Tribute to Doris Day

On 13 May we lost the 97-year-old singer and actress Doris Day. William Dart plays some of the musical sunshine that she left behind.

I'm heartened to discover that perhaps I am not alone in this country harbouring an intense admiration for Doris Day.

Well, Caitlin Smith may be celebrating the song rather than the singer, but "Secret Love" is a song that went on high rotate at my home when Doris Day passed away on 13 May.

When I first saw the movie Calamity Jane as a child, it was the ballads such as "Secret Love" and "The Black Hills of Dakoka" that set off golden-hued fantasies in my kiddy consciousness.  

Now, older and more aware, I enjoy the outrageous gender play of the film, with Doris in the title role playing it butch in buckskins before she’s taught just what a woman is supposed to do and be.

I still smile at the songcraft of Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster here, and the delicious irony that can be read into Webster’s lyrics if one is so inclined

I smile too at the consummate singing, never less than spot on in pitch, warming significant words with the gentlest of vibrato. An artistry honed over years in the late 1940s when Day was the singer with various bands, most famously that of Les Brown, who took her to the top of the Billboard charts in 1945 with this number.

There was no sentimental journey ahead for the young Doris Day. It was slog and grind, gig after gig, touring the country on the band bus, as the sole woman in a clutch of male musos.

And she wasn’t even top of the bill. You waited almost a minute and half to hear her voice in that song, skillfully shaded, almost chameleon-like, to blend in with the clustering reed instruments.

By 1948 Day made it to the big screen, in a series of musicals, often paired with Jack Carson.

And while she was capturing the heart of Carson, America, and the rest of the world with string-drenched ballads, there was a new music taking over outside the Hollywood enclave. Bebop, fuelled by the dynamic Dizzy Gillespie, would inspire a new breed of singers such as Anita O’Day and the trio, Lambert. Hendricks and Ross.

And Doris Day as it happens.  The 1949 movie My Dream is Yours cast her as a hopeful young singer, spinning demo discs, until she decides to add her vocals to one of the 78s.

The song, "Canadian Capers", was a ragtime tune that had been around since early in the century, already given a big band swing by Paul Whiteman.

Thanks to updated hip lyrics by Ralph Blane and Harry Warren, the same number gave Day the chance to bop with the best.

"Canadian Capers" was pretty progressive pop for 1949, with Doris Day navigating some treacherous melodic peaks and potential crevices with the skill of a musical mountaineer.

But, for all this work with the big bands, was she a jazz singer?

Checking through my back files of Downbeat magazine and the writing of the esteemed Whitney Balliett reminds me there was quite a rigid division back then between jazz and the merely popular.

All of which reached its highest level of preposterousness in the American Schwann Record Catalogue, which, as late as the 60s, divided the recordings of Ella Fitzgerald between those two categories.

While Fitzgerald's 1957 live set at the Chicago Opera House received a tick as genuine Jazz, her duets with Louis Armstrong, and her definitive songbook collections were herded together under Popular.

Needless to say, Doris Day, was firmly locked into the latter category.

I worried at the time when Whitney Balliet, in the extensive 1988 revision of his American Singers essays, excluded Day from its chapters – even though she’s credited with being a jazz singer in the book’s foreword. She obviously fitted with his definition of a jazz singer as anyone who makes the music swing.

Yet when Anita O’Day also didn’t make Balliett’s final list, I relaxed just a little. And nor did Sinatra, even if Tony Bennett was allotted a generous twelve pages.

It’s significant, I think, to pair Doris Day and Frank Sinatra as they’re both supreme song stylists. You can hear it in two of her albums from the 1950s – the 1956 Day by Day, and its follow-up, a year later, Day by Night.

Showcased in a sumptuous backing from Paul Weston and his so-called Music from Hollywood, this is chesterfield comfort in sound. Here's a song that just happens to be by a woman whom Irving Berlin once described as the Queen of Tin Pan Alley, Bernice Petkere

Talking stylists, I’d also been extremely vexed when Ken Barnes brought out a 1972 publication titled Sinatra and the Great Song Stylists.

Doris Day was amongst them but somehow sidelined. Barnes had praised Ella Fitzgerald for her “wonderful phrasing”, Sarah Vaughan for her “near instrumental melodic improvisations” and approved of Jo Stafford with her “academic perfection.”

But Doris Day’s chief asset, it seems, was her "personal charm" and "unspoiled vivacity" – a combination that, we were told, entitled her to the World Sweetheart Throne, vacated many years previously by Mary Pickford.

Was Barnes aware, one wonders, of Day’s Duet album from 1962, with pianist André Previn?

Apart from some gorgeously airborne standards, this featured three Previn originals, including this one, written without the assistance of his lyricist wife, Dory Langdon.

Perhaps it’s a song that only a man could write, with its portrait of what I’d call doormat devotion, but Day, the utter professional, has one hanging on every note and the breaths between them.

Extraordinarily, when she recorded this album, Doris Day had already seen the best years of her film career, peaking for some in her sophisticated comedies alongside Rock Hudson — Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back and Send Me No Flowers, in which Day seems just a mite uncomfortable singing a perky theme song by Burt Bacharach and Hal David with its wandering break.  

