Golden Girl: The Columbia Recordings 1944-1966
Columbia Legacy (CK2 65505), U.S., 1999

Young Man with a Horn
Columbia Legacy (CK 65508), U.S., 1999

Reviewed by Ted Naron (Chicago)

"I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin," said Oscar Levant. Now it’s your turn.

The new two-disc set from Columbia, Golden Girl, a 48-song selection from Doris Day’s long association with Columbia Records, gives you plenty of chances to hear Day BPT – Before Pillow Talk. The tunes date back to two recorded in 1944 when she was just 20 (including her huge hit Sentimental Journey), during her stint as "girl singer" with the Les Brown band, and end with some mid-1960s shots at the AM playlists. In between, the chronologically-arranged selections trace the development of her voice and style quite clearly, so this is a valuable, and long-overdue, document for anyone even slightly susceptible to her charms.

Offhand I can’t think of another popular artist who had such a long run with one label. Day’s two, very full decades at Columbia allows the label to put together a fairly complete picture here. Contrary to the implication of the set’s subtitle ("The Columbia Years, 1944-1966), it isn’t everything she ever recorded, by any means. For that, get the four-volume, 24-CD set from Bear Family in Germany, which compiles everything she recorded for Columbia as a solo artist. But in terms of presenting a basic showcase of the Day voice, Golden Girl is satisfying.

I stress the part of that last sentence concerning the Day voice, because in terms of presenting the Day repertoire, this collection is much less successful. Day recorded loads of quality songs with good arrangers on several good Columbia albums, but the song selection here tends disproportionately to tunes from her various movies (or songs written to exploit her various movies) and singles that charted, along with a bunch of "novelty" one-offs. Much of the ephemera in the latter category will tempt you to reach for the rightward-facing arrow on your CD remote, though a few novelty numbers, like Mel Torme and Bob Wells’ Tacos, Enchiladas and Beans and a tune called That Jane from Maine, have their charms.

Of course, the big hit It’s Magic is here, from her first film, Romance on the High Seas, for which lyric writer Sammy Cahn cajoled director Michael Curtiz into giving Day a screen test when Judy Garland and Betty Hutton proved unavailable for the role. Great American Songbook material – for instance, a beautiful rendition of Frank Loesser’s I’ve Never Been in Love Before with a lush David Rose accompaniment – and selections from her many concept LPs aren’t ignored on this two-disc set, but they are given disappointingly short shrift. Yet this set is still worth getting because, to resort to a cliche, that voice could sing the phone book.

In fact, with Day, there is a sense in which song selection, whatever it might have been on this collection in some alternate universe, is irrelevant. You don’t listen to Day for the deep insights she brings to the material; there aren’t any. You don’t find yourself moved by a soul laid bare. Rather, you luxuriate in the sheer sound, the exquisiteness, the total musicality, and the intriguing personality of one of the best pop voices of the recording era.

Who else combined that kind of "all-American girl" pluck with that kind of sexiness? That kind of birdsong vibrato with that kind of womanliness?

For that matter, who else ever pronounced words that way? You can’t listen to this much Day in a row without becoming aware that the very way she utters vowels and consonants is unique. Each L is lusciously, lavishly, almost ludicrously liquid. Her O is more of an "eo" diphthong; her I more like "ai;" the short U more like "eu." With the more romantic material, the effect is impossibly intimate and seductive, underneath a surface of sunshiny innocence.

Day always knows exactly what she’s doing musically. Vibrato is a tool at her disposal, not an artifact of her voice; she can dispense with it altogether when it suits her. She has complete control of dynamics, being equally convincing whether purring or shouting. (See Secret Love here.) But mostly the magic is just... that voice.

More highlights: the softly cooed Again and Baby Doll, their intimacy not so much seductive as post-coital; There’s a Rising Moon from the movie Young at Heart; My Romance, the last truly great song on this collection, from the movie musical Jumbo, with Day backed by the MGM orchestra in its last glory days (is that a Conrad Salinger arrangement?); the previously unreleased (in the U.S., at least) Let the Little Girl Limbo, an amusing clone of Eydie Gorme’s Blame It on the Bossa Nova; and the final song on the disc, an interesting ditty called Sorry, a Johnny Mercer and Gene DePaul tune I’ve never come across before.

The discographical information provided is as complete as one could wish (although the liner notes are more lengthy than insightful) and the disc’s cover features an arresting hand-tinted black and white photo of a young Day with her eyes a piercing blue.

