[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.)
