Day by Day

One of the few Cahn songs where he collaborated with arrangers rather than dedicated composers — Axel Stordahl and Paul Weston were both longtime Sinatra collaborators who moonlighted as songwriters. The result is a gentle, unhurried love song that became a Sinatra staple in the late 1940s.

Doris Day’s 1956 recording brought the song to a new audience, and it later gained an unexpected second life as the title of the Stephen Schwartz musical Godspell (1971), which adapted its melody for an entirely different lyric.