The Lonely Goatherd

"The Lonely Goatherd"
Song from The Sound of Music
Published	1959
Writer	Oscar Hammerstein II
Composer	Richard Rodgers
Chronology
"Sixteen Going on Seventeen" "The Lonely Goatherd" "How Can Love Survive"

"The Lonely Goatherd" is a show tune from the musical The Sound of Music that makes use of yodelling.

This song tells the whimsical story of a goatherd whose yodelling is heard from far off and by passers-by, until he falls in love with a girl who wears a pale-pink coat, with her mother joining in the yodelling.

This song has been sung at different points in the musical depending on the production. In the 1959 Broadway production, Maria (played by Mary Martin) sings the song in the children's bedroom to comfort them during a storm, while in the 1965 film Maria (played by Julie Andrews) and the children sing it as part of a marionette show they perform for their father. (A different song, "My Favorite Things," is performed in the bedroom for the film version.)

Julie Andrews performed this song with The Muppets as the opening number to her guest appearance on The Muppet Show.

Many subsequent stage productions have placed this song at different points in the musical. In the 1981 West End revival with Petula Clark, Maria and the children sing it at a fair, and in the 1998 Broadway revival with Rebecca Luker it is sung at the Salzburg Festival concert.

The lively number reappears later in both the original stage version and the film version as a deliberately-paced and very Austrian-sounding instrumental, the Ländler, a dance performed by the Captain and Maria. It then serves as the catalyst to a dramatic juncture in the film, as the young apprentice nun Maria realizes that she is in love with the Captain.

The famous marionette puppetry sequence in the film was produced and performed by the leading puppeteers of the day, Bil Baird and Cora Eisenberg.

The song is a well-known example of yodeling, which is a part of the traditional music of the Austrian Alps, where the musical is set. The lyrics are also well-known and widely quoted,^{[citation needed]} especially the opening line, "High on a hill was a lonely goatherd."

In 2006 Gwen Stefani sampled the song in Wind It Up (Gwen Stefani song) on her album, The Sweet Escape (2006).