"Oh, You Beautiful Doll" is a ragtime love song published in 1911 with words by Seymour Brown and music by Nat D. Ayer. The song was one of the first with a twelve-bar opening. The first was a decade earlier. The tune has been recorded hundreds of times by many artists from first publication until recent times.

Lyrics

Verse 1

Chorus

Second verse

Notable use in film

As well as being used in the 1949 film of the same name, the tune had been featured in several major movies — The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939), For Me and My Gal (1942), Broadway Rhythm (1944), Strangers on a Train (1951), The Eddie Cantor Story (1953), The FBI Story (1959), and The Taming of the Shrew (1969) as well as numerous Looney Tunes cartoons such as Hair-Raising Hare. The Kidsongs Kids and Billy and Ruby Biggle sang this song with a baby elephant named Belle in their 1995 video and DVD, Baby Animal Songs. The song also appears on the animated series Hey Arnold! where Grandpa Phil sings the song while taking a shower, as well as in the last Fred Astaire variety special, in which he and dance partner Barrie Chase danced to it. It appears in Somewhere in Time (1980), starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, during a scene where Reeve and Seymour dance briefly. The song was showcased in the climax of the movie...All The Marbles starring Peter Falk in 1981.

Other recordings