"Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" is a parlor song by Stephen Foster. It was published by Firth, Pond & Co. of New York in 1854. Foster wrote the song with his estranged wife Jane McDowell in mind. The lyrics allude to a permanent separation. "Jeanie" was a notorious beneficiary of the ASCAP boycott of 1941, a dispute caused by ASCAP increasing its licensing fees. During this period, radio broadcasters played only public domain music or songs licensed by ASCAP rival BMI. According to a 1941 article in Time magazine, "So often had BMI's Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair been played that she was widely reported to have turned grey."
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recorded the song on March 22, 1940, for Decca Records with John Scott Trotter and His Orchestra. Violinist Jascha Heifetz transcribed the song for the violin and it became a signature piece for him for years. The transcription has been performed by many subsequent violinists.
The opening line notably got used as the basis for the title of the TV series I Dream of Jeannie. In the 1956 Bugs Bunny short "Broomstick Bunny", a play on the title is used in the closing lines: "Hello, air-raid headquarters? Well, you're not gonna believe this, but I just saw a genie with light brown hair chasing a flying sorceress." Bugs would also, in other shorts, sing a variation: "I dream of Jeanie, she's a light brown hare." Episode 12 of the first season of the Phil Silvers Show, title "Singing Contest" involves his platoon very badly singing the same song throughout the show but a private in the platoon who has an excellent singing voice saves their chances to win and they all end up in Florida for the Army finals. A few lines of the song's first stanza are sung loudly, a cappella, in the Band of Brothers episode "Bastogne" by soldiers Joseph Liebgott, James Alley and an unnamed soldier in a foxhole, shortly before being shelled by Nazi artillery. In the John Cassavetes motion picture Faces, an important scene occurs which revolves around the singing of this song. The full title is used as the nickname for character Jeanie in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, most notably several times in the episode "The Cold Open". One of the Pink Pantheranimated cartoons is entitled Genie with the Light Pink Fur; it is about a magic lamp that turns the Pink Panther into a genie. A song segment from The Alvin Show devoted to this song has Dave Seville courting a young woman named, interestingly enough, Jeanie, singing the song to her in a boat while she admires it; meanwhile, Dave's charges the Chipmunks, who, disgusted with all this, counter with a very silly and inappropriate spoof, "I dream of Jeanie with the green purple hair/She looks so funny, people stop and stare.." which insults Jeanie and offends Dave to the point of forcing the Chipmunks to sing the song with its proper, correct lyrics until they know them by heart as punishment. In an animated alphabet segment from Sesame Street featuring a boy with a big egg on his knee and a girl jumping rope. They comment on the egg while reciting bits of the alphabet in rhyme; after they reach the end with Z, the egg bursts and hatches a tap dancing lizard who does a singing soft shoe version of the song. In the movie Beyond Tomorrow, the character Jimmy Houston sings the entire song during a Christmas dinner with a band accompaniment. The opening line of the song is heard on a parlor piano in the 1998 television movie, The Love Letter.
