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Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?


"Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?", music and lyrics by C.W. Murphy and Will Letters (1908), is a British music hall song, originally titled "Kelly From the Isle of Man". The song concerns a Manx woman looking for her boyfriend. It was adapted for American audiences by William McKenna in 1909 for the American musical The Jolly Bachelors. Kelly is the commonest surname on the isle of Man.

In 1926, Max Fleischer produced an animated short in the DeForest Phonofilm sound-on-film process as part of his "Song Car-Tunes" series. In 1928, William Wyler directed a feature film starring Bessie Love with this title. In 1943, the song was performed in the film musical Hello, Frisco, Hello. An instrumental rendition can be heard throughout the 1949 film It Happens Every Spring. It functions like a theme song for the main character - a science professor who becomes a baseball star under the pseudonym 'King Kelly'. In 1978's Ziegfeld: The Man & His Women, Inga Swenson, as Nora Bayes, sings the song during the scene of the first Ziegfeld Follies in 1908.

A verse from an adaptation of the song was featured in the film Catch Me If You Can on a broadcast of the 1960s television program Sing Along With Mitch; in this adaptation, the lyrics were changed to describe Kelly as being from Ireland (e.g., "Kelly from the Em'rald Isle") in order to appeal to the large viewing/listening demographic of Americans of Irish descent. The original song was also referenced in a 1959 episode of television series Bachelor Father titled "Bentley, the Hero". The theme tune to Kelly Monteith's BBC TV series also used part of the song's music.


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