A Kiss to Build a Dream On

This one waited sixteen years to be published, and then Louis Armstrong made it his. The A Kiss to Build a Dream On chords and the backing track here can be taken at any tempo and moved to any key.

Who wrote "A Kiss to Build a Dream On"

Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby wrote the melody in 1935, under the title "Moonlight on the Meadow", for the Marx Brothers picture A Night at the Opera. It was cut from the film and sat unused. Oscar Hammerstein II later wrote a new lyric to it, and the song was published in 1951 for The Strip, where it runs through the picture in several hands. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song and lost to "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening". Louis Armstrong recorded it in 1951, and his record is what the song has meant ever since — still strong enough forty years on to carry a scene in Sleepless in Seattle. It remains under copyright.

Recordings that made it a standard

• Louis Armstrong, single (1951) — the version. He sings a chorus, plays one, and the trumpet says the same thing the voice did, only cleaner. Nobody has found a reason to do it differently since.
• Hugo Winterhalter and his Orchestra with Johnny Parker, single (1952) — the orchestral hit that followed Armstrong into the American top twenty, and the reason the song spread beyond jazz players.
• Tony Bennett and k.d. lang, A Wonderful World (2002) — from their Armstrong tribute, sung as a duet with the two voices an octave apart. The most careful modern reading of it.
• Rod Stewart, Stardust: The Great American Songbook 3 (2004) — worth knowing because it put the tune in front of an audience that had never heard of Kalmar or Ruby.