Louis Armstrong A Kiss To Build A Dream On 1962 Live (1962)
Louis Armstrong’s sheet music available in our Library.
Louis Daniel Armstrong, active 1914-1971 (August 4, 1901 — July 6, 1971), nicknamed Satchmo or Pops, was an American jazz trumpeter and singer from New Orleans, Louisiana.
Coming to prominence in the 1920s as an “inventive” cornet and trumpet player, Armstrong was a foundational influence in jazz, shifting the music’s focus from collective improvisation to solo performance.
With his instantly recognizable deep and distinctive gravelly voice, Armstrong was also an influential singer, demonstrating great dexterity as an improviser, bending the lyrics and melody of a song for expressive purposes. He was also greatly skilled at scat singing, vocalizing using sounds and syllables instead of actual lyrics.
Renowned for his charismatic stage presence and voice almost as much as for his trumpet-playing, Armstrong’s influence extends well beyond jazz music, and by the end of his career in the 1960s, he was widely regarded as a profound influence on popular music in general.
Armstrong was one of the first truly popular African-American entertainers to “cross-over,” whose skin-color was secondary to his amazing talent in an America that was severely racially divided. It allowed him socially-acceptable access to the upper echelons of American society that were highly restricted for a person of color. While he rarely publicly politicized his race, often to the dismay of fellow African-Americans, he was privately a huge supporter of the Civil Rights movement in America.
A Kiss to Build a Dream On
“A Kiss to Build a Dream On” is a song composed by Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby and Oscar Hammerstein II. In 1935, Kalmar and Ruby wrote a song called “Moonlight on the Meadow” for the Marx Brothers film A Night at the Opera (1935) but the song was not used. Hammerstein later adapted the lyrics to be “A Kiss to Build a Dream On” and it was recorded by Louis Armstrong in 1951.
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It was also performed by Armstrong as well as by Mickey Rooney with William Demarest, by Sally Forrest, and by Kay Brown (virtually the entire cast performed part or all of the song) in the 1951 film “The Strip,” and was a sort of recurring theme in the film. The song was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1951 but lost out to “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening”.
Other recordings
Another popular recording was made by one of “The Strip” film’s guest-stars, Monica Lewis, and in early 1952, the version by Hugo Winterhalter and his Orchestra, with vocalist Johnny Parker, made it to the Pop 20 chart in the United States.
Bing Crosby recorded it for his radio show in 1951 and it was later included in the deluxe, 22-track version of the album Songs I Wish I Had Sung the First Time Around.
Sung by Richard Chamberlain, the song gained considerable exposure due to its being on the ‘B’ side of his 1962 hit: “Theme from Dr. Kildare (Three Stars Will Shine Tonight)“.
k.d. lang‘s version was included in the album A Wonderful World (2002)
Rod Stewart covered the song in his 2004 album, Stardust: the Great American Songbook 3.
Deana Martin recorded A Kiss to Build a Dream On in 2009. The song was released on her album, Volare, in 2009 by Big Fish Records.
Lyrics
Give me a kiss to build a dream on,
And my imagination will thrive upon that kiss.
Sweetheart, I ask no more than this:
A kiss to build a dream on.Give me a kiss before you leave me,
And my imagination will feed my hungry heart.
Leave me one thing before we part,
A kiss to build a dream on.When I’m alone with my fancies, I’ll be with you,
Weaving romances, making believe they’re true.Give me your lips for just a moment,
And my imagination will make that moment live.
Give me what you alone can give,
A kiss to build a dream on!