“I Won’t Dance” is a song with music by Jerome Kern that has become a jazz standard. The song has two different sets of lyrics: the first written by Oscar Hammerstein II and Otto Harbach in 1934. Kern, Hammerstein and Harbach originally wrote “I Won’t Dance” for the 1934 London musical Three Sisters. However, Three Sisters flopped and was quickly forgotten.
The next year, Dorothy Fields (though Jimmy McHugh was also credited) was hired to help with the music for a film version of the 1933 Kern-Harbach musical Roberta. The writing team decided to make use of “I Won’t Dance” for the film, also named Roberta. However, Fields rewrote nearly all of the lyrics, making the song more playful and suggestive by having the narrator refuse to dance because “I know that music leads the way to romance”. The song became such a hit, largely due to the fact that it was performed by Fred Astaire, that it is now included in all stage revivals and recordings of Roberta.
The song was added to the 1935 film version of “Roberta”, sung by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, danced to (solo) by Fred Astaire, then reprised as a dance by both. The song is anachronistically used as a musical number performed by Felicia Day in the television film biography of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Warm Springs, which largely takes place in the year 1924.
The song was also performed by Lucille Bremer and Van Johnson for the 1946 Kern biopic Till The Clouds Roll By. Since the scene takes place in a 1920s nightclub, its appearance in the chronology of the film is, again, anachronistic. The song was sung and danced to by Marge Champion and Gower Champion in the 1952 film “Lovely to Look At”. The version of the song by Frank Sinatra was in a scene in the movie What Women Want, where the character Nick, played by Mel Gibson, is dancing with a coat hanger.
The song was performed on The Muppet Show Episode 34 in a scene where Miss Piggy asks Kermit the Frog to dance. The song was performed in the 2000 film Love’s Labour Lost. The song also features as a duet by Jessica Lange and Malcolm Gets playing the roles of “Big Edie” Edith Bouvier Beale and George Gould Strong in HBO’s 2009 dramatization Grey Gardens based on the 1975 documentary of the same name.
