Doris Day Albums (25)
What The Critics Say
Warner Bros. Pictures' 1957 film adaptation of the 1954 Broadway musical The Pajama Game (about a strike for higher wages at a pajama factory) was unusually faithful to the show. Not only did Warner Bros. retain the Richard Adler-Jerry Ross score in its entirety, but the film company also preserved most of the cast, including male lead John Raitt and supporting actors Carol Haney, Eddie Foy Jr., Reta Shaw, and Buzz Miller. The only significant substitution was that of Hollywood star Doris Day for Broadway female lead Janis Paige, probably a box-office necessity. But Day fit right in, and the script was not altered to emphasize her part. Instead, the production remained an ensemble story in which Raitt got to sing the hit "Hey There" and Haney had showcases with "Steam Heat" and "Hernando's Hideaway." Day shone on "I'm Not at All in Love," throwing herself into the production number, and paired well with Raitt on "Once-a-Year Day" and "There Once Was a Man." Foy and Shaw retained their own showcase number, "I'll Never Be Jealous Again." The show worked as well on film as it had on stage, and the score remained fresh and catchy. The soundtrack album was nearly as popular as the original Broadway cast album had been three years earlier, making the Top Ten. Collectables Records is to be credited for reissuing the album on CD, but it is regrettable that the company chose to bill it as a Doris Day album, which does a disservice to the rest of the cast. Day is only on five out of 11 tracks on the soundtrack, though there is a bonus track, her recording of "The Man Who Invented Love," an Adler composition intended to be added to the score for the movie but ultimately dropped. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
'Billy Rose's Jumbo'
Release Date 7/10/2001
Tracks 9
Label Collectables
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What The Critics Say
Jumbo, the musical theater-cum-circus extravaganza with a score by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart that producer Billy Rose staged in the cavernous Hippodrome in New York in 1935, took 27 years to be adapted into a motion picture by MGM, and when it was, the script had been replaced with a typical boy-meets-girl (meets elephant!) plot. But half of Rodgers & Hart's score was retained, including the standards "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World," "My Romance," and "Little Girl Blue," as was Jimmy Durante, the star of the stage show. The star of the film, however, was Doris Day, in her first movie musical in five years (and her last). Day handled the songs well, especially the interpolations "Why Can't I?," a duet with Martha Raye borrowed from Rodgers & Hart's Spring Is Here, and "This Can't Be Love," lifted from the songwriters' The Boys From Syracuse. Male lead Stephen Boyd's singing was dubbed by the uncredited James Joyce on "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World," and the lengthy closing production number, "Sawdust, Spangles and Dreams (Finale)," was really the work of longtime MGM musical director Roger Edens, though it was credited to Rodgers since it was built out of his musical themes. (The words are by Edens, not Hart, who had died 20 years earlier.) Hopelessly dated but enjoyable nevertheless, both the film and soundtrack were modest commercial successes. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Doris Day recorded the material that comprises With Love in 1968 but the tapes sat undisturbed for nearly 30 years, due to her move from singing toward television acting. Her son, record producer Terry Melcher, discovered the tapes in her garage in the '90s and decided to release them. The end result is a mixed blessing. While With Love is pleasant, it doesn't offer anything remarkable and often it only slightly raises above pedestrian jazz-pop. For completists, it's not a bad purchase, but only diehard fans will need to explore this belated release. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide
'Love Me or Leave Me'
Release Date 5/18/1993
Tracks 17
Label Columbia
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What The Critics Say
