Oddly enough, after recording five consecutive tie-in albums for her Warner Bros. movie musicals on Columbia Records in 1950-1951, each of which hit the Top Five with two going to number one,
Doris Day did not cut a record of songs from her 1952 movie April in Paris. But she returned to the practice in 1953 with
By the Light of the Silvery Moon, the sequel to
On Moonlight Bay, which was set again in the World War I era, allowing for the inclusion of lots of Tin Pan Alley songs from the period (songs Warner held the copyrights to). None of the tie-in albums had featured actual soundtrack recordings, but on occasion Columbia had brought in one of the other stars of the films to provide a semblance of similarity.
Gordon MacRae,
Day's co-star, was contracted to Capitol Records and unavailable, and this time Columbia didn't bother to give the impression that this was anything but a
Doris Day solo album. Backed by
Paul Weston's orchestra and the Norman Luboff Choir, she sang all the songs, including ones
MacRae had sung by himself in the film and ones on which they had performed duets. As usual, she had a good grasp of the material, giving it greater depth than it really deserved. There was a recycled feel to the disc, nevertheless;
Day had performed "Ain't We Got Fun?" with
Danny Thomas on her most recent LP release, the I'll See You in My Dreams album in 1951, so it didn't bear repeating this soon, and the overall quality of the songs didn't match the ones in
On Moonlight Bay. But
Day's fans were ready for her return to the LP racks and put the album in the Top Five, her seventh consecutive album to achieve such a ranking. ~ William Ruhlmann