Throughout her long existence, Doris Day balanced four separate professional paths, divided equally between music and motion pictures. Regrettably, the public tends to recall only her later screen work, beginning with Teacher's Pet in 1957, where she embodied the quintessential all-American girl opposite leading men such as Clark Gable and Rock Hudson. She carried that same appeal into television by the close of the 1960s through a situation comedy that continued into the early 1970s. When listeners do remember her as a vocalist, it is most often for pop successes like “Secret Love” and the Oscar-winning “Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be),” which became her trademark number.
Long before those accomplishments, from 1939 through the final years of the 1940s, Doris Day ranked among the most compelling and seductive swing-band singers active in popular music. That catalog, highlighted by the early-1940s classic “Sentimental Journey,” stands as one of the strongest bodies of work in swing and popular jazz, yet it receives far less attention than it merits. Prior to her late-1950s comedies she had already appeared in film adaptations of Broadway musicals such as The Pajama Game, in classic thrillers such as The Man Who Knew Too Much, and in powerful social dramas such as Storm Warning.
Born Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff on April 3, 1922, in Cincinnati, Ohio, she grew up with a father who served as a music teacher, choir master, and church organist, while her mother favored popular music, particularly country styles. Her parents separated when she was twelve, after which she lived with her mother and older brother in College Hill, Ohio. Dancing lessons had begun at age six, and she planned to make that her livelihood. In 1937, at thirteen, she and a male partner claimed a $500 prize in an amateur contest; the family then decided to seek Hollywood opportunities for the young dancer. Those ambitions ended abruptly during the drive west when an automobile accident badly damaged her right leg.
While recovering above her uncle’s Cincinnati tavern, the teenager listened repeatedly to a jukebox stocked with current hits. By fourteen she had developed a strong liking for swing artists including Benny Goodman and the Dorsey Brothers. She also began singing along with Ella Fitzgerald recordings and worked to shape her own delivery. Music soon became her new goal, and voice coach Grace Raine guided her toward the interpretive style that would define her work. Raine secured an appearance for Doris on Cincinnati radio station WLW in an amateur showcase; performing Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz’s 1932 song “Day After Day” earned her a regular spot on the station.
Still billed as Doris Kappelhoff when she first sang at a local club, she adopted the professional name Doris Day once a radio broadcast opportunity arose, prompted by the popularity of “Day After Day.” Although that engagement proved brief, the name remained. In 1939 she learned of an opening for a vocalist with Bob Crosby’s band and won the position at seventeen. Three months later bandleader Les Brown recruited her. This occurred in 1940, an era dominated by big bands whose jazz-inflected swing ensembles offered vocalists such as Sinatra unprecedented chances to interpret contemporary material. Tin Pan Alley continued to control the airwaves while country and, to a lesser extent, blues gained ground, and strong songs remained plentiful. Amid that environment the seventeen-year-old conveyed a worldly sensuality or an innocent sensuality, coloring her tone with subtleties that proved difficult to dissect. In an age when Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Ella Fitzgerald were among the many vocalists vying for attention, Doris Day was emerging as a rising talent.
During her time with Bob Crosby she first collaborated with sidemen such as Bob Haggart, William Stegmeyer, Billy Butterfield, and Zeke Zarchy, all of whom later participated in her own sessions. It was with Les Brown’s orchestra, however, that listeners first encountered her voice on radio and on record. From 1940 until 1946, aside from a two-year hiatus caused by an unhappy marriage, she served as the band’s featured vocalist on major successes including “Sentimental Journey” and “My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time.” The former tune gained special favor among American troops stationed abroad during World War II. By the conclusion of the war and her association with Brown, while still in her early twenties, she was widely regarded as one of the foremost band vocalists anywhere. Beyond the beauty and control of her instrument, her popularity stemmed from an intimate manner of address that made each listener feel she sang directly to them rather than to a collective audience.
Another unsuccessful marriage interrupted her tenure with the band. Once it ended, Day, now responsible for a young son named Terry from her first marriage, considered returning to Cincinnati and abandoning music. According to the familiar account, her agent convinced her to attend a Hollywood party where she delivered an impromptu version of “Embraceable You” that impressed songwriters Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn. They were preparing the score for the Warner Bros. picture Romance on the High Seas, a project from which several leading actresses had withdrawn. Cahn arranged an audition before director Michael Curtiz, who requested a screen test; when that test was screened alongside those of two previously considered actresses, Day secured the part.
The resulting film succeeded, and Day became a star, not yet in the perky, virginal image later associated with her, but as a commanding singer and actress. Thereafter her parallel careers advanced together as she headlined films and frequently converted their songs into hits. She also took non-musical roles and demonstrated dramatic range in the socially conscious thriller Storm Warning (1950), playing the abused spouse of a brutal Ku Klux Klan member portrayed by Steve Cochran, while still handling lighter tomboyish characters in pictures such as On Moonlight Bay (1951).
She resumed solo recording in 1947. Even as ballads increased within her repertoire, her earliest independent sides retained a pronounced jazz flavor and rank among her strongest work. Her style grew somewhat smoother as the decade progressed, though she delivered notable jazz-inflected performances for the 1950 film Young Man with a Horn. From the 1950s forward her most prominent releases were pop numbers. Enormous successes arrived with “Secret Love,” drawn from Calamity Jane (1953), and “Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be),” performed in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) opposite James Stewart. Throughout the 1950s she stood as America’s most popular and among its highest-paid vocalists; the concurrent surge in popularity of her films, beginning with Teacher’s Pet (1958), further magnified her cultural presence, even as the movies gradually overshadowed her recording career. During this period she also completed an album of jazz material accompanied by André Previn titled Duet. Its reception was tempered by the dominance of her films, which by the early 1960s had transformed her into a cultural symbol whose wholesome persona offered a reassuring counterpoint to Marilyn Monroe’s innocent sensuality.
The mid-1960s ascent of rock music pushed Day to the periphery of popular music, although her son Terry Melcher emerged as one of the era’s notable rock producers, notably through early work with the Byrds and Paul Revere & the Raiders. Her personal and professional circumstances deteriorated following the 1968 death of her third husband, Marty Melcher, who had overseen her business affairs for seventeen years. She discovered afterward that he had squandered or misappropriated her lifetime earnings, leaving her penniless; the resulting pressures precipitated a nervous breakdown. Recovery began later that year when she started work on a CBS situation comedy. Melcher had committed her to the series without her knowledge shortly before his death, yet the program proved successful and restored her financial stability during its five-year run. A year after its conclusion she obtained a $22 million judgment against her former attorney for complicity in Melcher’s financial mismanagement. Following the 1973 cancellation of the CBS series she devoted most of her energies to the Doris Day Animal Foundation, though she hosted a cable series titled Doris Day and Friends in the mid-1980s. In 1994 she issued The Love Album, comprising previously unreleased recordings from 1967. In 2011 the collection My Heart assembled tracks from 1980s sessions—four of them co-written by her son Terry Melcher with the Beach Boys’ Bruce Johnston—alongside four earlier selections issued between 1951 and 1994. In May 2019 her foundation announced that Doris Day had died following a brief illness with pneumonia; she was 97.
