Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)

Running just 2:01, this song points out, quite effectively, how we can't predict the future. The first of the three verses finds Doris Day asking her mother if she'll grow up to be pretty and rich. Instead of the stock parental reply of "you can be anything you want to be," her mother comes back with something much more profound: whatever will be, will be. In the next verse, she asks the man she loves if they will live a happy life together, and he gives her the same answer. In the last verse, she has kids of her own and imparts this same wisdom.

This was written by Ray Evans and Jay Livingston, who wrote many songs for movies when they were under contract with Paramount Pictures. Doris Day sang it in Alfred Hitchcock's 1956 remake of his 1934 film The Man Who Knew Too Much. In the film, she was putting her young son to bed. Livingston told Paul Zollo in 1987: "We got a call from Alfred Hitchcock. And he told us that he had Doris Day in his picture, whom he didn't want. But MCA, the agency, was so powerful that they said if he wanted Jimmy Stewart he would also have to take Doris Day and Livingston and Evans. It was the only time an agent got us a job that I can remember. Hitchcock said that since Doris Day was a singer, 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." (this appears in Zollo's book Songwriters On Songwriting)

The phrase "Que Sera, Sera" came from a 1954 movie called The Barefoot Contessa, where the family motto of the character played by Rossano Brazzi is "Che Sera, Sera." The motto in the film is Italian, but Evans and Livingston switched the "Che" to "Que" because more people spoke Spanish in the US.