"You'll Never Know"

Harry Warren /Mack Gordon

About a year and a half ago, I wrote this about Harry Warren, composer of our Sometimes a Song for this week. Warren’s remarkable career is worth a revisit:

If you’ve never heard of him you are in good company. The novelist William Sheed called Warren “the king of the Hollywood incognitos, who had more songs on the Hit Parade than Berlin himself and who would win the contest [with Berlin] hands down if enough people had heard of him.” If — like most Americans even of his own day — you haven’t heard of Warren (born Salvatore Antonio Guaragna), you almost certainly know many of his hundreds of popular tunes, which include such American classics as “I Found a Million-Dollar Baby (In a Five and Ten Cent Store),” “I Only Have Eyes for You”, “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby”, “Jeepers Creepers”, “We’re in the Money,” “The More I See You”, “At Last.” “That’s Amore” was a big hit for Dean Martin, and “Chattanooga Choo Choo” was not only a huge hit for the Glenn Miller Orchestra but was the winner of the first gold record in the history of popular music.

Harry Warren, born to poor Italian immigrant parents in Brooklyn, had absolutely no formal education of any kind, not even basic piano lessons. He taught himself to play his father’s accordion as a child, picked up the drums and piano as a teen, and ran away to play in the band with his uncle’s traveling carnival at age 16. While serving in the navy during WWI, Warren started writing songs.

After the war, Harry returned home to Brooklyn and took a jack-of-all-trades job at the Vitagraph Motion Pictures Studios. The stars aligned for Harry Warren when Vitagraph was bought out by the Warner Brothers in 1925. So instead of peddling his songs on Broadway as so many of his contemporaries did, Warren became the first American composer to write primarily for films — over 300 of them. Fittingly, his songs were nominated for eleven Academy Awards, and won for three: “The Lullaby of Broadway” (1935), “You’ll Never Know” (1943) — our song this week — and “On the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe” (1946). In 1933, the Academy had not begun awarding a prize for best song in a motion picture. If they had, Warren might easily have won for the major musical named after his song, “42nd Street,” the first of many musicals he worked on with choreographer Busby Berkeley. If you’ve seen the the 1957 film, “An Affair to Remember,” you’ve heard one of his Academy Award nominated songs. If you’ve watched the 1955 film, “Marty,” which we featured on Word & Song for Valentine’s Day, you’ve heard his lilting and charming theme song, “Hey, Marty,” nominations for Best Song. And if none of these rings a bell with you, you’ve certainly heard compositions of Warren’s which were featured in over a hundred Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons!

So what about our song for this week, “You’ll Never Know”? How much of a hit was this little number? Well, it was big. Alice Faye premiered the song in the movie, “Hello, Frisco, Hello,” and sang it again in “Four Jills and a Jeep.” These films were released in the last two war years, 1943 and 1944, and the story goes that the song was inspired by a poem written by a war bride to her husband. Gee, you might think that romance was popular, even! “You’ll Never Know” became Alice Faye’s signature song, but due to contract restrictions with the studio, she was not able to record it until twenty years later. But in 1943, the song as recorded by Dick Haymes, hit the top of the Billboard Charts and held that spot for four weeks. In that same year, it was recorded by Frank Sinatra, whose version reached number two and stayed on the charts for sixteen weeks.

The song retained its popularity and became a hit again and again in the 1950’s and 1960’s, with recordings by a host of orchestras and singers, including Harry James (with Rosemary Clooney), Ella Fitzgerald, Doris Day, Jo Stafford, Johnny Mathis, Nat King Cole, The Platters, Bobby Darin, and the list goes on. It’s widely considered a standard, and was revived by Bette Midler, Barbra Streisand, and was comercially recorded as recently as 2025, with about 280 covers of the song since its release in 1943.

I could spin the wheel and let fate decide which version to share with you, but today I want to go to the song’s authentic number one version, in 1943, during the long and sadly-timed American Federation of Musicians’ strike during the Second World War. So here is Dick Haymes, with “You’ll Never Know,” accompanied by “The Song Spinners” in an a capella version necessitated by the strike. (You will hear singers performing harmonic accompaniements designed to fill in for the missing instruments.) And then listen to the excellent rendition of the song by the Harry James Ochestra in 1952, with Rosemary Clooney at the height of her voice and her career. The stars shone bright in those days.

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well as a Friday podcast, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. To support this project, please join us as a free or paid subscriber and please do share our posts.