Songs: Dolly’s My Sunflower

Everywhere you go, it’s Hello, Dolly! Everybody is doing it: modern jazz groups, Dixieland groups, dance bands. Paul Anka, Frank Sinatra, Peter Nero, Al Hirt, Benny Goodman, Andy Williams, Steve Lawrence, Andre Kostelanetz. “I guess there hasn’t been a big hit like this since Star Dust,” says Manhattan Disk Jockey William B. Williams.

Jerry Herman originally wrote it just as a production number to get Carol Channing onstage in the second act of his Broadway musical. Then Louis Armstrong’s recording hit the counters. Typically, Satchmo gave it a rasping rhythm and lowdown authority—qualities it never had in the original—and his single recording knocked the Beatles right off the top of the bestselling lists. Both Republicans and Democrats wanted to cash in on the song’s popularity, but Dolly Producer David Merrick, a loyal Democrat, gave the tune exclusively to Johnson for Hello, Lyndon! and threatened to sue Barry Goldwater if he dared use it.

Now Los Angeles Composer Mack David says Dolly is his and Herman is a pirate. Dolly, he charges, is really the Sunflower song, which he wrote in 1948, and his publisher is ready to sue Herman for copyright infringement. The beginning of the refrain, “Hello, Dolly, well, hello, Dolly, it’s so . . .” is identical, says the publisher, with “She’s a sunflower, she’s my sunflower.” Herman concedes this, but points out that after the first notes “the songs take off in different directions.” Whether she’s Herman’s Dolly or David’s Sunflower, she’s still glowing, crowing, going strong.