"I Didn't Know What Time It Was": Song history, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video

"I Didn't Know What Time It Was"

Other songs written for the Broadway show Too Many Girls currently included in the Cafe Songbook Catalog of The Great American Songbook: none

One song included in the Cafe Songbook Catalog of The Great American Songbookwas written exclusively for the 1940 movie Too Many Girls: You're Nearer.

"I Didn't Know What Time It Was" was interpolated into the movie version of the Rodgers and Hart show Pal Joey where it is sung by Frank Sinatra as Joey.

Rah-rah college musicals were fashionable on Broadway in the late thirties and Too Many Girls is one of them. The show starred Marcy Wescott, Richard Kollmar, Desi Arnaz, and Eddie Bracken and was directed by George Abbott with a score by Rodgers and Hart. Pottowatomie College in Stopgap, NM, is the setting.

Wescott plays Connie a ditsy coed whose father is a very wealthy Pottowatomie grad. When Connie decides to attend it's not because her father went there so much as because her latest heart throb, an older, sophisticated British novelist, lives just off campus. Her father is pleased with her choice of college but knowing his daughter suspicious of her motives and so decides to hire four football stars to secretly accompany and "protect" Connie. As part of their cover, the bodyguards join the Pottowatomie football team; The team becomes terrific; one of the bodyguard-become-team-members (Clint Kelley/Richard Kollmar) falls for Connie and she for him until she discovers he's working for her father -- at which point things become a little dicey and much more complicated; but finally, and not so surprisingly, everything works out making us feel okay about a somewhat silly plot becuse we know that in the the comic tradition all's well that ends well.

"I Didn't Know What Time it Was" is sung as a duet by Kollmar and Wescott as a means for them to acknowledge how enamored they have become of one another.

By the time Too Many Girls reaches the screen in 1940, the cast has undergone some changes. Lucille Ball has replaced Wescott, Richard Carlson has replaced Kollmar, Anne Miller has been added to the cast and story as Pepe the dancing Latina, and Van Johnson, very early in his Hollywood career, is a featured member of the chorus. Desi remains as Manuelito. The movie is memorable mostly for the fact it was on its set that Lucy first met Desi. It might also have been memorable for its presentation of "I Didn't Know What Time It Was," which has since become a great American standard song; but that happened in spite of its mangled performances in the movie not because of it. Lucille Ball (dubbed by Trudy Erwin) and Richard Carlson sing it as a duet, and Eddie Bracken adds a comic reprise. Here is Lucy's dubbed portion of the duet:

"I Didn't Know What Time it Was" is a good example of a song that achieved its status as a standard more as a result of singers such as Billie Holiday who recognized its possibilities, then the buzz it got from its performance on stage or screen, though the Kollmar-Westcott rendition on Broadway made a distinct impression the audience, as Desi Arnaz recalled, stopping the show.

"I Didn't Know What Time it Was" charted only twice both times shortly after the song was introduced in 1939: Benny Goodman, beginning October 28, 1939, for thirteen weeks, peeking at #13; Jimmy Dorsey, beginning Dec. 23, 1939, for two weeks also peeking at #13 (Source Joel Whitburn, Pop Memories 1890-1954: The History of American Popular Music, 1986.

Reviews of Too Many Girls:
Brooks Atkinson. Review of Too Many Girls. The New York Times, October 19, 1939 (summary of review of Broadway show)..
Bosley Crowther, "Playhouse at the Palace." The New York Times, Nov. 21, 1940 (review of movie Too Many Girls).
Stephen Holden. "Theater: Rodgers and Hart." The New York Times. March 27, 1987 (review of Equity Library Theater revival of Too Many Girls).

Philip Furia and
Michael Lasser,
America's Songs: The Stories Behind the Songs of Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley, New York: Routledge, 2006.

Philip Furia and Michael Lasser point out that Hart's use of a colloquial expression for his title, one that works well as a reference to college students who often do not know "what time it is," or what else is going on around them, could be an "apt description of of the lyricist himself in the late 1930's" because of his alcoholism which often led to blackouts when he could not remember where he had been" (pp. 158-159).

Ed's. note: Hart's lyrics are replete, either consciously or otherwise, with phrases that apply not only to a character in his show but, often wryly, to himself. One thinks of "this half-pint imitation" of a man from the lyric of "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" (written the year after "I Didn't Know What Time It Was" for Pal Joey) as being a reference to the barely 5 foot tall lyricist.

One early performance of "I Didn't Know What Time It Was" is lost to posterity. Gene Kelly relates that when he auditioned for Pal Joey in 1940, within a year of the introduction of "I Didn't Know What Time It Was" in Too Many Girls on Broadway, he did what he called "a stupid thing." At the audition he sang, for Richard Rodgers and John O'Hara (who wrote the book for Pal Joey), "I Didn't Know What Time it Was." Kelly recalls,

I was naive enough not to think about this. I just thought I'd do a ballad for them an up song. I didn't even know it was a Rodgers and Hart ballad. Years later, when I became a director-producer myself, I learned how songwriters hate this kind of thing because it looks like you're currying favor. A day or two later, they told me I was hired for the part of Joey and I certainly jumped at the chance (Gene Kelly in Thou Swell, Thou Witty , p. 146) .

