“Begin the Beguine” is a popular song written by Cole Porter. Porter composed the song during a 1935 Pacific cruise aboard the Cunard ocean liner Franconia from Kalabahi, Indonesia to Fiji. In October 1935, it was introduced by June Knight in the Broadway musical Jubilee, produced at the Imperial Theatre in New York City. The beguine is a dance and music form, similar to a slow rhumba. In his book American Popular Song: The Great Innovators 1900–1950, musicologist and composer Alex Wilder, described “Begin the Beguine” as “a maverick, it is an unprecedented experiment and one which, to this day, after hearing it hundreds of times, I cannot sing or whistle or play from start to finish without the printed music … about the sixtieth measure I find myself muttering another title, ‘End the Beguine’“
At first, the song gained little popularity, perhaps because of its length and unconventional form. Josephine Baker danced to it in her return to the United States in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1936, but neither she nor the song was successful. Two years later, however, bandleader Artie Shaw recorded an arrangement of the song, an extended swing orchestra version, in collaboration with his arranger and orchestrator, Jerry Gray. After signing a new recording contract with RCA Victor, Shaw chose “Begin the Beguine” to be the first of six tunes he would record with his new 14-piece band in his first recording session with RCA Victor. Until then, Shaw’s band had been having a tough time finding an identity and maintaining its existence without having had any popular hits of significance. His previous recording contract with Brunswick had lapsed at the end of 1937 without being renewed.
Because RCA Victor was pessimistic with the whole idea of recording the long tune “that nobody could remember from beginning to end anyway”, it was released as the “B” side of the record “Indian Love Call”, issued on the RCA Victor Bluebird label as catalogue number B-7746. Shaw’s persistence paid off when “Begin the Beguine” became a best-selling record in 1938, peaking at no. 3, skyrocketing Shaw and his band to fame and popularity. The recording became one of the most famous and popular of the entire Swing Era. Subsequent reissues by RCA Victor (catalogue number 20-1551) and later releases on LP, tape and CD have kept the recording continuously available ever since its original release in 1938.
After Shaw introduced the song to dance halls, MGM released the musical film Broadway Melody of 1940. The song is one of its musical numbers, first sung in dramatic style by mezzo-soprano Lois Hodnott on a tropical set, with Eleanor Powell and Fred Astaire dancing in flamenco choreography. It is continued in the then contemporary jazz style by The Music Maids, with Powell and Astaire tap dancing to a big-band accompaniment. In short order, all of the major big bands recorded it, including Harry James, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller, often as an instrumental, as in the film. As a vocal song, it also became a pop standard, beginning with Joe Loss and Chick Henderson, the first pop vocal record to sell a million copies; new interpretations are often still measured against renditions by Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald.
Julio Iglesias recorded a Spanish version of “Begin the Beguine”, titled “Volver a Empezar” in Spanish. Iglesias himself wrote new Spanish lyrics for this song, which is about lost love rather than a dance. Apart from the opening lines, the full song is in Spanish. The song was produced in Madrid with an arrangement by producer Ramón Arcusa, using the rhythm from Johnny Mathis’s disco version of the song. The song reached No. 1 in the Uk Singles Chart in December 1981. It is the first fully Spanish language song to have reached No. 1 on the British chart.
