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From the time it began to flourish on record and on the big screen in the 1930s, to the present day and inescapably beyond, popular music has tapped and swayed to\u00a0the tune of songs about dance. Less often, songs have not only been about dancing \u2013 cheek to cheek or buttock to groin \u2013 but have given their name to dances, or have given\u00a0wide recognition to dance trends\u00a0previously\u00a0confined to regional clubs and halls, demonstrating for national or international audiences the spirit and the gestures which serve to define the style. Other songs have acted as useful repositories of dance,\u00a0suggestively listing some of the dances\u00a0common\u00a0across recent decades.<\/p>\n
Cole Porter wrote \u2018Begin the Beguine\u2019 in 1935, somewhere between\u00a0Indonesia and Fiji while on\u00a0a cruise of the Pacific. That October, it was given its first performance by June Knight in the Broadway musical Jubilee<\/em>, in a production staged at the Imperial Theatre in New York City. Beguines were originally Christian lay women, who in the spirit of the thirteenth century in the Low Countries had lived austere lives devoted to God and the poor. In the creole of Martinique, a Caribbean region of France, the word became a generic term for white women, before being applied to a style of ballroom dance approximating a slow rumba. Already fashionable in Martinique, Guadeloupe, and parts of France, the influence of Porter\u2019s song caused the Beguine to spread throughout the Americas and Europe.<\/p>\n Bandleader Artie Shaw\u2019s swinging arrangement of \u2018Begin the Beguine\u2019<\/a> proved hugely popular in 1938, with later interpretations of the song recorded by Glenn Miller, Frank Sinatra, and Ella Fitzgerald. Begin the Beguine<\/em>\u00a0was chosen as\u00a0the English title for Volver a Empezar<\/em>, the 1982\u00a0film directed by Jos\u00e9 Luis Garci which became the first Spanish picture to win an Academy Award. And the song has been referred to in other diverse forms of media, from Disney\u2019s The Little Mermaid<\/em> to Haruki Murakami\u2019s short story \u2018Julio Iglesias\u2019<\/a>, where it proves unbearable to the listening of a wily old sea turtle. In \u2018May the Giant Be with You\u2019, the eighth episode of Twin Peaks<\/em>, Leland Palmer shouts the song\u2019s title as he begins his descent into a sort of ecstatic mania<\/a>\u00a0over the death of his daughter.<\/p>\n