Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis is a popular song published in 1904 on the occurrence of the St. Louis World’s Fair which celebrated the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. The music was written by Kerry Mills (1869–1948) with words set by Andrew B. Sterling.
The song and the fair were focal points of the highly successful Judy Garland movie Meet Me in St. Louis of 1944, which made this tune immortal. Incidentally, the film was also MGM's most successful musical of the 1940s. It was subsequently adapted for a 1989 Broadway musical of the same name.
The film and musical were based on The Kensington Stories, a series of sentimental family stories by Sally Benson that appeared in The New Yorker in 1942 and later in novel form as Meet Me in St. Louis. The lyrics as sung are unrelated to these stories.
The song, which is generally styled in the form of a limerick, has many and varied verses, few of which are remembered today. The chorus varies in verses three through six, which are essentially jokes with the punch line in the chorus.
In the film, Garland even debuted the standards The Trolley Song, The Boy Next Door and Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas – all of which were new but none of them written by Mills and Sterling.
Performing with a singer? Complete lyrics are available here:
The sound clip is computer generated using sampled sounds (AI). Transcriptions and descriptions are not AI generated.
Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis is a popular song published in 1904 on the occurrence of the St. Louis World’s Fair which celebrated the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. The music was written by Kerry Mills (1869–1948) with words set by Andrew B. Sterling.
Performing with a singer? Complete lyrics are available here: 
