Remarks:
This was on her 1961 album “Wonderful Day”. It never charted. Her days of top-ten hits ran from 1945 to 1958. But this is the song that appears in Raoul Peck’s 2017 film about James Baldwin, “I Am Not Your Negro”. Peck has it play as he shows images of lynching, right after quoting Baldwin saying:
“In this country, for a dangerously long time, there have been two levels of experience. One, to put it cruelly, can be summed up in the images of Gary Cooper and Doris Day, two of the most grotesque appeals to innocence the world has ever seen. And the other, subterranean, indispensable, and denied, can be summed up, let us say, in the tone and face of Ray Charles. And there has never been any genuine confrontation between these two levels of experience.”
That might seem unfair to Doris Day, but as Peck told Dazed:
“I’m sure your generation knows less about Doris Day, but she was an icon for Hollywood… well, they didn’t call it ‘whiteness’ at the time, but it’s the clean, very romantic Hollywood image. I was submitted to that image as well. I loved watching Doris Day films, but it’s an illusion of real life. Baldwin deconstructs that image.”
See also:
Lyrics:
Should I be fire or ice
Should I be firm or tender
Should I be bad or nice
Should I surrender?
Shall I resist my heart
Shall I deny its splendor
Shall I insist we fight
Should I surrender?
His pleading words so tenderly
Entreat me
Is this the night that love finally
Defeats me
Should I avoid his touch
Should I play a shy pretender
Should I admit I’d much rather
Surrender
Surrender
Surrender
Surrender
Sources: Genius Lyrics, Dazed.
Abagond 
I used to enjoy her innocence and so watched every movie she and Rock Hudson starred in. Both hid their secrets rather well. When I look at her now, I see her two faces. The one that shouts truth is the one done up in blackface. The same goes for Shirley Temple BLACK. I watched the part about the children “up there” being sent down to earth. None of those souls were people of color. I turned off the television.
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Oops! The movie was “Blue Bird.”
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I watched “I Am Not Your Negro;” the only part I thought that wasn’t thoughtful was Baldwin’s unfair put-down of Day and Cooper. Slam Hollywood’s dream machine all you want; they were employees not executives. And Day’s personal life had little to do with her image on screen
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Since Abagond won’t do it, I’ll do it for him:
Requiescat in pace.
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