Hal David Knew the Way to San Jose

Dionne Warwick hated the song. The lyricist had spent World War II writing comedy revues with Carl Reiner — in Honolulu, not California. The composer cheerfully admitted he had no idea where the phrase had come from. Yet somehow, in 1968, three New Yorkers handed San Jose what may still be the most famous global name-check any American city outside Los Angeles and New York has ever received.

This is how it happened.

The Lyricist

Harold Lane David (May 25, 1921 – September 1, 2012) was a Brooklyn-born American lyricist best known for his collaborations with composer Burt Bacharach. Together, working out of New York City’s Brill Building, David and Bacharach wrote a staggering catalog of pop standards: “Walk On By,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” “What the World Needs Now Is Love,” “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” “(They Long to Be) Close to You,” “Alfie,” “What’s New, Pussycat?” — most of them shaped around the voice of a young singer named Dionne Warwick, whom they met when she was a 20-year-old backup vocalist.

Before any of that, though, there was a war.

Drafted into the U.S. Army shortly after Pearl Harbor, David was assigned to the Special Services Entertainment Branch and ultimately deployed to Hawaii. There, in a barracks-turned-writers’-room that reads today like a “Who Knew?” all by itself, he wrote musical revues and comedy sketches alongside fellow soldier Carl Reiner — the future creator of The Dick Van Dyke Show — and a supporting cast that included actor Maurice Evans, future game show host Allen Ludden, and the future Hogan’s Heroes star Werner Klemperer. One of their productions, Jumping Jupiter, ran for six months at Roosevelt High School in Honolulu. Irving Berlin reportedly attended several performances.

By the time Hal David came home from the Pacific, he had been writing songs and sketches alongside some of the funniest and most talented people of his generation. The career that followed was just a matter of time.

The Song

By the late 1960s, the Bacharach-David-Warwick partnership was producing hit after hit. Then came a single phrase that would tie Hal David’s name forever to a California city he had no obvious personal connection to.

“I heard the phrase ‘Do you know the way to San Jose,'” David later explained, “and from that I began to create the storyline that became the person who comes to Los Angeles to make his or her career in the entertainment business and has dreams of being a big star, and for most people it does not turn out to be quite that happy.”

The story was simple and emotionally true: a hometown native, weary of L.A.’s broken promises, packs up and heads home to a slower, more honest place. San Jose in 1968 was still transitioning from “The Valley of Heart’s Delight” — orchards, canneries, prune dryers, country roads — into the technology capital it would soon become. The city was big enough to symbolize opportunity, small enough to still feel like home. Hal David’s lyrics captured San Jose at exactly that hinge moment.

Released in April 1968 on Dionne Warwick’s album Dionne Warwick in Valley of the Dolls, “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” became her biggest international hit to that point. It sold more than 3.5 million copies worldwide. And it won Warwick her first Grammy Award — for Best Contemporary Pop Performance, Female — at the 1969 ceremony.

The Twist

Dionne Warwick almost didn’t record it.

“I was like, ‘Where is San Jose?'” she later told The Daily Mail, explaining her reluctance. She didn’t like the song. Bacharach and David had to talk her into it.

“Dionne did not want to record that song,” Bacharach later admitted to Record Collector magazine. “She didn’t like it. But we talked her into it and she did it. Her mind changed once it was a hit.”

Bacharach being Bacharach, he had a perfect summary of the whole accidental episode: “I just giggled all the way to the bank, what can I tell you?”

Did Hal David Actually Know the Way to San Jose?

Honest answer: not really. He was Brooklyn-born and Manhattan-based. His military service took him to Hawaii, not the Bay Area. He spent his civilian life in New York and later Los Angeles. He never made San Jose his home, and there is no reliable record of any extended personal time he spent here.

What he did was something arguably more remarkable. From a single overheard phrase — five words he caught somewhere and never forgot — he built a story so emotionally honest that millions of people around the world came to know San Jose’s name through a Dionne Warwick record. Not from a tourism campaign. Not from a news story. From a song.

Long before Apple, Google, NVIDIA, or “Silicon Valley” entered the global vocabulary, a New York lyricist who had never lived here gave the South Bay its first piece of international pop-cultural identity.

The Legacy

Hal David died September 1, 2012, in Los Angeles at age 91. He left behind one of the most celebrated catalogs in American songwriting — an Academy Award, multiple Grammys, induction into both the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, Broadway success, and decades of leadership at ASCAP. Most of his songs about love, longing, and loss have aged into standards that working singers still close out their sets with.

But here in Santa Clara County, one Hal David song endures above all the others — the one he wrote without ever calling this city home.

Who knew? Now you do.