Description
They Didn’t Believe Me is a love song with music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Herbert Reynolds from the 1914 musical The Girl from Utah. The song’s use of everyday language was a quite a departure from the rather staid European styles and flowery vocabulary that audiences of the time were accustomed to:
And when I told them how beautiful you are,
They didn’t believe me. They didn’t believe me.
Your lips, your eyes, your cheeks, your hair
Are in a class beyond compare,
You’re the loveliest girl that one could see!
And when I tell them, and I cert’nly am goin’ to tell them,
That I’m the man whose wife one day you’ll be.
They’ll never believe me. They’ll never believe me.
That from this great big world you’ve chosen me!
They Didn’t Believe Me was one of many songs adopted and parodied by soldiers fighting in World War I, in this case as an ironic take on the allegedly ‘easy’ life in the trenches. In this form it accompanies the extremely moving end sequence of Richard Attenborough’s 1969 film Oh! What a Lovely War – where the camera slowly pans out from a hillside revealing countless rows of soldiers’ graves.
The song became Kern’s first major song success and has been recorded countless times. Here the chorus to the song has been arranged for wind quintet.
