The year the film came out, numerous well-known duos recorded the song, including Doris Day and Bob Hope, Dinah Shore and Buddy Clark, and Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan. Again, audiences ate it up, and in 1950 “Baby, It's Cold Outside” won the Oscar for Best Original Song. ![]() ![]() In the second, Betty Garrett pushes hard for a sleepover with Red Skelton, flipping the whole thing on its head. In the first, Ricardo Montalbán pursues Esther Williams, reinforcing the song’s traditional gender dynamics. The following year, the song appeared in the film Neptune’s Daughter, where it serves as the soundtrack to a pair of comedic scenes involving two couples. In 1948, much to Garland’s chagrin, Loesser sold “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” to MGM. “No cabs to be had out there,” he counters. “Baby, it's bad out there,” the man shoots back. “The neighbors might think …” the woman sings. Or, as the original sheet music puts it, a “wolf” and a “mouse.” The man would like the woman to spend the night, and every time the woman makes an excuse and heads for the door, he’s ready with a reason why she should stay. What were people responding to? On its face, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is a light and flirty song about a romantic evening shared by a man and a woman. “We got invited to all the best parties for years on the basis of ‘Baby.’” “We had to do it over and over again, and we became instant parlor room stars,” Garland remembered. It was meant to amuse guests and send them on their way at the end of night, and by all accounts, people loved it. Broadway legend Frank Loesser wrote the ditty in 1944 and performed it with his wife, Lynn Garland, at a housewarming party in New York City that same year. Some Enchanted Eveningįor a song that provokes such strong feelings, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” began fairly innocently. In December 2018, as debates about the lyrics in the context of the #MeToo movement reached a crescendo, the song cracked the Top 10 on Billboard’s Digital Song Sales chart for the first time ever. And actually, the two activities are connected. In recent years, arguing about the intention behind “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” has become nearly as popular as listening to the song itself. If the song is “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”-a ’40s-era American standard that some modern listeners hear as a misogynistic depiction of sexual misconduct-it’s cause for an annual barrage of controversies, radio bans, and think pieces. This is especially true if the work in question is a holiday song that pops back into the public consciousness each December. Writing in Variety in 2018, Chris Willman has described it as “the story of a woman doing battle – not with a guy who won’t take no for an answer, but with the expectations of a society that won’t take yes for an answer,” while a 2010 essay by Slay Belle, published by women’s website Persephone, calls it “a song about the desires even good girls have”.Once a piece of art is released into the world, people are free to debate its meaning and merits until the end of time. Others have read the song as a knowing portrait of a time when women were not allowed to be openly sexual. The author of the Vanity Fair profile, Karen Valby, describes the original song as “date-rapey”, and a Salon article in 2012 described it as a “date rape anthem … icky at best, at worst reprehensible”. The new version will feature on an updated version of Legend’s 2018 album, A Legendary Christmas, to be released on 8 November. An interview with Legend in Vanity Fair reveals that the new lyrics include: “What will my friends think.” “I think they should rejoice.” “.if I have one more drink?” “It’s your body, and your choice.” In the wake of the controversy, Legend, along with lyricist Natasha Rothwell, has rewritten the song for a duet with Kelly Clarkson. Listen to Dean Martin’s 1959 version of the song
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