decade
1940s [91]
1950s [105]
1960s [203]
1970s [253]
1980s [230]
1990s [141]
2000s [129]
2010s [1]

check your birthday!
(e.g. 1965-10-31)

administrator login


(login/password)

                 advanced search
"I'll Be Seeing You"
#1 weeks: 1
weeks: 1944-07-01
artist: Bing Crosby

"I'll Be Seeing You" is a popular song from the Broadway musical Right This Way, which closed after fifteen performances. Its music was written by Sammy Fain, the lyrics by Irving Kahal. The song was published in 1938.

The musical theme has emotional power, and was much loved during World War II. The lyrics begin, in Ambrose's recorded version, with a preamble:,

Cathedral bells were calling and our hearts sang on;, Was it the spell of Paris or the April dawn?, Who knows if we shall meet again,, But when the morning chimes ring sweet again,, I'll be seeing you in all the old familiar places...

As the song develops, the words take a jaunty commonplace of casual farewell and transform it by degrees, to climax with

"...and when the night is new,, I'll be looking at the moon,, But I'll be seeing you."

The resemblance between the main tune's first four lines and a passage within the theme of the last movement of Gustav Mahler's Third Symphony (1896) was pointed out by Deryck Cooke in 1970

Featured throughout the 1944 movie also titled I'll be Seeing You, starring Ginger Rogers and Joseph Cotten, the recording by Bing Crosby became a hit that year, being number one for the week of July 8. Later, the song became notably associated with Liberace, as the theme to his television show of the 1950s. It has also been featured in the 1989 Woody Allen film Crimes and Misdemeanors; in the end credits of the 1990 film ; in the 1992 movie Shining Through; in a few episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's final season; and in the 2004 film The Notebookas the song for Noah and Allie. It was also featured in the closing credits for the final episode of Beavis and Butthead. During the 2009 Academy Awards presentation, Queen Latifah sang the song during the 'In Memoriam' tribute to members of the motion picture industry who had died during the previous year, which was controversial because the In Memoriam tribute was previously traditionally unaccompanied.

The song has been covered by well known artists.