Why ‘What a Wonderful World’ Took 20 Years to Become a Hit

“I see trees of green / red roses too / I see them bloom / for me and you.” With its sentimental lyrics, wistful string arrangement and distinctive vocals, Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” stands as one of the timeless pop ballads of 20th-century music. 

“The sweetness in the great man’s heart shines through,” writes Steve Sullivan in the Encyclopedia of Great Song Recordings, adding that Armstrong’s climactic “oh, yeah”  evokes “images of a mile-wide smile like no other.”

Yet the widely beloved anthem for peace, hope and simple pleasures did not debut as a cultural touchstone. Despite speaking to a precise moment in U.S. history—amid the social turbulence of the late 1960s—and being sung by an elder statesman of American music, the song was nearly forgotten. “I don't think American audiences found it corny,” says Ricky Riccardi, author of What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong's Later Years. “I just think they didn't find it—period.”

It would take an ironic movie soundtrack placement 20 years later for the song to re-enter public consciousness—and begin its ascent into the pantheon of popular music. Armstrong's recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999. It was given a Towering Song Award by the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2015. To date, it has sold more than 5 million copies.

Born in 1901 and raised in poverty in New Orleans, Louis Armstrong learned music early—the hard way. After a childhood stint in a reform school brass band, he quickly evolved into one of jazz’s great innovators, transforming the music by putting improvisation at its center and establishing the lead instrument as the primary expressive voice.

By the 1920s, Armstrong was a national figure, equally at home performing for white audiences in Midtown Manhattan and Black audiences in Harlem. His warm, gravelly voice made him a star beyond jazz circles, a crossover appeal underscored decades later when his jubilant 1964 recording of “Hello, Dolly!” knocked the Beatles from the top of the charts.

In the mid-1960s, songwriter George David Weiss was asked by his publisher to pen a song for Armstrong. Weiss and his co-writer, Bob Thiele, decided to craft a tune that would tap into Armstrong’s unique appeal to diverse audiences. Writing in the midst of civil unrest across the country, they intended the song to serve as an antidote to “the deepening national traumas of the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, racial strife and turmoil everywhere,” wrote Thiele in What a Wonderful World: A Lifetime of Recordings. “We wanted this immortal musician and performer to say, as only he could, the world really is great: full of the love and sharing people make possible for themselves and each other every day.” It would be a radical departure from “Hello, Dolly!”

Weiss and Thiele cut a demo of “What a Wonderful World” and auditioned it for Armstrong. In Thiele’s memory, Armstrong announced—before he’d even heard the song all the way through—“Pops, I dig it. Let’s do it!” According to Riccardi, Armstrong’s clarinetist Joe Muranyi recalled that Armstrong disliked the song at first, remarking, “What is this sh*t?”

Whatever his initial reaction, Armstrong clearly warmed to the material. “Armstrong could sing ‘What a Wonderful World’ and make listeners believe it,” says Riccardi. “He was at a stage in his career [age 66] where he had the wisdom to deliver [it] with sincerity. In the hands of any other artist, it could have been too saccharine. With Louis, it felt like autobiography.”

The recording session for the song took place on August 16, 1967, in New York City. Larry Newton, the president of ABC Records, turned up at the session, wanting a photo with Armstrong. A temperamental personality, Newton hated the song so much that he tried to fire Thiele and the musicians and cancel the session—at one point having to be forcibly prevented from bursting into the studio. 

According to Thiele, Newton then refused to promote the record, apparently securing no radio airplay for it. As a result, it made only a minor impression on the U.S. charts. The song fared much better overseas—reaching No. 1 in England, Belgium and South Africa, and No. 2 in the Netherlands. 

In Armstrong’s later years, the lyrics of the song seemed to encapsulate the quiet simplicity of his life in the working-class Corona, Queens neighborhood of New York City, where he lived in an unpretentious two-bedroom house from 1943 until his death. “I saw three generations come up on that block," he said in one of the many interviews he did from his den there. "That’s why I can say, ‘I hear babies cry / I watch them grow / they’ll learn much more / than I’ll never know.’”

Armstrong died in 1971. But the world hadn’t heard the last of “What a Wonderful World.”

In 1987, film director Barry Levinson employed “What a Wonderful World” to memorable effect in the film Good Morning, Vietnam. One of the film’s producers, a Vietnam veteran, recalled that the song had been a fixture on Armed Forces Radio during the conflict. 

In the film, the heartfelt optimism of the song is used to contrast with scenes of devastation and destruction wrought by U.S. forces: napalm strikes, bombed-out homes and innocents killed in the streets.

The song was reissued as a single and, 20 years after its initial release—17 years after Armstrong’s death and 65 years after his first recordings—it became a hit. 

More than a hit, the song became a standard, covered by artists as diverse as Willie Nelson, Nick Cave and Shane MacGowan, Hawaiian singer and ukulele player Israel Kamakawiwo'ole and punk rocker Joey Ramone, among many others. 

Its first significant cover performance, though, came in 1978. In an episode of “The Muppet Show”—produced in England, where the song had topped the charts—Rowlf the Dog croons the number in his own gravelly tones while patting a (real) snoozing puppy.

Good Morning, Vietnam set a peculiar precedent. From then on, the ironic deployment of “What a Wonderful World” would become a cinematic trope. It would underscore, for example, the post-apocalyptic desolation of 12 Monkeys and a montage depicting the brutishness of the natural world in Madagascar.

Outside the movies, though, the song has been widely embraced. In 2025, the Recording Industry Association of America certified it five-times Platinum for selling upward of 5 million copies. “Once listeners found it,” says Riccardi, “they fell in love with it.”