Words by Raymond B. Egan & Gus Kahn, music by Richard Whiting, 1921. A Jazz Age classic, a mainstay in vaudeville, film musicals, even literature of the time. Written shortly after the end of the traumatic, watershed WWI, this song jauntily announced in both style and sentiment the new heedlessness of the Age, an understandable reaction to the horrors of the War.
Said to be the second most sung song in the English language after "Happy Birthday." The melody's origins are from early 18th century France, the varying English words having evolved throughout the 19th century in Britain ("...and so say all of us...") and America ("...which nobody can deny..."). Genuinely old and used enough to be considered a "folk song."
Originally credited in 1912 to New Orleans jazz musician Tony Jackson, then "expanded upon" in 1916 by Tin Pan Alley pros Egbert Van Alstyne and Gus Kahn, the year after their first hit "Memories."
Classic Irish lullaby, written in 1914 by James Royce Shannon, popularized by Bing Crosby in "Going My Way," 1944.