Beautiful Dreamer

Wm. A. Pond and Company published Beautiful Dreamer in New York in March 1864, two months after Stephen Foster died in the charity ward of Bellevue Hospital. The cover called it the last song he ever wrote, composed a few days before his death. Carol Kimball points out in her book Song that the first edition carries an 1862 copyright date, and at least twenty songs have been sold as Foster's last. Nobody knows which one really was.

Foster called it a serenade and wrote it in 9/8, a gently rolling three to the bar, with a piano part of broken chords that barely changes. The words ask a sleeper to wake to the singer, and some readers hear a dreamer who will not wake at all. Foster's songs are full of young women who are gone, Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair among them.

It outlived its century easily. Bing Crosby recorded it in 1940, it calms the gorilla in the film Mighty Joe Young in 1949, Roy Orbison sang it on In Dreams, and a doo-wop rewrite for Tony Orlando was in the Beatles' stage set in 1962 and 1963. E. B. White made it the song Louis plays on his trumpet in The Trumpet of the Swan and printed the music in the book.

On a mandolin in D the whole verse sits in first position, from the C sharp at the fourth fret of the G course up to the open E course. The eighths go by in threes, and the pick should lean on the first of each three and let the other two float. Give the long notes their full length, tremolo them if the room is quiet, and listen for the E major under the third line: it is the one chord in the song from outside the key, and the plain d the melody plays over it is what makes it ache.