Other films included two directed by the great Frank Tashlin, with the 1966 The Glass-Bottomed Boat, indecorously retitled in some countries as The Spy in Lace Panties.

Andrew McLaglan’s feminist-aware western The Ballad of Josie had Day coming up against the male establishment in the old west.

And her final outing, Howard Morris’ With Six You Get Eggroll, a kooky 1968 comedy, opened with its star in overalls on a fork hoist. Later, in a nightclub scene, Doris was confronted by the band The Grassroots, in psychedelic mode.

As for her own music, it seemed she’d signed off in 1965 with her Sentimental Journey album, revisiting the song that had been so good to her 20 years before, now bathed in a new Morton Garson arrangement with oriental shadings. 

1968 also saw the death of her husband, Marty Melcher and the discovery that she had essentially been left in dire financial straits by his misdoings.

She had also been signed up for a TV series, which ran for 5 seasons until 1973, with her popular "Que Será, Será" as its theme song.

It's a song that, for some, encapsulated the cozily nice image that she had. A song that has inspired covers by artists from P J Proby and the Shirelles to Martha Wainwright and opera diva Sumi Jo ... and even Sly and his family Stone, who tried to pump some 70s soul into it.

I’ve often regretted that Doris Day didn’t lend her distinctive voice to the music that was around her in these years. Searching out her versions of 60s and 70s songs, pickings are sparse, but precious.

One unexpected appearance was as a backing vocalist for her son Terry Melcher on his one and only solo album, in 1974. Jackson Browne’s "These Days", unthinkable for some outside of Nico’s definitive version, is heartrending.

Few expected a new album from an 89-year-old Doris Day but it did eventuate in 2011.

Titled My Heart, it even had a moderate chart success. It wasn’t all new, though, with a song from the André Previn Duet album and this revisiting of a number from the Leonard Bernstein musical Wonderful Town. The nostalgic associations of Doris Day’s home state, where she was born back in 1922 as Doris Mary Kappelhoff, make it specially poignant

My Heart makes available a selection of songs from the 1980s, intended for use on television specials. She manages the good-timey shuffle of the Lovin Spoonful’s "Daydream" rather fetchingly, with its backing vocalists recalling the bopping quartet in "Canadian Capers".

The choice of songs on Doris Day’s last album leans to the gentle side with Billy Preston’s "You are so beautiful" and a delicately nuanced "Disney Girls", from the pen of Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys. Indeed, you can’t help wishing that Day had formed a singing partnership with Brian Wilson and the boys rather than John Denver.

The spirit of her son Terry Melcher who’d died in 2004 hangs over the CD, making it something of an epitaph for Melcher fans.

Day’s well-known love of animals comes out in their duet, "Stewball", a racehorse ballad with a history going back to the 18^th century. Best known from the songbook of the folk-singing trio Peter, Paul and Mary, it’s difficult, listening to it now, not to be reminded of John Lennon’s celebrated yuletide protest song "Happy Xmas (War is Over)".

Whenever I play Doris Day’s spoken tribute to her late son, introducing Terry Melcher remembering times that once were and should be forever, I remember how the singer stood by her friend Rock Hudson, when he was dying from AIDs. It was a courageous and necessary stand in the 1980s, when the homophobic Reagan administration took such an inhuman stance on this very real and crippling health crisis.

Melcher sings of "Happy Endings" and good guys winning so movingly that one almost overlooks the syrupy synths around him.

And in times like ours, when happiness is a constantly threatened condition, the songs and singing of Doris Day will always have a place.

Music Details

'Song title' (Composer) – Performers
Album title
(Label)

'Secret Love' (Pain, Webster) – Caitlin Smith. The Fondue Set
Down to the Rind
(The Fondue Set)

'A Woman's Touch' (Pain, Webster) – Doris Day
Sings Songs from the Warner Brother Pictures Calamity Jane et al
(Columbia)

'Sentimental Journey' (Brown et al) – Doris Day
Sentimental Journey: Doris Day with Les Brown and His Orchestra
(Black Box)

'Canadian Capers' (Chandler et al) – Doris Day
It's Magic (1947-1950)
(Naxos)

'Just one of these things' (Porter) – Doris Day
Lullaby of Broadway
(Real Gone)

'Close Your Eyes' (Petkere) – Doris Day
Day By Night
(Columbia)

'Yes' (Previn) – Doris Day & André Previn
Duet
(Pickwick)

'Send Me No Flowers' (Bacharach, David) – Doris Day
Easy Listening Bacharach
(Columbia)

'Sentimental Journey' (Brown et al) – Doris Day
Sentimental Journey (1965)
(Columbia)

'Que Será Será' (Evans, Livingston) – Sly & The Family Stone
Fresh
(Epic)

'These Days' (Browne) – Terry Melcher & Doris Day
Terry Melcher
(Reprise)

'Ohio' (Bernstein et al) – Doris Day
My Heart
(Arwin)

'Daydream' (Sebastian) – Doris Day
My Heart
(Arwin)

'Stewball' (Rinsler et al) – Doris Day
My Heart
(Arwin)

'Happy Endings' (Johnston, Melcher) – Terry Melcher
My Heart
(Arwin)