What’s in a Song: Begin the Beguine (1)

[Cole Porter at the piano, sometime in the 1930s. For me, it’s easy to see in him,
from this photo, the song “Begin the Beguine” — but not the beguine itself.]

[This is another in an occasional series on popular songs with appeal across the generations. This post will be broken into two parts; Part 2 appears in a few days here.]

So let’s start with the obvious question for a word geek, that word: beguine.

As far as I can tell, every Google result for the word “beguine” (pronounced something like b’GEEN) refers to the song — with these exceptions:

• dictionary pages (some of them!) for the word itself;
• pages about a 13th- to 14th-century religious order, whose female adherents were called Beguines; and
• pages on which only the lyrics appear.*

And what does beguine refer to, in the context of the song? Wikipedia:

The beguine is a dance, similar to a slow rumba, that was very modestly popular in the 1930s, coming from the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, where the Martinique beguine is a slow close dance with a roll of hips.

(Indeed, a whole style or genre of music exists, known as biguine — not at all unrelated to the beguine dance.)

Cole Porter had two stories for where he encountered the dance before enshrining its name in the song. In one, he saw it performed on an island in the South Pacific; in the other, later version, he saw Martinique immigrants perform it on a Paris dance-hall stage. Charles Schwartz’s Cole Porter: A Biography offers a letter from Porter to a fan as an explanation which joins both of those stories into one:

I was living in Paris at the time and somebody suggested that I go to see the Black Martiniquois, many of whom lived in Paris, do their native dance called The Beguine. This I did quickly and I was very much taken by the rhythm of the dance, the rhythm was practically that of the already popular rumba but much faster. The moment I saw it I thought of BEGIN THE BEGUINE as a good title for a song and put it away in a notebook, adding a memorandum as to its rhythm and tempo.

About ten years later [on an island to the west of New Guinea, in what is now Indonesia, a] native dance was stated [?] for us, the melody of the first four bars of which was to become my song.

In these terms, then, the music of “Begin the Beguine” sprang from a Caribbean rhythm and a South Pacific melody. (Note, though: Porter was a notorious kidder and practical joker, and very aware of his popular image. Various other explanations have been offered — by Porter and others — for the song’s origin. Basically, all we truly know about the song is what anyone has known since it was published.)

In any case, what’s inarguable is that the song first appeared in a Broadway musical in 1935, called Jubilee. In the story, a family of royals in a fictional European country are (temporarily) forced to abandon their thrones, deciding to take up separate quests for long and fondly held dreams. The Prince encounters night-club singer Karen O’Kane (originally played by June Knight) at the Cafe Martinique, and that’s where the song is played, sung, and danced to.

“Begin the Beguine” took a while to become popular. Xavier Cugat’s Waldorf Astoria Orchestra released a recording of it — also in 1935 — with a vocal by Don Reid; this went as high as #13 on the charts (such as they were back then). (Cugat apparently claimed — though I’ve found only one reference to this — that Porter dedicated the song to him, and said further that he was actually present when its lightning struck Porter the first time.)

But what really broke “Beguine” out was a straight-up instrumental, a 1938 recording by Artie Shaw:

[Below, click Play button to begin. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:12 long.]

That little number became Shaw’s most popular, and he came to hate it. Here’s how New England jazz/folk radio station WICN tells the story on their page of information about the song:

Shaw was recording “Indian Love Call” at the time, and he wanted “Beguine” as the “B” side. Shaw later recalled “…the recording manager thought it was a waste of time and only let me make it after I had argued it would make a nice quiet contrast to “Indian Love Call.” Record buyers quickly discovered the “B” side, and “Begin the Beguine” became by far the biggest hit of 1938. It spent eighteen weeks on the pop charts, and six weeks at #1. After this success, every top swing band of the 1940s recorded the song, as did dozens of vocalists as well.

