"My Heart Stood Still": song history, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video

"My Heart Stood Still"

Other songs written for One Dam Thing after Antoher currently included in the Cafe Songbook Catalog of The Great American Songbook: none

"My Heart Stood Still" was written for the Charles Cochran revue One Dam Thing after Another which opened in London at the London Pavilion on May 19, 1927. The show starred Jessie Matthews, Douglas Byng, Lance Lister, Richard Dolman and ran for 237 performances.

In November of that same year, the song was used in the Rodgers and Hart show A Connecticut Yankee on Broadway where it was introduced by William Gaxton, Constance Carpenter and ensemble, performed only in the prologue (See below for more details).

In March of 1927, Rogers and Hart had traveled to Paris from London to meet the with the arranger Robert Russell Bennett, also an American, to try to persuade him to orchestrate the songs for their upcoming London revue, One Dam' Thing After Another. On their way back to Paris from a sightseeing expedition to Versailles, a truck came within a hair of demolishing the cab the two song writers, along with their two female companions, were riding in. As the truck rattled by, one of the young women cried out in apparent fright, “Oh! My heart stood still!” Without losing a beat, Hart, apparently unaffected by what must have been a nerve jangling moment, instantly urged the unfailingly conscientious Rodgers to make a note of her exclamation as a potential song title. Hart's partner faithfully jotted it down in his address book and upon coming across the note, only after they had returned to London, proceeded to construct a melody. When Rodgers played it for Hart, the lyricist loved the tune but claimed no recollection of the precipitating incident. Still, within no time at all, he produced the lyric for the now classic song. (One version or another of this famous anecdote is recounted in many sources: Denison, pp. 69-70; Furia and Lasser, p. 62; Nolan, pp. 99 ff; Secrest, p. 103; and in Rodgers' autobiography, pp. 101 ff.). Later in his life story Rodgers wants to make it clear that it wasn't a near accident that inspired him to write the "My Heart Stood Still" or anything else. For Rodgers, artistic inspiration is "the excitement of the event combined with the excitement of having a job to do combined with one's background combined with one's talent that results in the song, painting or novel" (Rodgers, Musical Stages, pp. 122-23).

One Dam' Thing after Another opened at the London Pavilion on May 19, 1927, with My Heart Stood Still in the score. During a rehearsal Charles Cochran, the British producer, heard the song for the first time, and though he liked it thought it should have a verse. Jessie Matthews, who along with Richard Dolman were to introduce the song in the show, characterizes Hart's brassy but endearing manner in her account of the lyricist's response to the producer's suggestion: Hart "was sitting there with his hat on the back of his head and the inevitable cigar sticking out of his mouth, [and he] rushed over, and said, ‘Verse, verse, you wanna verse?’ He pulled an envelope out of his pocket and scribbled on it. ‘How's this?’ he said, putting it into my hands. ‘How d'ya like this, babe? Think you can read my writing?’ We never altered one word of it.” In fact, Hart’s biographer Frederick Nolan notes that "With minor emendations, the verse Larry wrote that day became verse two in the published version” (Nolan, p. 99—hard bound Ed.).Editor's note: It's also the verse Matthews opens with in her subsequent recording of "My Heart Stood Still." (Listen.)

What Rodgers and Hart finally did write wound up having great appeal for none other than the Prince of Wales, who saw One Dam Thing After Another on opening night. The Prince (who would become Edward VIII and then abdicate in order to marry the divorced American, Wallis Simpson) was so taken by My Heart Stood Still that a few nights later while attending a party asked the band leader to play it. Upon being told the ensemble didn't know the song, the Prince proceeded to hum it to the band until they learned it. The next day the story made the London papers giving My Heart Stood Still the royal seal of approval and causing ticket sales for One Dam Thing after Another to soar (Nolan, p. 100—hard bound Ed.)

The song didn't debut on Broadway until November, 3, 1927, in an altogether different Rodgers and Hart show, A Connecticut Yankee, but it got there via a circuitous route. Beatrice Lillie, the prominent British comedienne who was fond of the song, was pushing to introduce it on Broadway in yet another Rodgers and Hart show in which she was to play the lead, but which had not yet even been scored. Afraid that Lillie’s voice was not big enough for "My Heart Stood Still," the songwriters avoided a potentially embarrassing situation by telling Lillie a little white lie: that the song was already included in another soon-to-open show of theirs. And in order to cover themselves, into A Connecticut Yankee it went. As it turned out the Lillie show never opened anyway, and My Heart Stood Still, because of its placement in the prologue of Connecticut Yankee, was nowhere the hit in New York it had been in London and wound up playing second fiddle to Yankee's’s show stopper -- Thou Swell (Nolan, pp.107-08). Very ironically, in order to accomplish the switch, Rodgers and Hart were forced into buying the rights to their own song from Cochran so it could be sung in New York earlier than originally planned-- and without Bea Lillie singing it. (Marx and Clayton, pp. 117-118.) Paul Whiteman and his concert orchestra and chorus made a recording contemporaneous with the 1928 Broadway introduction of "My Heart Stood Still."

"My Heart Stood Still" has, of course, emerged from the shadows of the prologue of A Connecticut Yankee into the limelight of its status as an American standard song favored by the greatest pop singers and jazz performers of the 20th century ranging from early period renditions by Jessie Matthews and Whiteman to pop and jazz versions by Artie Shaw, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra (who, according to Jonathan Schwartz, first sang the song in 1943 when he heard about Hart's death), Tony Bennett, Bud Powell, Art Tatum, Erroll Garner, Dave Brubeck, Stan Getz, Oscar Peterson, and Stacey Kent among others. Even folk-rock and R & B groups such as The Mamas and the Papas and The Supremes have recorded it.

