More I Cannot Wish You
"More I Cannot Wish You" is a song written and composed by Frank Loesser and first performed by Pat Rooney, Sr. in 1950. The song was featured in the musical "Guys and Dolls". The sentimental lyrics relate the feelings of the oldest character in the play, missionary Arvide Abernathy, who sings it tenderly to his granddaughter, Sarah Brown. Development. Loesser originally wrote the song for the 1949 movie "Roseanna McCoy". In a scene in which the title character sat next to her elder brother in a wagon seat, her brother was to sing  the song to her, "wishing her good fortune in the heart." When the song was cut from the movie, because producer Samuel Goldwyn "neither liked nor understood the song," Loesser added the song to "Guys and Dolls". To devise some of the singular lyrics, Loesser derived "with a sheep's eye" from "making sheep's eyes at" to describe "the imagined lover's almost pitiable adoration of the girl." For "lickerish tooth," Loesser consulted a thesaurus to find synonyms for "covetous" and found "lecherous," which was "appalling in sound to the modern ear," after which he consulted "Oxford English Dictionary  and saw two archaic spellings""licorice" and "lickerish"and "[i]n the exemplary material ... found 'lickerish tooth.'" Reception. Reviewing the original Broadway production of "Guys and Dolls", Wolcott Gibbs wrote in The New Yorker that "More I Cannot Wish You" is "one of the pleasantest things in the show." The New York Daily News review said that "More I Cannot Wish You" "is worthy of Rooney's old, sure charm." In his 1972 study of American popular songs, Alec Wilder described "More I Cannot Wish You" as "a very special song, shining with tenderness, as natural as if it simply  happened," and called its lyrics "most distinguished and truly poetic."