Miss Otis Regrets

"Miss Otis Regrets" is a song composed by Cole Porter in 1934, and first performed by Douglas Byng in Hi Diddle Diddle, a revue which opened on October 3, 1934, at London's Savoy Theatre.

Background

Cole Porter spent many holidays in Paris throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Ada "Bricktop" Smith was a close friend, and he frequented Bricktop's, whose "modern" performing acts certainly influenced or informed the erudite and dense lyrical content of Porter’s songs. However, despite her assertion and references to that assertion in articles written by journalists, Cole Porter did not write "Miss Otis Regrets" for Ada "Bricktop" Smith. “(Cole Porter was perhaps the greatest influence on my career) “standing right there behind me,” she wrote, “until I became Bricktop, the one and only.” When it came time to open her own club, it was Porter who insisted that she name it Bricktop’s, knowing it was the lady herself people would come to see. He wrote “Miss Otis Regrets,” one of his most successful songs, in her honor. (The idea for the song emerged when she told Porter, of a lynching in the American South, “Well, that man won’t lunch tomorrow.”) ".