Strangers in the Night


"Strangers in the Night" is a song credited to Ivo Robić and Bert Kaempfert with English lyrics by Charles Singleton and Eddie Snyder. Kaempfert originally used it under the title "Beddy Bye" as part of the instrumental score for the movie A Man Could Get Killed. The song was made famous in 1966 by Frank Sinatra, although it was initially given to Melina Mercouri, who thought that a man's vocals would better suit the melody and therefore declined to sing it.
Reaching #1 on both the Billboard Hot 100 chart and the Easy Listening chart, it was the title song for Sinatra's 1966 album Strangers in the Night, which became his most commercially successful album. The song also reached No. 1 on the UK Singles Chart.
Sinatra's recording won him the Grammy Award for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance and the Grammy Award for Record of the Year, as well as a Grammy Award for Best Arrangement Accompanying a Vocalist or Instrumentalist for Ernie Freeman at the Grammy Awards of 1967.

Authorship disputes

Avo Uvezian

In an interview, Avo Uvezian gave an account of the story behind "Strangers in the Night", stating that he originally composed the song for Frank Sinatra while in New York at the request of a mutual friend who wanted to introduce the two. He wrote the melody after which someone else put in the lyrics and the song was originally titled "Broken Guitar". He presented the song to Sinatra a week later, but Sinatra did not like the lyrics, so they were rewritten and the song was renamed and became known as "Strangers in the Night".
When asked about why someone else was claiming the song, Uvezian went on to say that since Kaempfert was a friend of his and in the industry, he asked him to publish the German version in Germany so the two could split the profits, since Uvezian did not feel he would get paid for his work on the song in the US. Uvezian stated that when he gave the music to Kaempfert the song had already been renamed and lyrics revised. Uvezian also stated that Kaempfert gave him a letter acknowledging Uvezian as the composer.

Ivo Robić

It is sometimes claimed that Croatian singer Ivo Robić was the original composer of "Strangers in the Night", and that he sold the rights to Kaempfert after entering it without success in a song contest in Yugoslavia. This has not been substantiated. Robić—often referred to as "Mr. Morgen" for his 1950s charts success with "Morgen", created in collaboration with Bert Kaempfert—was rather the singer of the Croatian-language version of the song, called "Stranci u noći."
It was published in 1966 by the Yugoslav record company Jugoton under the serial number EPY-3779. On the label of the record, Kaempfert and Marija Renota are stated as authors, wherein Renota is the author of the Croatian lyrics. The original composition of "Strangers" was under the title "Beddy Bye"—referring to the lead character William Beddoes—as an instrumental for the score of the movie A Man Could Get Killed.
The phrase "Strangers in the Night" was created after the composition, when New York music publishers Roosevelt Music requested that lyricists Eddie Snyder and Charles Singleton put some words to the tune. "Stranci u noći" is a literal translation of this phrase.
In an interview on Croatian TV with a renowned Croatian composer Stjepan Mihaljinec, Robić stated that he had composed a song "Ta ljetna noć" and sent it to a festival in former Yugoslavia, where it was rejected. Then he sang a first few tunes from that song, identical to the first few tunes from "Strangers in the Night". He added that, later, Bert Kaempfert “composed” for him that very same song, which later became known as "Strangers in the Night".

Philippe-Gérard

In 1967 French composer Michel Philippe-Gérard established a claim that the melody of "Strangers" was based on his composition "Magic Tango", which was published in 1953 through Chappells in New York. Royalties from the song were thus frozen until a court in Paris ruled in 1971 against plagiarism, stating that many songs were based on similar constant factors.

Recording

The track was recorded on April 11, 1966, one month before the rest of the album. Hal Blaine was the drummer on the record and Glen Campbell played rhythm guitar..
One of the most memorable and recognizable features of the record is Sinatra's scat improvisation of the melody with the syllables "doo-be-doo-be-doo" as the song fades to the end. For the CD Nothing but the Best, the song was remastered and the running time is 2:45 instead of the usual 2:35. The extra ten seconds is just a continuation of Sinatra's scat singing. In 1968, CBS television executive Fred Silverman was inspired by the scat whilst listening to the recording on a red-eye flight to a development meeting for a Saturday morning cartoon show and decided to rename the dog character to "Scooby-Doo".
Sinatra despised the song, calling it at one time "a piece of shit" and "the worst fucking song that I have ever heard." He was not afraid to voice his disapproval of playing it live. In spite of his contempt for the song, for the first time in 11 years he had a #1 hit, and it remained on the charts for 15 weeks.

Cover versions

"Strangers in the Night" was covered by many other artists, among them:
The song has been recorded in Spanish by several artists under the title "Extraños en la noche", among them: