Got no check books, got no banks. Still I'd like to express my thanks — I got the sun in the morning and the moon at night.

These lines come from Irving Berlin’s song “I Got the Sun in the Morning (and the Moon at Night),” written for the Broadway musical Annie Get Your Gun. In the show, the number is associated with the character Annie Oakley, who contrasts her lack of money or conventional security (“no check books… no banks”) with a sense of abundance drawn from nature and everyday experience. Berlin wrote the score in the late 1940s for a star vehicle built around Ethel Merman, and the lyric reflects the musical’s recurring theme of plainspoken, frontier-inflected optimism set against the trappings of wealth and status.

The lyric turns material deprivation into a declaration of contentment. By listing what she lacks—financial instruments and institutions—then pivoting to gratitude for the sun and moon, the speaker reframes “riches” as access to the basic, freely given rhythms of life. The contrast is deliberately homely and comic, but it also carries a moral: security and happiness need not depend on money or social standing. In the context of a musical about fame, competition, and romance, the line underscores Annie’s grounded self-reliance and her ability to find value outside the marketplace.