A Certain Smile

Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster wrote this ballad in 1958 for the film of the same name, and Johnny Mathis sang it on screen and on the hit single. The A Certain Smile chords here are written out as a pianist would play them, several a bar, in F at a walking 110 with the melody on top. The backing track follows this chart, so the tempo and the key can both be moved to suit whoever is singing or playing it.

Who wrote "A Certain Smile"

The music is Sammy Fain's and the words Paul Francis Webster's — a pairing that had already won two Academy Awards together, for "Secret Love" and "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing". They wrote this one in 1958 as the title song of the 20th Century Fox picture taken from Françoise Sagan's novel, and it was nominated for Best Original Song in 1959, losing to the title song from Gigi. Johnny Mathis recorded it on 12 May 1958 with an orchestra conducted by Ray Ellis, and Columbia released it on 2 June. It reached the top twenty in America and number four in Britain, and it is still under copyright.

Recordings that made it a standard

• Johnny Mathis, single (Columbia, 1958) — the film version and the one everybody knows. Ellis's strings hold the long notes while Mathis sings across the bar lines rather than with them, which is how the tune came to be phrased ever after.
• Johnny Mathis, More Johnny's Greatest Hits (1959) — the album that carried the single into people's houses, opening the second side. The same performance, and the copy most listeners actually owned.
• Astrud Gilberto and Walter Wanderley, A Certain Smile, a Certain Sadness (Verve, 1967) — recorded in September 1966 with Wanderley's organ, José Marino on bass and Claudio Slon on drums. They open the record with it and are gone in ninety seconds, taking the ballad at a bossa lilt instead of a crooner's rubato — the reading that made it a tune for instrumentalists and not only for singers.

The changes

Thirty bars and then a two-bar hold on F: a sixteen-bar opening strain, an eight-bar restatement, and a six-bar last section shorter than the ear expects. That odd six is worth counting out before playing it with anyone.

Almost every bar of the first strain is a line cliché rather than a chord change. Gm, GmMaj7, Gm7 is one voice walking down inside a held G minor; F, FMaj7, FMaj9, F6 is the same trick over the tonic; Dm, DmMaj7, Dm7 does it again later. Read them as one chord with a moving note, not as four chords, or the tempo will sag. Note too where the tune starts: on Gm, the ii chord, with F not arriving until bar three.

The middle of the strain travels. Em7 to A7 is a ii-V into D minor, and the A7 bar alternates the two; Dm walks its own line down to G9, which turns to C and CMaj7 — the chart genuinely visits the dominant key rather than passing through it. Dm7 to G7 and Gm7 to C9 to F bring it home, and C7 sends it round again. The eight-bar section compresses the opening and ends F7, Cm7, F7, pointing at B flat and not going there.

The last six bars are the hard ones. A to Bb in one bar is a pair of triads a half step apart belonging to no key established so far; D7 and D7b9 are the dominant of Gm7, which does arrive; and Bbm6 with A+ between its two halves is a borrowed minor subdominant with an augmented chord threaded through. F and Dm then set up Gm7 to C9 and the hold. Players stumble at that Bbm6 bar.