"That Happy Feeling" is an instrumental
pop music composed by Ghanaian musician
Guy Warren[1] in 1956 under the original title "An African's Prayer (Eyi Wala Dong)", and recorded as a single by
Bert Kaempfert.
Background
The track was recorded on March 16, 1962, and featured as the second cut on his album A Swingin' Safari. That song and the title track were among the first pop instrumentals to incorporate elements of
South African music. It is also the title track of what is virtually the same album as the German A Swingin' Safari, issued under a different name in America.
Chart performance
Although Kaempfert's recording of the tune only peaked at number 67 on the
Billboard Hot 100 chart,[2] when issued as a single in 1962, its upbeat style,
flute/
marimba melody line and
trumpet/
trombonearpeggios combined with a full string section, a brass section, hand claps, guitars, and chorus helped it to become a staple of
beautiful music radio.
Popular culture
The tune also proved to be a natural choice for locally produced children's television programming, especially in the
United States:
The song was also used on another Los Angeles television station,
KABC-TV Channel 7, when the station would sign on in the early morning to begin its broadcast day well before round-the-clock broadcasting became the norm much later.
It is used in Adam Elliot's 2009 film, Mary and Max.
It is also used by the UK's Cambridge Talking News as its signature tune on its weekly recordings for the blind and partially sighted.
A version sung by Herb Oscar Anderson was used on WABC Radio 770