When Leigh Harline and Ned Washington penned "When You Wish Upon a Star" for Disney's 1940 film Pinocchio, the song came like a bolt out of the blue. Like Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg's "Over the Rainbow" from The Wizard of Oz one year earlier, "When You Wish Upon a Star" comes on the heels of the Great Depression and just shy of America's sudden jolt into a second global conflict. Both tunes reach outward and upward with their memorable octave leaps. Both have aged into two of the most beloved and iconic songs of our times. And both are closely associated with their original interpreters (Judy Garland and Cliff Edwards, respectively) whose tragic falls from grace make a poetic crease in the clean bill of health America gives itself again and again.

But fate stepped in and "When You Wish Upon a Star" has since taken a peculiar and dynamic life of its own. The tune is everywhere. It is a corporate logo. It is part of a soundscape in America that harmonizes personal aspiration with the health of the marketplace. And that initial tear in Cliff Edwards's voice has now largely faded into the background. No longer a bolt, no more out of the blue, but here to stay. What is this song's secret?

This book pulls focus to the song--its origins and original context in Pinocchio, the way it works, the work it's been made to do in the world, and the lives of those who orbited it over the last eight decades--in order to better understand how our ears attune to the possible and what "When You Wish Upon a Star" can teach us.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

About the Author

Jake Johnson is Associate Dean of the Wanda L. Bass School of Music at Oklahoma City University. His writing and teaching explore the interweaving of music, literature, art, and media in American life. Jake is the author of Lying in the Middle: Musical Theater and Belief at the Heart of America (2021) and Unstaged Grief: Musicals and Mourning in Midcentury America (2025), editor of the volume The Possibility Machine: Music and Myth in Las Vegas (2023), and current Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society.

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