My Heart Belongs to Daddy

For other uses, see My Heart Belongs to Daddy (disambiguation).

"My Heart Belongs to Daddy" is a song written by Cole Porter, for the 1938 musical Leave It to Me! which premiered on Nov 9, 1938. It was performed by Mary Martin who played Dolly Winslow, the young protégée of an elderly ambassador, Alonzo P. Goodhue.^[1] She is stranded at a Siberian railway station, wearing only a fur coat, and performs a striptease while performing the song.

She sang it again in the 1940 movie Love Thy Neighbor. Again she wears a fur coat, but the setting is a show within a show and the act is more conventional as she wears an evening gown beneath the fur. Her best movie performance is in the 1946 Cole Porter biopic Night and Day in which she plays herself. She again performs the striptease, discarding her muff and then the fur coat.^[2]

In Britain, the song was a hit for Pat Kirkwood who performed it in the 1938 revue Black Velvet, making her the first wartime star,^[3] and so the song was thereafter associated with her.^[4]

Rhyming with "daddy" is difficult but Porter characteristically managed it well.^[5]  One clever rhyme is

“

If I invite A boy some night To dine on my fine Finnan haddie, I just adore His asking for more, But my heart belongs to daddy.

”

Finnan haddie is smoked fish, and this is one of many innuendoes which appear throughout the song. Sophie Tucker famously advised Mary Martin to deliver such sexy lines while looking towards heaven. Mary Martin was quite innocent and so the contrast between her naive manner and the suggestive lyrics accompanied by the provocative striptease made her performance a huge success.^[6]

Referring to the melody, Oscar Levant described it as "one of the most Yiddish tunes ever written" despite the fact that "Cole Porter's genetic background was completely alien to any Jewishness."^[7]

Notable recordings

• The 1938 version by bandleader Larry Clinton with singer Bea Wain was the most successful of the many contemporary recordings, entering the U.S. charts at the same time as Mary Martin's original cast recording but peaking at No. 4, compared to Martin's No. 7.
• Valaida Snow - (1939)
• Eartha Kitt - That Bad Eartha (1953)
• Kitty Kallen - Little Things Mean A Lot (1954)
• Anita O'Day - Cool Heat (1959)
• Della Reese - Della Della Cha Cha Cha (1960)^[8] 
• Marilyn Monroe - Let's Make Love (1960). During her performance she wears a purple sweater over a black bodystocking. Near the end of the song, she takes off her sweater, revealing her bodystocking and a black bikini over it.
• Oscar Peterson - Night Train (1962)
• Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass - Herb Alpert's Ninth (1967)
• Violetta Villas - Violetta Villas sings (1970)
• Ella Fitzgerald - Ella Loves Cole (1972)
• Anna Nicole Smith - My Heart Belongs To Daddy (1997)
• Dee Dee Bridgewater - Dear Ella (1997)
• Paul Motian - On Broadway Vol.1 (2003)
• Sophie Milman - Sophie Milman (2004)

Notes

1. ^ Inc, Time (Dec 19, 1938), "Mary Martin is Broadway's newest song star", LIFE: 29, http://books.google.com/?id=9EkEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA29 
2. ^ Roy Hemming (1999-03), The melody lingers on: the great songwriters and their movie musicals, ISBN 9781557043801, http://books.google.com/?id=c-nEd2lSb_oC&pg=PA162 
3. ^ Actress Pat Kirkwood dies at 86, BBC, 2007-12-26, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7160134.stm, retrieved 2010-05-19 
4. ^ Colin Larkin (1995), The Guinness Encyclopedia of Popular Music, p. 2328, ISBN 9780851126623, http://books.google.com/?id=8JhGAAAAMAAJ 
5. ^ Pamela Phillips Oland (2001-06-01), The art of writing great lyrics, p. 50, ISBN 9781581150933, http://books.google.com/?id=5ffWkLlzUAgC 
6. ^ Ethan Mordden (1988-06-23), Broadway Babies: The People Who Made the American Musical, p. 220, ISBN 9780195054255, http://books.google.com/?id=WFyJdLgYlikC 
7. ^ Oscar Levant, The Unimportance of Being Oscar, Pocket Books 1969 (reprint of G.P. Putnam 1968), p. 32. ISBN 0-671-77104-3.
8. ^ Marc Shell (2005-06-15), Stutter, p. 292, ISBN 9780674019379, http://books.google.com/?id=F8_rW-DciEEC