For the record, my musical tastes mostly run to classic rock and blues. Over the years, however, I’ve rounded out my CD collection with odds and ends from other genres, including a fairly large number of movie soundtracks. (No surprise there, given my other interests.) The wonderful thing about soundtracks is that they often span across all the other musical genres, since the music selected for any given film needs to complement the film’s setting and mood. Because of soundtracks, I’ve discovered a whole range of music and artists I otherwise wouldn’t know about. For example, it was on a movie soundtrack that I first remember hearing the song, “Begin the Beguine.”
“Begin the Beguine” was written by Cole Porter in (I believe) the 1930s. It’s one of those old songs that instantly conjures the atmosphere of a lost world in which men always wore suits and hats, and yet it’s also timeless, a song I suspect will still be heard a century from now. The melody is sweetly haunting; if you hear it in the morning, it’s still running through your mind at midnight, but in this case, that’s not a bad thing. It’s been recorded by everyone from Perry Como to Sheryl Crow (for the soundtrack of the recent Porter bio-pic De-Lovely). The best-known version, however, is an smooth, finger-snapping instrumental by the great Artie Shaw.
Shaw was a clarinetist and bandleader during the heyday of swing music, in the 1940s. At the time, his name was as well-known as that of Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, or Tommy Dorsey, the superstars of the day. Time tends to erase fame, though, and while I’d be willing to bet a lot of younger people still know the name Glenn Miller, I suspect Artie Shaw has become somewhat obscure. That was partly Shaw’s choice — he walked away from the music business in the 1950s and, aside from his multiple marriages to a string of celebrity women, kept a pretty low profile for the rest of his life.
Shaw passed away last Thursday at the age of 94. As disrespectful as it may sound, I didn’t realize he was even still alive. But his recording of “Begin the Beguine” lives on, appearing on just about every Big Band compilation I’ve ever seen and sticking in the brains of everyone who hears it. Some may question whether his version should be the definitive one, but there’s little doubt that it is. And it seems to me that’s a pretty good eulogy for any person.
(Incidentally, for anyone who cares, I first heard “Begin the Beguine” on the soundtrack for The Rocketeer, an underappreciated little movie based on a comic book by artist/writer Dave Stevens. It wasn’t the Artie Shaw version in the film, though; the song was sung on-screen by a woman named Melora Hardin, one of two numbers she performed in a scene set in a swanky Hollywood restaurant populated by Golden Age movie stars.)