Musically, "My Heart Stood Still" has been described as "an utterly simple ballad" (Furia and Lasser, p. 62). Geoffrey Block, however, notes, "Not only does 'My Heart Stood Still" demonstrate both direct and disguised scales and some melodic and harmonic surprises, the music also serves the text and the dramatic situation of a young couple recalling their overpowering feelings off love at first sight (Block, pp. 36-37); and for Alec Wilder, it is an example of Rodgers' ability to create just the right relationship between melody and harmony -- no simple matter. Rodgers, Wilder says, "is capable of highly sophisticated harmony," but never "so concerned with it as to cause it to distort the melodic flow," a quality that is part and parcel of his "phenomenally high level of writing," which in the case of "My Heart Stood Still" was more than a little responsible for the creation of a "splendid" song (Wilder, pp. 164, 174-5).

And as for the simplicity-complexity debate, Hart was sometimes accused of being unnecessarily complex in his rhyming. Arthur Schwartz recounts that his long-time lyricist partner Howard Dietz accused Hart of over rhyming saying, "Larry Hart can rhyme anything—and does." Schwartz didn't agree and in defense of Hart recalls something Hart said to him while the two were walking down Broadway:

They said all I could do was triple rhyme. Now just take a look at this lyric. "I took one look at you, that's all I meant to do, and then my heart stood still." I could have said, "I took one look at you, I threw a book at you,' but I didn't.

Schwartz concludes, "That was his [Larry's] way of saying that he did not need to triple-rhyme—to overrhyme. He was right with that melody, not to do that because he had a choice of accents. The melody was undoubtedly written before the words. The title was written first." Schwartz was exactly right. (Dorothy Hart, Thou Swell, p. 36)

With its elegant deployment of special notes in the melody and its trenchant harmonies ["My Heart Stood Still"] is one of the classic ballads in the popular idiom and one that occupies an interesting chronological position in the decades with which this book is concerned, for it occurs at what might be regarded as the crux—the year 1927, in which the full efflorescence of the American popular ballad began in earnest ( Forte, pp. 187-188 ).

In Words and Music, a 1946 movie very loosely based on the lives and collaboration of Rodgers and Hart, an orchestral version of "My Heart Stood Still" is heard over the scene depicting Hart's death.

Ed.'s note: Composer Arthur Schwartz first met Lorenz (Larry) Hart in 1917, when Hart was working at a summer camp in the Adirondacks in upstate New York. There, they wrote a camp song together, the melody for which later, with new lyrics by Howard Dietz, became the standard " I Guess I'll Have to Change My Plan ."

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

Click here to read a version of the complete lyrics for "My Heart Stood Still," including the verse , as sung by Ella Fitzgerald. In an article Richard Rodgers wrote for the Dramatists Guild Quarterly on the subject of his collaboration with Lorenz Hart he emphasizes how [Larry] was fascinated by the various techniques of rhyming, such as polysyllabic rhyme, interior rhymes, masculine and feminine rhymes, and the trick of rhyming one word with only part of another. . . . Yet Larry could also write simply and poetically. "My Heart Stood Still," for example, expressed so movingly the power of "that unfelt clasp of hand," and did it in a refrain consisting almost entirely of monosyllables. (quoted in Max Wilk, They're Playing Our Song: Conversations with America's Classic Songwriters , New York and Stratford, CT: Easton Studio Press, 2008, p. 51.) The complete, authoritative lyrics for "My Heart Stood Still" can be found in:

The Complete Lyrics reveals that the original lyric is structured as a duet in four parts: 1) a verse to be sung by the male member of a duet; 2) a refrain also sung by the man; 3) a verse to be sung by the woman; 4) a repeat of the refrain to be sung by the woman. In live performances and recordings over many years subsequent to the show, the opening verse starting with "I laughed at Sweethearts / I met at schools" is commonly sung as the opening portion of the song--by those performers of either sex who choose to include a verse at all. Lee Wiley is a good example of a singer who does it this way. The final, seldom heard verse ends with the quatrain, I read my Plato, Love I thought a sin, But since your kiss I'm reading missus Glynn."* [where "kiss" rhymes, in typical Hart fashion, internally with a single syllable, "miss," of the longer word, "missus." Jessie Matthews who introduced the song in the show in London, in Her later recorded version , opens with verse 2 and then sings the refrain twice, never singing the opening verse. Ella Fitzgerald on her 1956 Rodgers and Hart Songbook album actually sings both verses in the places Hart put them, which is quite unusual. Frank Sinatra, on the Cafe Songbook Main Stage (above) begins with verse 1, proceeds to the refrain with which he concludes, omitting Verse 2, which of course makes sense because it was written for a woman to sing. *According to Wikipedia , "'Missus Glynn' is Elinor Glyn (October 17, 1864 - September 23, 1943), born Elinor Sutherland, was a British novelist and scriptwriter who pioneered mass-market women's erotic fiction."

• Paul Whiteman: bsgs98
• Peggy Lee on the Nat King Cole Show: Balletamie
• Stacey Kent: MegaINOSAN·

• Peggy Lee and Frank Sinatra: PeggyLee.com

Notes

• Click here to read the lyrics for "My Heart Stood Still" as sung by Ella Fitzgerald.
• For a complete listing of songs used in the original production of this show, see LorenzHart.org .
• Allen Forte concludes his detailed musical analysis of "My Heart Stood Still" thusly:
• Richard Rodgers, Musical Stages: An Autobiography New York: Random House, 1975 (Da Capo paper bound Ed., 2002, pictured above).

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