By late 1966, “Alfie” had been recorded by more than forty artists. Cilla Black had taken it into the British charts. Cher had sung it over the American prints of the film. Sonny Rollins had played it as a jazz instrumental. And Dionne Warwick — the singer Burt Bacharach and Hal David had wanted all along — wanted nothing to do with it.
She would later joke, in a 1983 concert televised on PBS, that she was the 43rd person to record “Alfie.” What she didn’t say that night was that her version — cut in a single take, released as a mere B-side — would become the definitive one, the one that turned a movie theme into a standard, and the one she would sing at the Academy Awards. This is the story of how the song nobody wanted became the song everybody remembers.
A Song Written for Someone Else’s Movie
It started with a film. “Alfie,” released in 1966 and starring Michael Caine as a charming, faithless Cockney playboy, was one of the defining movies of swinging London — a hit that earned Caine an Academy Award nomination and captured the era’s restless spirit. Bacharach and David — already Warwick’s golden songwriting team — were hired to write a title song, and they wrote it with Warwick’s voice in their ears. She was their muse, their most prolific interpreter, the singer who could navigate Bacharach’s impossible melodies as if they were lullabies.
But the film’s British producers had other ideas. A film set firmly in swinging London, they argued, needed a British singer. Bacharach and David’s preference for Warwick was overruled. The song went first to Sandie Shaw, who reportedly turned it down. Then it went to Cilla Black — the Liverpool singer managed by Brian Epstein, already a star in Britain. Black herself was baffled by the assignment. “I actually said to Brian, ‘I can’t do this,’” she later recalled. “For a start — Alfie?? You call your dog Alfie!”
Black recorded it anyway, and her version became the British hit. In America, the film’s prints used a version by Cher, which climbed the U.S. charts on its own. The jazz world got Sonny Rollins’s instrumental. By the time anyone thought of Dionne Warwick again, “Alfie” felt like old news — a song that had already been sung every way it could be sung.
The 43rd Time’s the Charm
Warwick’s reluctance was understandable. What was the point of recording a song that Cilla Black, Cher, and forty others had already cut — a song the film’s producers hadn’t even wanted her to sing in the first place? But Bacharach was insistent, and Bacharach at his most insistent was hard to refuse. He believed — correctly, as it turned out — that Dionne could make it a hit, and he took her into the studio with a brand-new arrangement built from the ground up for her voice.
She nailed it in one take — one pass through a melody that had defeated lesser singers, delivered with the casual perfection of a woman who had been singing Bacharach’s impossible intervals for years.
There’s a lesson in that single take about the Warwick-Bacharach partnership at its peak. Bacharach’s melodies were notoriously difficult — full of odd time signatures, unexpected key changes, and intervals that other singers found unsingable. Warwick didn’t just sing them; she made them sound inevitable. “Alfie” is a philosophical lyric — a gentle interrogation of a man who has everything except the things that matter — set to a melody that keeps slipping out from under you. In Warwick’s hands, it sounded like the most natural thing in the world: a cool, precise, quietly devastating question, asked by someone who already knows the answer.
The B-Side That Became the Song
Here’s the part of the story that feels like pure Dionne Warwick. When Scepter Records released the single in March 1967, “Alfie” wasn’t the A-side. It was the B-side — the flip of a Bacharach-David ballad called “The Beginning of Loneliness.” The label, once again, had decided which song was the hit.
And once again, the public overruled them.
It was the third time in Warwick’s career that a B-side had upended the label’s plans. “Walk On By” had started life as the B-side of “Any Old Time of Day” in 1964 before disc jockeys flipped it into a classic. “I Say a Little Prayer” had been a B-side too, before becoming a Top 5 smash. Now “Alfie” followed the same improbable path: radio played the flip side, listeners responded, and the B-side became the hit — climbing to No. 15 on the Billboard Hot 100 and into the Top 5 on the R&B chart.
There’s something almost poetic about it. The song that forty-two singers had recorded before her, the song she hadn’t wanted to sing, the song the label had buried on the back of the single — became one of the defining records of her career. It appeared on her January 1967 album “Here Where There Is Love,” her first RIAA-certified gold album, alongside “Trains and Boats and Planes” and “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself.” “Alfie” was the quiet centerpiece of the record that proved she was no singles artist — she was an album artist, a career artist.
The Night She Sang It for the Academy
On April 10, 1967, Dionne Warwick walked onto the stage of the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium and sang “Alfie” at the 39th Academy Awards. The song had been nominated for Best Original Song — the film world’s official recognition that Bacharach and David had written something special.