Obviously neither Rodgers nor O'Hara held it against Kelly who went on from that audition to become one of America's great stars.

Richard Rodgers in his autobigraphy recalls that the period during which the team wrote the score for Too Many Girls represented a difficult time for Larry Hart and in the relationship between the two men, so much so that due to Hart's frequent absences from the scene, mostly due to his drinking, Rodgers was forced into writing and rewriting lyrics, though, as he says, "All of the major songs did have lyrics written by Larry," furhter noting that "because our story dealt more or less with an institution of learning, in "I Didn't Know What Time It Was," he [Larry] came up with the idea of discovering both love and wisdom" (Musical Stages, p. 192, hard cover Ed.)

I wanted love and here it was Shining out of your eyes. I'm wise, And I know what time it is now.

As can be noted in the Cafe Songbook Record/Video Cabinet for "I Didn't Know What Time It Was," this song is particularly popular with Jazz musicians. That his melodies were often subject to jazz improvisation was not, however, seen as a compliment by Rodgers, at least not during this period. His reaction is highlighted by another tune written for Too Many Girls, "I Like To Recognize the Tune." Rodgers biographer Meryle Secrest notes that in this song Rodgers and Hart "lamented the major distortions being perpetuated on songs by the swing bands of the period, or what Rodgers called 'the musical equivalent of bad grammar'" (Secrest, p. 208).

William Zinsser suggests a musical irony in this attitude of Rodgers because it is his very solid and "elegant" compositional craftsmanship that so attracts jazz musicians providing them with the opportunity to do what they do:

Good pianists and arrangers are seldom tempted to improve the base line of a Rodgers song; it can't be done. The descending bass of " My Funny Valentine " is the foundation that holds up the whole song; the contrapuntal bass line of "I Didn't Know What Time It Was" invites an instrumentalist or a singer to improvise on the melody, secure in the elegant safety net below (Zinsser, p. 131) .

Click here to read the lyrics for "I Didn't Know What Time It Was" as sung by Ella Fitzgerald (including the opening verse only) on the album Ella Fitzgerald Sings Rodgers & Hart Song Book . Rodgers and Hart wrote "I Didn't Know What Time It Was" beginning with an opening verse followed by a refrain with a single chorus and concluding with a second verse. The lyric on the video below as sung by James Taylor for the the soundtrack of the 1992 movie League of Their Own includes only the refrain omitting both verses. Finding the closing verse is difficult outside of the film Too Many Girls in which the song was introduced. ( See below .)

To hear the the song sung with the opening verse, listen to the Nancy Lamott version (below) from her 2005 album (performed c. 1995) Live at Tavern on the Green . The verse begins the song with, "Once I was young" and concludes with the line, "And now I know I was naive." The verse demonstrates the singer's total naiveté: (not even knowing ". . . what time it was [knowing nothing of life until] . . . I met you," thus setting up the transformative nature of the refrain.

The verse that concludes the song, which is almost never heard beyond its use in Too Many Girls (in which Lucile Ball [dubbed by Trudy Erwin] and Richard Carlson sing it), is reproduced below: Once I was old-- Twenty years os so-- Rather well preserved The wrinkles didn't show. Once I was old, But not too old for fun. I used to hunt for little girls With my imaginary gun. But now I aim for only one. This final verse reveals Hart's inclination toward irony and paradox by suggesting the singer had lost his youth and grown old by the time he turned twenty. His promiscuous indulgence in "fun" hunting for women made him old before his time; but now, having met the "you" of the refrain has been transformed, abandoning his childishness and in the process paradoxically regaining a youth of a much more satisfying kind--being "only for one." Perhaps the most salient trope in the lyric is how the songwriting team takes a cliched figure of speech, "I didn't know what time it was," and through Hart's words and Rodgers' music make it into a movingly romantic expression of great force and tenderness.

• Lucille Ball and Richard Carlson: lucymunstersfan
• James Taylor: detroitMC313
• Frank Sinatra: catman916

Notes

• For a complete listing of songs used in the original production of the Broadway show, see IBDB song list .
• For a complete listing of songs used in the movie, see IMDB Soundtrack .
• Lucille Ball (dubbed) and Richard Carlson in Too Many Girls (1940)
• Richard Rodgers, Musical Stages: An Autobiography New York: Random House, 1975 (Da Capo paper bound ed., 2002, pictured above).
• William Zinsser. Easy to Remember The Great American Songwriters and Their Songs . Jaffrey, New Hampshire: David R. Godine, 2001.
• James Taylor on the soundtrack of the movie League of Their Own (1992)
• (Please complete or pause one video before starting another.)
• Nancy LaMott live at Tavern on the Green (NYC) 1995
• The complete, authoritative lyrics for "I Didn't Know What Time It Was" can be found in:

Cite this page: "I Didn't Know What Time It Was": Song history, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video, Cafe Songbook, https://greatamericansongbook.net/pages/songs/i/i_didnt_know_what_time_p.html