“What Is This Thing Called Love?” is a 1929 popular song written by Cole Porter, for the musical Wake Up and Dream. It was first performed by Elsie Carlisle in March 1929. The song has become a popular jazz standard and one of Porter’s most often played compositions.
Cole Porter said that when he wrote this song he was inspired by a native dance in Marrakesh that was accompanied by Moroccan tom-toms. That remark has been perpetuated by literal minded critics over the years. It is more than likely that this narrative, perhaps conceived in a vein left over from Porter’s days as a Yale undergraduate, was delivered tongue-in-cheek.
However, the “hootchiekootchie” accompaniment figure in the sheet music refrain suggests that someone, perhaps at the publisher’s, took Porter’s story seriously and tried to lend an exotic flavor to the music.
In the 1929 musical Wake Up and Dream, the song was performed before a huge African idol to the accompaniment of a persistent tom-tom rhythm, suggesting that, like the publisher, the Broadway people had a rather hazy idea of African geography, if they wished to convey Cole Porter’s atmospheric setting, that is. Perhaps the American public had not yet completely recovered from the evocative 1926 movie, The Son of the Sheik, which starred Rudolph Valentino, so that any reference to the African continent would have served the commercial purpose.
Closer to home, however, and further confusing the locus of the song, is Porter’s performance instruction at the beginning of the Refrain: “Slow (in the manner of a ‘Blues’).” The reference to blues becomes musically concrete in the very first bar of the Verse, where the lyric “humdrum” is set by a blue note. Like all blue notes, this one lies outside the key and evokes the sound aura of the traditional blues. By Porter’s time, these blues references had been fully integrated into the American popular song idiom, due, in no small part, to the songs of George Gershwin. Indeed, in the verse, this very blue note (B♭) is the headnote of the Refrain, setting the first two notes of the titular phrase: “What is” in “What is This Thing Called Love?”
The lyrics of the verse are charmingly humorous and rueful. “Humdrum” is the key word in the first four lines, occurring in the first and again in the fourth. The sonic quality of the word itself, with its rhyming syllables, no doubt inspired the very “square” rhythmic setting of the first line, “I was a humdrum person,” which is repeated for the second line, emphasizing the “humdrum” character of the singer before love appeared on the scene in the metaphorical guise of a bird. The alliteration, “window wide” cleverly matches the internal syllabic rhyme of “humdrum,” illustrating the kind of sophisticated detail that earned Porter his reputation as a major lyricist.
