The ‘Bewitched’ Theme Song Was a Deep Cut for… Peggy Lee?

If you were exactly the kind of person Nick at Nite was invented for (i.e., kind of old or very young insomniacs), you could hum the Bewitched theme song in your sleep, and probably did at some point. Maybe you even made up your own words to the simple little instrumental tune. Even Nickelodeon did, for a 1996 commercial in which a loungey-sounding man croons:

‘Bewitched,’ ‘Bewitched,’ the theme song to Bewitched
‘Bewitched,’ ‘Bewitched,’ the one song with a twitch
The music swings, the cartoon plays, and Sam wiggles her nose
La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, that’s how it goes
So watch Bewitched here on Nick at Nite

Which is silly, because right from the beginning, the Bewitched theme song already had words. In fact, those words were written by Howard Greenfield, the legendary mid-century lyricist behind “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” by Neil Sedaka and “Where the Boys Are” by Connie Francis. He and composer Jack Keller were tapped in 1963 to put together a theme song for a magical new sitcom, and they delivered the familiar ditty still famous today alongside the following lyrics:

Bewitched, bewitched, you’ve got me in your spell
Bewitched, bewitched, you know your craft so well
Before I knew what you were doing, I looked in your eyes
That brand of woo that you’ve been brew-in’ took me by surprise
You witch, you witch, one thing that’s for sure
That stuff you pitch just hasn’t got a cure
My heart was under lock and key, but somehow it got unhitched
I never thought my heart could be had, but now I’m caught and I’m kinda glad to be
Bewitched. Bewitched-witched

However, producers decided to cut the lyrics in favor of an orchestral arrangement by Warren Barker, who provided the score for the rest of the series, including the xylophone riff that always accompanied the twitch of Samantha Stephens’ nose, which is included in the theme song as well. They considered throwing them back in for the second season, but they were unwilling to pay a singer $2,500 for it. To be fair, that was approximately a janitor’s yearly salary back then.

Weirdly, despite the general public’s unawareness of the vocal track, recording the song became trendy among jazz singers. It was recorded by Steve Lawrence of the pop duo Steve and Eydie, jazz great Jimmy Smith and no less luminary a figure than Peggy Lee of “Fever,” “Big Spendor” and drag queen worship fame. It appeared on Lee’s 1965 album Pass Me By, but it wasn’t even released as a single, buried at the end of the first side as filler. 

Although the words of the song, as the Library of Congress puts it, “faded from consciousness over many decades of reruns,” Greenfield and Keller got their due, and you got a new way to be annoying to the people you watch those reruns with.