The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #34008   Message #2550515
Posted By: GUEST,leeneia
27-Jan-09 - 06:00 PM
Thread Name: Lyr Req: Que Sera, Sera
Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Que Sera, Sera -4 Popular Halfwit
Eight years have passed, and I've decided to revive this thread because I'm interested in this song.

Here's a link to a Wikipedia article about it.

que

The article says that the phrase 'que sera sera' occurs in no Romance language. It even has a spreadsheet to prove it.

However, I was reading a mystery last week that was set in French Louisiana. A character used the phrase in the story. So is it Cajun French, a dialect likely to be unknown to Wikipedia?

I know the song was written by Livingston and Evans for the movie by Hitchcock. I'm interested in what kind of song they were trying to recreate. In fact, I came across a MIDI of it recently, and I thought, 'That's strange! I never noticed that song is in 3/4 and has a Mediterranean feel to it.'

As a kid, I heard this song many times, and I remember Doris Day's cheerful, antiseptic rendition, a rendition from which all hint of the Italian had been banished. Just now I found a YouTube of her singing it, and it's even worse than I remembered. Cold, brash, invariant - arrgh.

In the clip from the movie we hear a mandolin for a few seconds. (Kinda funny because there's no mandolin in the room.) Does anybody have any techniques for making this song sound Italian or Mediterranean if I'm playing it on the piano and don't have a mandolin?