They’ll Never Believe Me

They’ll Never Believe Me is a Jerome Kern song whose performance becomes a pointed moment in Harry S. Truman and Bess Wallace’s courtship. As a handsome, dark-haired leading man sang of a man astonished to have been chosen as a woman’s future husband, Truman held Bess’s hand—a quiet gesture that placed the song’s theme close to their own relationship.

Performance and Setting

On a date in Kansas City, Truman took Bess to see Julia Sanderson and Donald Brian starring in the new show The Girl from Utah. During the performance, the leading man sang the show’s biggest hit, They’ll Never Believe Me, while Truman held Bess’s hand. The account supplies no exact date for the outing, but singles out the gesture and song together, making the performance more than a passing detail of the evening.

Lyrics and Courtship

The song’s speaker marvels that others will scarcely believe a woman from the wide world has chosen him as the man she will one day marry. That premise resonates with the courtship account’s description of Truman and Bess: in November 1913, Bess had told him that if she ever married anyone, it would be him, and they agreed to be secretly engaged. The song does not establish what either understood by the parallel, but its language gives the scene an apt emotional counterpoint: a public declaration of incredulous happiness accompanies Truman’s private, physical expression of affection.

Narrative Significance

The moment joins the theatrical and the personal without making them identical. The leading man voices the astonishment of being chosen; Truman, who had struggled to speak his feelings aloud and relied on letters to express them, holds Bess’s hand instead. The song therefore frames the courtship through a contrast between performed declaration and restrained gesture, while its title captures the disbelief and happiness associated with their promise.