It didn’t win. (The Oscar went to “Born Free.”) But the performance was the real prize. There was Warwick — a 26-year-old Black woman from East Orange, New Jersey, singing a song the British film industry hadn’t thought she was right for, on the biggest stage in American entertainment. In the film itself, the song had been performed by Cilla Black and Cher. On Oscar night, it belonged to Dionne.
It wouldn’t be her last appearance at the ceremony, either. Warwick would go on to perform at the Academy Awards four times in total — “Alfie” in 1967, “It Goes Like It Goes” from “Norma Rae” in 1980, “People Alone” from “The Competition” in 1981, and a Bacharach medley in 2000. But the first time was the one that mattered most: the night she claimed a song that had been kept from her and made it hers forever.
The Three Alfies: Cilla, Cher, and Dionne
It’s worth pausing to appreciate how strange the “Alfie” sweepstakes really was. Three major artists cut the song within months of each other, and each version tells a different story about the music business in 1966.
Cilla Black’s version was the British establishment choice — the Liverpool pop star, managed by Brian Epstein, singing for a London film. It was a hit in the UK and scraped the American charts at No. 95. Cher’s version was the Hollywood compromise, dubbed over the American prints of the film; it climbed to No. 33 in the US. And then there was Dionne’s: the version Bacharach and David had wanted from the start, recorded last, released as a B-side, and the biggest American hit of the three at No. 15 pop and Top 5 R&B.
History has rendered its verdict. Cilla’s version is a period curio. Cher’s is a footnote. Dionne’s is the standard — the one singers still measure themselves against, the one that gets sung at tribute concerts and Kennedy Center Honors. (At Warwick’s own Kennedy Center Honor in 2023, Cynthia Erivo performed “Alfie” in tribute — a torch passing across generations.) Being first doesn’t matter. Being right matters.
The Song the Film Almost Didn’t Keep
There’s one more twist in the “Alfie” saga, and it’s pure Hollywood. For all the fuss over which singer would perform the title song, the film itself barely used a vocal version at all. The movie’s score leaned on Sonny Rollins’s smoky jazz instrumental of the theme — the tenor saxophone doing the emotional heavy lifting while Michael Caine did his charming-roguish thing on screen.
Think about what that means. Bacharach and David wrote one of the great songs of the decade for a film that used it mostly as background music. The song had to escape the movie to become itself — first through Cilla and Cher, then definitively through Dionne. “Alfie” didn’t need the film. The film, if anything, needed “Alfie” — needed the philosophical weight of Hal David’s lyric to give Michael Caine’s womanizing chauffeur a soul.
That’s why the song outlived the movie. Films date; questions don’t. “What’s it all about, Alfie?” is as urgent now as it was in swinging London. And nobody asks it better than the woman who asked it last — in one take, on the B-side, at No. 15 with a bullet.
The Signature
Today, “Alfie” is considered Dionne Warwick’s signature song — the one she is asked to sing above all others, the one that closes the circle on the Bacharach-David years. It’s a remarkable fate for a song she initially refused, recorded in one take, and released as a B-side.
It’s also a parable about the music business. The definitive version of “Alfie” was the one the producers didn’t want, sung by the singer who recorded it 43rd, released as the B-side of another song, after being talked into it by a composer who wouldn’t take no for an answer. Being first doesn’t matter. Being right matters — and sometimes the masterpiece is the afterthought.
And there’s a final, gracious coda to the Cilla Black rivalry. Years later, Warwick recorded Black’s own hit “You’re My World” for her 1968 album “Dionne Warwick in Valley of the Dolls” — a quiet acknowledgment, perhaps, that in the end the songs belonged to everyone. The rivalry that had once made her furious mellowed into mutual respect. The songs outlasted the squabbles.
What endures about “Alfie” is the way Warwick sings it — not as a movie theme, not as a chart contender, but as a genuine question about what a life is for. “What’s it all about, Alfie?” The lyric asks whether love is the answer, and Warwick’s delivery suggests she knows it is, even if Alfie himself hasn’t figured it out yet. Forty-two singers had asked the question before her. She was the first one who sounded like she meant it.
That’s the Dionne Warwick story in miniature: the typo that became a name, the B-sides that became classics, the song she didn’t want that became her signature. She never chased the hits. She just sang them better than anyone else — in one take — and let the world catch up. And “Alfie,” the song that had to travel through three singers, two countries, and one Academy Awards ceremony to find its true voice, finally found it in the last place anyone looked: the B-side of a single nobody remembers, sung by the woman they should have called first.
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