Love Me or Leave Me was one of Doris Day's greatest, and least likely, successes. Coming out of a string of light movie musicals, she turned in a dramatic performance in this film biography of singer Ruth Etting. She looked nothing like Etting and made no attempt to sound like her, either. But since Etting's recordings of the 1920s and '30s were long out of print and she made only a few films, that was less of a problem than it would have been for a performer whose voice and appearance were better preserved and available. The film was a popular and critical success, but the soundtrack, consisting entirely of Day's renditions of Etting signature songs like the title tune and "Ten Cents Dance," plus a couple of newly written songs, was a blockbuster, spending months at the top of the charts and becoming far and away the best selling of the relatively new 12" LPs of 1955. Day was given a chance to sing something different from the novelty-dominated contemporary material and often second-rate screen songs she had been assigned up to this point, and she reveled in the opportunity. The 1993 reissue, the first release in true stereo, added three bonus tracks, two of which were previously unreleased alternate takes marred by buzzes and the third the Percy Faith-backed studio version of one of the film's new songs, Sammy Cahn and Nicholas Brodszky's "I'll Never Stop Loving You," which became a hit single for Day but had not previously appeared on the soundtrack. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
'Doris Day's Sentimental Journey'
Release Date 1/1/1965
Tracks 11
Label Columbia
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What The Critics Say
Probably nobody knew when Columbia Records released Doris Day's Sentimental Journey in 1965 that it would be her last album of new material (not counting The Love Album, which she recorded in 1967 but which went unreleased until 1995). The singer was only in her early forties, after all, and if she hadn't sold many records lately, she remained a big movie star and her record contract had a while to run. Nevertheless, if she had to have a swan song, this was the right one. Day began her career as a big band singer with Les Brown in the 1940s, and this collection brought her full circle, presenting 11 songs copyrighted between 1940 and 1945 that were hits either for Brown or his competitors. Day, of course, knew the material backwards and forwards, and she sang it with complete assurance, as well as with a mature sensibility that savored the dreamy sentiments and the long-lined melodies. She seemed to take particular pleasure in claiming songs associated with other female singers of the era, making her own such standards as "I Had the Craziest Dream," "I Don't Want to Walk Without You," and "I Remember You" (all of which were hits for Harry James as sung by Helen Forrest), as well as "I'm Beginning to See the Light" and "It's Been a Long, Long Time" (James hits sung by Kitty Kallen) and "It Could Happen to You" (a hit for Jo Stafford). No doubt she had occasion to perform many of these songs on the Brown bandstand. The proceedings ended appropriately with her big Brown hit, "Sentimental Journey," the song that really launched her career and that, here, essentially closed out one aspect of it. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
In the wake of the Stan Getz albums Jazz Samba (1962) and especially Getz/Gilberto (1964), Brazilian bossa nova was all the rage with the jazz-pop set of the early and mid-'60s, and many pop singers took the opportunity to record albums full of songs by Antonio Carlos Jobim. Doris Day might not come to mind immediately as someone well-suited to the lightly rhythmic style, but she had always had a feel for mid-tempo material that provided a showcase for her warm, rich voice. Still, you might have thought of her as a bit lightweight for the easygoing, yet intricate Brazilian sound. But by her early forties, the eternally ingenuous singer finally was showing signs of maturity. She had taken a distinctly different tack on Love Him!, the 1964 album produced by her son, Terry Melcher, and here she sang the lyrics like a grown-up woman, her voice even betraying an attractive huskiness here and there. As a former band singer, she knew how to work with the beat, and so the rhythms didn't throw her at all. The result was a surprisingly satisfying change of pace for her. Unfortunately, rather than marking a new beginning in her recording career, it happened to come at the end. Latin for Lovers was the last new Doris Day album to be recorded (though it was released ahead of Doris Day's Sentimental Journey, which was actually recorded a couple of months earlier); all that followed were a few singles in 1966-1967 and a "lost" 1967 LP session, The Love Album, which languished unreleased in the Columbia vaults until Melcher found it in 1995. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
'With a Smile and a Song'
Release Date 1/1/1964
Tracks 24
Label Columbia
See Album Tracklist and Review
What The Critics Say
