By a Waterfall
song performed by Guy Lombardo
"By a Waterfall" is a 1933 song with music by Sammy Fain and lyrics by Irving Kahal. It was featured in an extravagant choreographic arrangement in the film Footlight Parade by Busby Berkeley that features his trademark human waterfall, with vocal performances by Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler. It features a water ballet of chorus girls diving and swimming into the water in elaborate geometric and floral patterns.
The lyrics of the song use the phrase "I'm calling you - oo-oo-oo" in much the same way as the Indian Love Call from the operetta Rose-Marie.
Berkeley realized that screen choreography involved the placement and movement of the camera as well as the dancers. Instead of filming numbers from fixed angles, he set his cameras into motion on custom built booms and monorails and if necessary, cut through the studio roof to get the right shot.
Berkeley used a 40-by-80-foot (12 by 24 m) swimming pool that filled an entire soundstage. Its walls and floor were glass, and before shooting started 100 chorus girls took two weeks to practice their routines in it. The actual filming lasted six days and required 20,000 U.S. gallons (76,000 liters) of water a minute to be pumped across the set.
Recordings
The recordings by Guy Lombardo & His Royal Canadians (vocal by Carmen Lombardo), Leo Reisman & His Orchestra (vocal by Arthur Wright) and by Rudy Vallee are assessed by Joel Whitburn as the most popular in 1933.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “By a Waterfall” is song performed by Guy Lombardo. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Waterfall, song and performed, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “song performed by Guy Lombardo” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5003838. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1933.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “By a Waterfall” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.