Composer Victor Young wrote this song as the title piece for the film My Foolish Heart for which he also wrote the score. Long-time collaborator Ned Washington wrote the lyrics, and the song was introduced by vocalist Martha Mears, dubbing for actress Susan Hayward. “My Foolish Heart” was nominated for a Best Song Oscar in 1950.

Composer/arranger/bandleader Gordon Jenkins’ Capitol recording hit third place in the charts, beating out the version by popular, jazz-influenced singer Billy Eckstine.

• Gordon Jenkins and His Orchestra (1950, Sandy Evans, vocal, #3)
• Billy Eckstine and His Orchestra (1950, vocal, #6)
• Mindy Carson (1950, vocal, #6)
• Margaret Whiting (1950, vocal, #17)
• Richard Hayes (1950, #21)
• Hugo Winterhalter and His Orchestra (1950, #29)

Victor Young is considered by many to be among the cadre of best film music writers of the 20th century. Although not a composer of sweeping, symphonic-type scores like Miklos Rosza, Dimitri Tiomkin or Bernard Hermann, Young had a marvelous knack for creating supreme melodies--not really surprising since his writing career began with popular songs. “He wrote music from the heart,” music editor and associate Bill Stinson said of Young. “He had so much melody within him. He may have been the best melody writer we ever had in Hollywood.” But even by the early 1930s he had a reputation as one of the music business’ top arrangers, too.

In Bruce Jenkins’ biography of his father, Goodbye: In Search of Gordon Jenkins, the author quotes an interview by Wink Martindale, where the senior Jenkins told of his first encounter with Victor Young while recording with Isham Jones’ band in Chicago. “He asked me if I would take a walk with him. We walked for three hours in Lincoln Park and he talked to me about music, some of the things I’d done wrong on the record date, and some of the things I’d done right... I learned more about practical writing that afternoon than I could ever learn in college... If I did nothing for the rest of my life but arrange Victor Young songs, I still couldn’t repay him.”

Young’s film writing, beginning with his arrival in Hollywood in 1935, took a front seat over all his other work, although he was a workaholic, conducting and arranging for his own orchestra, doing radio work, and backing a plethora of fine singers in the recording studios. Fellow composer Irving Gertz mentioned an encounter on a recording date. “The first time I met him was at Columbia and he was coming to the podium to conduct. He was a little guy who looked like a prizefighter with a cigar.”

When Young died at the relatively young age of 56 in 1956 (many close acquaintances said his obsessive work habits were the cause), vocalist/pianist Nat “King” Cole did a television tribute to the composer which included a sensitive version of “My Foolish Heart.”

Young was wise in choosing Ned Washington to write the lyrics for the song. The pair had successfully collaborated on several hits, beginning with “Can’t We Talk It Over” (1932), “Love Me” (1934), and “Stella by Starlight” (1946). Washington’s lyrics tell of a moonlit night, the right atmosphere for the beginning of a love affair. But he also suggests the uncertainty of such a situation with the words, “Is it love or fascination?”