While the words to the Doris Day hit song Qué Será, Será are ubiquitously known to almost every native-English speaker in the world, with the repetitive nature of the lyrics mixed with the inescapably catchy melody making it a near perfect earworm, it might surprise you to learn it comes from a movie. A Hitchcock one, at that, and that it bagged its writers an Oscar for ‘Best Song’ in 1957.
The great British director, known for his fetish for filming ice-cold blondes, didn’t want Day to take the female lead in The Man who Knew too Much. Jay Livingston, one of Qué Será’s writers, always maintained that MCA, the agency, had put its foot down, demanding that Hitchcock cast Day if wanted Jimmy Stewart to take the role as the eponymous American diplomat overburdened with too much knowledge.
“Hitchcock said since Doris Day was a singer,” Livingston says in Songwriters On Songwriting, “They needed a song for her. He said, 'I can tell you what it should be about. She sings it to a boy. It should have a foreign title because Jimmy Stewart is a roving ambassador and he goes all over the world."
Day sings the childlike ditty to her onscreen son, telling the story of a young child who, intrigued by the promise of the future, asks some heavy questions. “What will I be?” “Will I be handsome/pretty?” “Will I be rich?” The mother replies by repeating the name of the song over and over, offering nothing reassuring about the future, and refusing to tempt fate.
The cheery tune and sweetly-sung voice of Day would make any listener believe that the future this child is so curious about holds nothing by happiness, and the song has become synonymous with upbeat positivity. But the reality is something far more, as Hitchcock would approve, fatalistic.
The earliest known recording of the song’s title comes all the way back from Elizabethan times; the playwright Christopher Marlowe had one of his characters utter the line Che sarà sarà in his 1604 play Doctor Faustus, to describe how fate cannot be denied the inevitable.
Doris Day despised Qué Será, Será.
"It's a kiddie song," she told her manager and husband Marty Melcher, who had to wear her down until she would finally concede to record it. After the session ended, having agreed to only doing one take, she turned to her producers and said, "That's the last you're going to hear of this song."
The future's not ours to see.
The song became a huge global hit, rerecorded by countless stars and performed in numerous languages. As well as helping to secure the song its Academy Award, Day sang it again in Please Don't Eat the Daisies and The Glass-Bottom Boat. When she retired from the movie business and transferred to television in 1968, a version of the song became the theme tune to all five seasons of her hugely popular variety show, The Doris Day Show.
Whatever will be, will be.
Every Thursday on The Right Hook, George is joined live in studio by Bill Hughes, who fills in the musical blindspot in the presenter’s cultural awareness with the riffs, refrains, and robust hits have defined musical history.
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