It Had to Be You (song)
1924 song composed by Isham Jones, lyrics by Gus Kahn
"It Had to Be You" is a popular song composed by Isham Jones, with lyrics by Gus Kahn. It was published on May 9, 1924 (1924-05-09). by Jerome H. Remick & Co. of New York. The Isham Jones Orchestra recorded an instrumental version of it on April 24, 1924 (1924-04-24), at Brunswick Studios, 799 Seventh Avenue, New York City, and it was released in July.
A version with lyrics by Gus Kahn and vocal by Marion Harris (who had signed with Brunswick in 1922) and Phil Ohman on piano was recorded for Brunswick in March 1924.
Other versions
A version by Doris Day and the Paul Weston Orchestra appeared on the 1951 I'll See You In My Dreams soundtrack album.
Frank Sinatra together with the Billy May Orchestra recorded a version for Frank Sinatra's 1980 Trilogy: Past Present Future.
Appearances in film and television
By Ruth Etting in the 1936 short film Melody in May
By Edward G. Robinson and Harry Seymour with Seymour on piano in the 1938 film A Slight Case of Murder
By Priscilla Lane in the 1939 film The Roaring Twenties
In the 1940 Merrie Melodies cartoon, Cross Country Detours, to which a lizard performs a striptease to the song to shed her skin
By Dooley Wilson in the 1942 film Casablanca
Daffy Duck performs a striptease to the song in the 1943 Looney Tunes cartoon The Wise Quacking Duck
By Dick Haymes and Helen Forrest, featured in the R.K.O. Picture Show Business with Victor Young Orchestra
By Dolores Gray in the 1944 film Mr. Skeffington
By George Murphy in Show Business (1944)
Betty Hutton in the 1945 film Incendiary Blonde
Faye Emerson in the 1945 film Danger Signal
A parody of Frank Sinatra sings the song in the 1946 Looney Tunes cartoon Book Revue
By Ginger Rogers and Cornel Wilde in the 1947 film It Had to Be You
Gene Kelly and Marie McDonald danced to it in the 1947 film Living in a Big Way (while it was being sung by a mixed group)
In the 1951 film I'll See You in My Dreams (based loosely upon the lives of Gus Kahn and his wife Grace LeBoy Kahn)
Joanne Dru sang a portion of it in 1955's Hell on Frisco Bay.
“It Had to Be You (song)” enters the record as 1924 song composed by Isham Jones, lyrics by Gus Kahn. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what song, composed and Isham can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“It Had to Be You (song)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, song, composed and Isham provides the most credible route into that argument.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6091772. The first chronological checks are 1924, 1922, 1951 and 1980.
Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “It Had to Be You (song)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.