Golden Girl contains three songs from Day’s 1950 film with Kirk Douglas, Young Man with a Horn (loosely based on a novel loosely based on the life of trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke.) You can also purchase a disc that consists entirely of songs from the movie, but I wouldn’t. It isn’t just that Young Man contains only four Day songs that aren’t on Golden Girl (the remaining tracks are instrumentals by Harry James, he being the off-camera stunt-horn for Douglas). It’s more that, in a strange way, on many of these tracks Day doesn’t really sound like Day. She sounds fine, of course, but somewhat generic. I have two explanations for this, both wildly speculative since my experience of the movie is confined to one viewing of just the last forty minutes a couple of weeks ago.

Explanation one: Day, because she is playing a band singer in the movie, felt it was necessary to sound on some of these songs like some generic concept of a band singer. Explanation two: being the clever and expert actress she is, Day wanted to indicate a progression on her character’s part, so that the numbers that fall early on in the film sound more generic and the ones that occur later depict the character finding her own voice. The result might have worked superbly in the movie, but makes for a somewhat disappointing listen as a CD. One number that shines is With a Song in my Heart, a lovely and quintessentially Day rendition that should have been included in Golden Girl.

Columbia Legacy (C2K65505), U.S., 1999

Disc one, 68:28; disc two, 67:41

1. Sentimental Journey (Green, Brown, Homer)
2. My Dreams are Getting Better All the Time (Curtis, Mizzy)
3. It’s Magic (Styne, Cahn)
4. Love Somebody (Whitney, Kramer)
5. Tacos, Enchiladas and Beans (Torme, Wells)
6. Put Em in a Box, Tie Em with a Ribbon (And Throw Em in the Deep Blue Sea) (Styne, Cahn)
7. Someone Like You (Warren, Blane)
8. That Old Feeling (Fain, Brown)
9. Again (Newman, Cochran)
10. At the Cafe Rendezvous (Styne, Cahn)
11. You Can Have Him (Berlin)
12. Cuttin’Capers (Warren, Blane)
13. The Very Thought of You (Noble)
14. Too Marvelous for Words (Mercer, Whiting)
15. I Only Have Eyes for You (Warren, Dubin)
16. Crazy Rhythm (Caesar, Meyer, Kahn)
17. I’ve Never Been in Love Before (Loesser)
18. It’s a Lovely Day Today (Berlin)
19. You’re Getting to be a Habit with Me (Warren, Dubin)
20. In a Shanty in Old Shanty Town (Young, Little, Schuster)
21. Lullaby of Broadway (Warren, Dubin)
22. On Moonlight Bay (Madden, Wenrich)
23. (Why Did I Tell You I Was Going To) Shanghai (Hillard, DeLugg)

1. Baby Doll (Mercer, Warren)
2. It Had to be You (Kahn, Jones)
3. Sugarbush (Marais)
4. A Guy is a Guy (Brand)
5. April in Paris (Duke, Harburg)
6. Ain’t We Got Fun (Kahn, Egan, Whiting)
7. The Black Hills of Dakota (Fain, Webster)
8. Secret Love (Fain, Webster)
9. I Speak to the Stars (Fain, Webster)
10. If I Give my Heart to You (Crane, Jacobs, Brewster)
11. There’s a Rising Moon (Fain, Webster)
12. Shaking the Blues Away (Berlin)
13. I’ll Never Stop Loving You (Brodsky, Cahn)
14. Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera) (Livingston, Evans)
15. There Once was a Man (Adler, Ross)
16. Everybody Loves a Lover (Adler, Allen)
17. That Jane from Maine (Lubin, Ross)
18. Pillow Talk (Pepper, James)
19. Lover Come Back (Spilton)
20. You’re Good for Me (Rotella, Clare)
21. My Romance (Rodgers, Hart)
22. Doin What Comes Naturally (Berlin)
23. Let the Little Girl Limbo (Mann, Weil)
24. Move Over Darling (Melcher, Kanter, Lubin)
25. Sorry (Mercer, DePaul)

Columbia Legacy (CK65508), U.S., 1999

With Harry James. 40:01

1. I May Be Wrong (But I Think You’re Wonderful) (Sullivan, Ruskin)
2. The Man I Love (G. & I. Gershwin)
3. The Very Thought of You (Noble)
4. Pretty Baby (Kahn, VanAlstyne, Jackson)
5. Melancholy Rhapsody (Heindorf, Cahn)
6. Would I Love You (Russell, Spina)
7. Too Marvelous for Words (Mercer, Whiting)
8. Get Happy (Arlen, Koehler)
9. I Only Have Eyes for You (Warren, Dubin)
10. Limehouse Blues (Braham, Furber)
11. With a Song in my Heart (Rodgers, Hart)
12. Lullaby of Broadway (Warren, Dubin)
13. Moanin’ Low (Rainger, Dietz)

Columbia/Legacy’s Doris Day page