Begin the Beguine
“a maverick, it is an unprecedented experiment”
The 114 bars of the longest entry in the American Songbook have always divided critical opinion. In his American Popular Song: The Great Innovators 1900–1950 Alec Wilder seems personally affronted by a tune
I cannot sing or whistle or play from start to finish without the printed music … about the sixtieth measure I find myself muttering, ‘End the Beguine’
Not for you then, Alec. But as Arthur Askey would reply to hecklers, ‘you’re a million pounds too late for that’. Beguine was already an established as one of Cole Porter’s many entries in the Great American Songbook.
Porter began writing Beguine during a South Pacific cruise (as you do if you’re Mr High Society). It then featured in Jubilee, which opened on Broadway in October 1935. The show flopped and the song with it.
Janet Baker took up what was labelled a rumba a year later, with the same result. Other popular performers walked quickly past. A weird windy tune you couldn’t whistle but went on forever — a tough sell.
Song Structure
One problem was that they couldn’t pin down what they were singing about. There was a dance called the Beguine in Martinique — but it wasn’t the folk tune that Porter had heard. Nor was it formally a rhumba, though it did have a vaguely Latin- Caribbean feel.
Begin the Beguine also departs from the traditional AABA structure of the standard pop songs of the era. Typically this consisted of a repeated eight bar strain (A), followed by an eight bar bridge (B) moving back to A again.
Porter had wandered a long way off the reservation. In his own words:
one theme of 16 bars repeated endlessly and then finished off with a new theme which is repeated twice.
So no introductory verse and no bridge. You can why this might have left the purist Wilder in a foul mood when he ploughed through the score.
Arrangement
Beguine was slipping under the waves until it inspired the interest of a young band leader. Artie Shaw intuited that Beguine was what today would be inelegantly termed ‘a banger’: a song with the potential to fill his dance floor. He set about making the Beguine swing, starting by picking the brains of his classically trained violinist, Jerry Gray.
“Jerry and I worked very closely in those days …like Duke [Ellington] and Billy Strayhorn. I would give him sketches or ideas and he would score them.” Source
Gray came up with the goods but when they rehearsed Shaw immediately saw that another change was needed.
It was arranged in a beguine rhythm — bhum bhum, bhum pah bhum — but Artie {wanted} a song would play at the Waldorf. So he said, ‘Let’s do it in four-four,’
Swing Time
Artie’s instincts were vindicated but he could never pinpoint the secret sauce: “Sometimes you just hit a way of doing a song, that for some unknown reason the public buys, en masse.”
And then some. Reaching number no. 3 on Billboard Chart was just the start of the Beguine gold rush. In 1940 it shared billing with Fred Astaire in a major musical. Every major swing orchestra took it up, every audience called for it.
Early on Artie met Cole Porter at a party. The composer warmly shook his hand and said, “Happy to meet my collaborator.”
“Does that mean I get royalties?”
It did not but Shaw was now a major league Hollywood celebrity. This broadened the field of his womanising and would ultimately lead to a Henry VIII beating tally of wives.
Shaw later conceded that he was ‘a very difficult man’. This applied to music, too. As this became more formally ambitious, with pieces like his Clarinet Concerto (1940), Shaw became increasingly hoity-toity about his golden goose. In the the 1950s he stopped performing Beguine. Then he stopped playing at all — for nearly thirty years.
Eventually he realised that the problem was his tortured psyche rather than the Porter song. Towards the end of his life he said, “it still holds up; that [record] goes on and on.”
The Words
Porter is rightly celebrated for his lyric writing, though Sondheim does suggest that he overdid the famed word play (kettles and pots, Steve!). But it is important to bear in mind that the song was written to fit the book (story) of Jubilee, rather than the bands and singers who later took it up.
The original words for Beguine the Begin float beautifully with the melody. They are stiff in places — ‘To live it again is past all endeavour’ — alongside magical moments (‘clutches my heart’).
It’s a fine lyric but the two most commercially successful interpretations sidestep all but the refrain. Obviously, Artie Shaw couldn’t toot the exact words ‘what rapture serene’ however well he conveyed their deeper meaning. But for the silver medalist the avoidance it is more intriguing.
Enter Iglesias
Julio’s barnstorming 1981 version was the first (almost) all Spanish British chart topper. It kicks off with the title in English but then switches to a new Spanish lyric. This ditches the dance connection for a conventional boy-loses-girl-but-pleads-for-a-reprieve narrative:
Quiero saber si tú aun me quieres/Quiero volver a empezar
Loosely translated: I want to know if you still love me/I want to know if we can start again.
Then apropos nothing, back to the the refrain in English. Shouldn’t work but does despite the overblown eighties production. For me this because the three key elements remain: the melody, the title and the wistful mood.
Making a show tune a standalone success is a tightrope walk. The show lyric evokes a ‘memory evergreen’ but there are few details that resonate. ‘A night of tropical splendour’ palm trees swaying — we get it.
And yet the words haven’t burrowed into the collective memory, as have with Hammerstein’s similarly nostalgic My Favourite Things. When Coltrane bends notes on his saxophone we hear ‘brown paper packages tied up with string’ in our heads. The verses of Beguine don’t have the vivid physical detail to achieve the same visceral impact
Granted, we may have seen The Sound of Music rather more times than Jubilee. But That’s Entertainment, as another brilliant lyricist, Howard Dietz would later write. Cole Porter, who so marvellously combined artistry and theatrical artisanship, fully accepted the rules.
