“Beauty of My Dreams” is an original song by Del McCoury, recorded by the Del McCoury Band on their 1992 album Blue Side of Town. By then McCoury — once a guitarist and lead singer in Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys — was fronting the family band that would become a leading act in traditional bluegrass.
The song is a bright, hard-driving love number; its title says most of what it is about — the singer has found, in someone real, the beauty he had only dreamed of. That lift and momentum made it a favorite in performance, and one of the Del McCoury Band’s signature up-tempo numbers.
“Beauty of My Dreams” reached well beyond bluegrass after the rock band Phish took it up as a regular cover, an unlikely route by which a McCoury original found a jam-band audience. It remains a staple of the Del McCoury Band’s shows.
