ginia Mayo.
- An instru­men­tal ver­sion is played on the vio­lin by the char­ac­ter Papa Mouseke­witz in the 1986 ani­mated film An Amer­i­can Tail.
- The song appears in the film The Naked Spur when­ever there is a roman­tic scene between Jimmy Stew­art and Janet Leigh.
- The song is used in two episodes of Dr. Quinn, Med­i­cine Woman. The first episode enti­tled “The Pris­oner” where Loren Bray (Orson Bean) per­formed the first verse of the song on his har­mon­ica. Later in the same episode, a group of towns­folk {includ­ing Bray} played the entire song at Ms. Olive’s(Gail Strick­land) Hurdy-Gurdy. Later in the series the song was per­formed by Bar­bara Man­drell in the episode “All That Glit­ters”.
- In the HBO series Dead­wood, the song can be heard on the piano in the back­ground dur­ing a bar scene in episode 9 of sea­son 1.
- An upbeat instru­men­tal ver­sion of the song appears in the movie Office Space in the scene where Peter is sleep­ing through his boss call­ing his answer­ing machine to tell Peter to come into work.

- Marty Rob­bins, was an Amer­i­can singer, song­writer, and multi-instrumentalist. One of the most pop­u­lar and suc­cess­ful coun­try and West­ern singers of his era, for most of his nearly four-decade career, Rob­bins was rarely far from the coun­try music charts, and sev­eral of his songs also became pop hits.

- Rob­bins became known for his appear­ances at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee.

–In addi­tion to his record­ings and per­for­mances, Rob­bins was an avid race car dri­ver, com­pet­ing in 35 career NASCAR races with six top 10 fin­ishes, includ­ing the 1973 Day­tona 500.

- Rob­bins later por­trayed a musi­cian in the 1982 Clint East­wood film Honky­tonk Man. Rob­bins died a few weeks before the film’s release in Decem­ber 1982 of com­pli­ca­tions fol­low­ing car­diac surgery.

- Robbins’s 1957 record­ing of “A White Sport Coat and a Pink Car­na­tion” sold over one mil­lion copies, and was awarded a gold disc.

- His musi­cal accom­plish­ments include the Grammy Award for his 1959 hit and sig­na­ture song “El Paso,” taken from his album Gun­fighter Bal­lads and Trail Songs. “El Paso” was the first song to hit #1 on the pop chart in the 1960s.

- It was fol­lowed up, suc­cess­fully, by “Don’t Worry”, which reached #3 on the pop chart in 1961, becom­ing his third, and last, Top 10 hit.

- He won the Grammy Award for the Best Coun­try & West­ern Record­ing 1961, for his follow-up album More Gun­fighter Bal­lads and Trail Songs, and was awarded the Grammy Award for Best Coun­try Song in 1970, for “My Woman, My Woman, My Wife”.

- Rob­bins was named Artist of the Decade (1960–69) by the Acad­emy of Coun­try Music, was elected to the Coun­try Music Hall of Fame in 1982, and was given a Grammy Hall of Fame Award in 1998 for his song “El Paso”.

- Rob­bins was inducted into the Nashville Song­writ­ers Hall of Fame in 1975. For his con­tri­bu­tion to the record­ing indus­try, Rob­bins has a star on the Hol­ly­wood Walk of Fame at 6666 Hol­ly­wood Blvd.

- Rob­bins has been hon­ored by many bands, includ­ing the Grate­ful Dead who cov­ered “El Paso”. The Who’s 2006 album End­less Wire includes the song “God Speaks Of Marty Rob­bins”. The song’s com­poser, Pete Town­shend, explained that the song is about God decid­ing to cre­ate the uni­verse just so he can hear some music, “and most of all, one of his best cre­ations, Marty Robbins.”

- Johnny Cash recorded a ver­sion of “Big Iron” as part of his Amer­i­can Record­ings series, which is included in the Cash Unearthed box set.

- Both Frankie Laine and Elvis Pres­ley, among oth­ers, recorded ver­sions of Robbins’s song “You Gave Me a Moun­tain”, with Laine’s record­ing reach­ing the pop and adult con­tem­po­rary charts in 1969.

VIDEO OF THE DAY