The Private Canon: "Control Yourself," Doris Day's Blues Bite

This post is part of a series; for an explanation go here.

Among the many musical pearls I dug up in my used-record-store trawls of the late 1980s and early ’90s was a Betty Hutton novelty tune on an otherwise bargain-bin compilation called Hooray for Hollywood. The tune began deceptively placidly, a whispered lullaby waltz, then turned on a dime into a full-bore brass attack, with Hutton belting and finally screaming the lyrics as a way to convey the thunderstruck suddenness of romantic passion.

If that sounds familiar, then you’ve obviously heard Björk’s Post and her inspired rendition of “It’s Oh So Quiet.” I was both impressed and a little jealous that Iceland’s great diva had discovered the same song I had (and copied Hutton’s chart, pretty much note for note). But this is a kind of pop reclamation I’m wholeheartedly in favor of, along the lines of what the Blues Brothers did for the Chips’s “Rubber Biscuit”, or Elvis Costello did for Gram Parsons's “I’m Your Toy”, or what That ’70s Show did for Big Star's “In the Street.”

Into that hit-waiting-to-happen sweepstakes I would like to enter “Control Yourself,” an utterly beguiling lite-blues shuffle that is the standout track on Duet, the underrated Doris Day/André Previn record from 1962. I’ve already written about my admiration for Day as a song interpreter (as opposed to a cultural icon). But one thing that’s great about this song, an original by Previn, with lyrics by his wife, Dory Langdon Previn, is the way it seems to gently tweak Day’s rep as an uptight Puritan, with music that works subtly and slyly against the po-faced lyric. It’s not quite Hysterium bleating “I’m calm” in Funny Thing, but the way the percolating boogie of Previn's piano pulses under the clipped, self-flagellating iambs of the lyric (“Control yourself/Contain yourself/Restrict yourself/Restrain yourself”) suggests a witty, almost sketch-comedy-worthy premise. (I just happily imagined the Muppets tackling this one.) Lest we miss the irony, the song’s climax comes on the second bridge, when Day hits an intense blue note—and A-flat over an F7 chord (2:29 above)—that belies the cheery advice, “Try to imitate the guy/Who grins when things look bad.” Making apple-cheeked Doris Day belt a blues-bite chord may not be quite as perverse as the scene in The Man Who Knew Too Much when Hitch had Jimmy Stewart forcibly sedate her, but it’s in the ballpark.

And it seems to me that this brittle control-freak contrast could be pushed further by the right nervy chanteuse (or chanteur). Really, the entire agenda of this post is to convince you that “Control Yourself” deserves to be a minor cabaret standard (along with such insufficiently known gems as “Mr. Sellack” and “Whatshername”—but more on those in future installments). Indeed when I saw that Nellie McKay had done a Doris Day tribute album, I was shocked to find that she had not done this one. I should probably take the song’s advice that “life is just too short to spend it in a huff,” but honestly it weighs on me that this song is so underloved. Zing boom! I feel better to have shared this with you.