“Begin the Beguine” sold millions of copies and was on jukeboxes all over the world… However, Shaw was an accomplished musician who wished to record classical music, and he became frustrated with the constant requests to play “Begin the Beguine” when he had greater artistic aspirations. It has been said that he came to loathe the song, even though it gave him wealth and pop star notoriety. He was contemptuous of the bobby-soxers who idolized him and tore his clothes. In the New York Post he declared, “I hate the music business. I’m not interested in giving the public what they want… Autograph hunters? The hell with that. They aren’t listening. Only gawking. My friends, my advisors tell me that I’m a damned fool. ‘Look here,’ they shout at me. ‘You can’t do that. These people made you.’ You want to know my answer? I tell them if I was made by a bunch of morons, that’s just too bad.” Shaw left the music business in 1954 at the age of 43, never again to play his clarinet in public.

Most recordings and performances of “Beguine,” unlike Shaw’s arrangement, include the vocals. Here are the lyrics:

Begin the Beguine
(words and music by Cole Porter)

When they begin the beguine,
It brings back the sound of music so tender,
It brings back a night of tropical splendor,
It brings back a memory ever green.
I’m with you once more under the stars
And down by the shore an orchestra’s playing,
And even the palms seem to be swaying,
When they begin the beguine.
To live it again is past all endeavor
Except when that tune clutches my heart.
And there we are, swearing to love forever,
And promising never,
Never to part.
What moments divine, what rapture serene,
Till clouds came along to disperse the joys we had tasted.
And now when I hear people curse the chance that was wasted,
I know but too well what they mean;
So don’t let them begin the beguine!
Let the love that was once a fire remain an ember.
Let it sleep like the dead desire I only remember
When they begin the beguine.
Oh yes, let them begin the beguine, make them play
Till the stars that were there before return above you,
Till you whisper to me once more, “Darling, I love you!”
And we suddenly know what heaven we’re in,
When they begin the beguine.

(In its first version, the next-to-last line ended …know the sweetness of sin. Hmm.)

If you read my post of some months ago about “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” you may remember that I like, well, loose-jointed lyrics — those which streeeeetch out a line just a little too long, without sounding ridiculous, in a manner like poetry’s so-called “sprung rhythm.”

“Begin the Beguine” does something like that. Most popular American tunes are written in 4/4 time, to a length of 32 bars (or measures). “Beguine,” though, really stretches convention: those lyrics go on for over a hundred bars. Per The Poets of Tin Pan Alley, by Philip Furia, “along about the sixtieth measure’ [music critic Alec Wilder said he] finds himself pleading, ‘End the Beguine.'” Ha!

Even Porter himself may have found the song’s length and complex structure daunting; according to Wikipedia (without citation, and I myself couldn’t find any other reference), he once claimed, “I can never remember it — if I want to play I need to see the music in front of me!”

As for the story the lyrics tell, it’s far from a conventional June-moon-tune love story:

The narrator, at first apparently just nostalgic about a past romance, comes eventually to regret “the chance that was wasted.” By the time we hit the restatement of the recurring “let them begin the beguine” theme, it now has the ring of bitter irony: all that about dead desire, and experiences he (or she) can only remember but nevermore experience. It invokes almost a world- and love-weary feeling, like: Sure, sure, sure — the beguine. Right. That stinkin’ rotten beguine, I hate it, I tell you, hate it! Nice, huh?

In a couple-three days, I’ll post Part 2 of this entry has now been posted. That part covers a few of the more remarkable of the song’s many cover versions, and also address some curious elements of popular culture which it’s influenced.

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* “Beguine” is like “Moby” that way. Or “grail.” A name must exist for this phenomenon, the self-unawareness of works of literature and song. It works for movies, too, big-time. Think North by Northwest: the police desperately hunt an alleged murderer, a George Kaplan. Various all-points-bulletins go out describing the man — so tall, hair color X, last seen wearing Y, and so on. But none of them simply states the obvious: George Kaplan looks exactly like Cary Grant. The actor “Cary Grant” has existed in every world we know of — except the worlds depicted in Cary Grant movies.