Except for a single release of the title song from her film Move Over, Darling, Doris Day stayed away from the record racks for most of 1963, possibly dissatisfied with Columbia Records' efforts to record and promote her with outdated concept albums of old standards at the same time that she was the reigning queen of Hollywood. But in the winter of 1963-1964, she returned with her first new LP in more than a year, Love Him!, and it represented a whole new approach. The producer was her 21-year-old son, Terry Melcher, and he attempted to bring his mother's musical style up to date by banishing the silly concepts and carefully choosing contemporary material he thought would suit her. He got Brill Building pop songwriters Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil to pen the title song, a bolero in which a woman gives another woman advice on the man she has lost to her. And the rest of the material dated either from the last few years or had recently been revived. Thus, for example, "Since I Fell for You" might be a 1948 copyright, but it had been a hit for Lenny Welch in 1963. There were also songs associated with Elvis Presley and appropriations from the country and R&B charts. Melcher seemed to want to demonstrate that Day could sing a broader range of material than Columbia had been giving her, and she responded by throwing herself into performances of songs that had greater depth than those she usually sang. The approach didn't always work, but Day sounded much more engaged than she had on previous albums. The disc made the charts, but sales were difficult to estimate; in Billboard it just missed the Top 100, while in Cash Box it climbed into the Top 40, a significant commercial comeback. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
'The Doris Day Christmas Album'
Release Date 1/1/1964
Tracks 9
Label Columbia
See Album Tracklist and Review
What The Critics Say
Christmas can perhaps be considered the most romantic holiday of the year (celebrants woo it weeks in advance, whereas Valentine's Day is more of a romantic interruption), and listening to The Doris Day Christmas Album, it sure feels that way. Some may find her voice unseasonably sultry but, at their core, many Christmas songs are really love songs (both love of hearth and that other kind). After all, "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!" isn't really about snow at all; Day sets listeners straight on that subject with a smoldering version that ranks among the most honest interpretations of the song's real intent. Likewise, she doesn't gloss over the intrinsic sadness of many Yuletide songs; "I'll Be Home for Christmas" paints the picture of home and hearth so vividly that you begin to understand that, as sad as missing Christmas with family might be, the person singing really can conjure up the surroundings by memory in a pinch. Perhaps the album's saddest moment occurs with "Toyland," as Day sings in a dreamy, faraway voice of a magical land that invites a self-assessment of what is lost in becoming "grown up." It's not a depressing record by any means, but it is more of an "adult" Christmas album. Her versions of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" and "Silver Bells" are very good, aided throughout by excellent arrangements (no cheesy cut-rate band orchestras here; these guys are the real McCoy). If "The Christmas Song" and "White Christmas" aren't showstoppers, they're pleasant all the same. The extended introduction to "Winter Wonderland" is a nice touch, and Day's version of the little-known "Christmas Present" is a timely reminder that a person's presence is more important than their presents. While Doris Day isn't a singer as closely associated with Christmas as Nat "King" Cole, Perry Como, or Bing Crosby, The Doris Day Christmas Album is a good addition to any Yuletide collection. Like an extra log on the fire, putting this on will heat up your holidays nicely. ~ Dave Connolly, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Recorded late in 1961, this album is a milestone in Doris Day's career -- despite having generated no hits -- as her best long-player (and, by extension, her best CD), and her purest jazz solo album. Cut as a duet with Andre Previn (with Previn Trio bassist Red Mitchell and drummer Frank Capp providing occasional support), the album presents Day in the most intimate musical setting of her career. Her trademark style of singing works twice as well here as it did on her swing-era and early solo recordings. The repertory includes "Fools Rush In," and Alec Wilder's "Give Me Time," "Falling In Love Again," and a few Previn-authored pieces that hold up magnificently in this company. The CD reissue includes three previously unreleased outtakes, among them even more upbeat renditions of "Fools Rush In" and "Close Your Eyes." And the notes by Will Friedwald are also a treat. Worth tracking down -- if you own only one Doris Day non-hits/non-swing-era CD, this is the one. ~ Bruce Eder, All Music Guide
