“The Way You Look To-night” is a song from the film Swing Time that was performed by Fred Astaire and composed by Jerome Kern with lyrics written by Dorothy Fields. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1936. Fields remarked, “The first time Jerry played that melody for me I went out and started to cry. The release absolutely killed me. I couldn’t stop, it was so beautiful.” In the movie, Astaire sang “The Way You Look To-night” to Ginger Rogers while she was washing her hair in an adjacent room. Astaire’s recording was a top seller in 1936. The song was sung by Fred Astaire in the 1936 film Swing Time in the key of D major, but it is typically performed in E-flat major with a modulation to G-flat major.
Bing Crosby and his wife Dixie Lee recorded the song as a duet in August 1936. To take advantage of the song’s success, pianist Teddy Wilson brought Billie Holiday into a studio 10 weeks after the film Swing Time was released. Holiday was 21 when she recorded “The Way You Look Tonight” with a small group led by Wilson in October 1936.
A number of British dance bands also made contemporary cover recordings of the song: Ambrose (with vocals by Sam Browne), Roy Fox (with vocals by Denny Dennis), Tommy Kinsman, Harry Roy, Carroll Gibbons and the Savoy Hotel Orpheans (vocal by George Melachrino) and Jay Wilbur (with vocals by Sam Costa).
Six years passed before the song appeared on the charts again, this time in a version by Benny Goodman with Peggy Lee on vocals and Mel Powell on celeste. The most popular and imitated version was recorded by Frank Sinatra with the Nelson Riddle orchestra in 1964. The Letterman found their first hit when their version reached No. 13 on the Billboard magazine Hot 100 singles chart in 1961 and No. 36 on the UK Singles Chart that same year.
Tony Bennett recorded the song on his album Long Ago and Far Away in 1958, and then again with the Ralph Sharon Trio for the film My Best Friend’s Wedding, released in 1997. The singer also recorded two duets of the song: with Faith Hill in 2011 on Duets II and one year later on his album Viva Duets with Thalia. A new version only accompanied by the piano of Bill Charlap was on the album The Silver Lining: The Songs of Jerome Kern in 2015.
