Buttons and Bows

Written: 1948

Ray Evans (lyrics) and Jay Livingston (music)
(both songwriters received words and music credit)

Written for: The Paleface
(movie)

On the Main Stage at Cafe Songbook

Dinah Shore

performing her 1948 hit

"Buttons and Bows"

in a TV appearance c. 1960

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More Performances of "Buttons and Bows"
in the Cafe Songbook Record/Video Cabinet
(Video credit)

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"Buttons and Bows"

Critics Corner || Lyrics Lounge

"Buttons and Bows" was written for the 1948 movie The Paleface" where it was sung by Bob Hope to his co-star Jane Russell; but this was not the song's introduction. Buttons and Bows" is one of those songs with two sets of lyrics one to be sung by a man, the other by a woman. The Man's version, is sung by Hope to Russell in the film. Its lyric included lines such as "Let's go where you'll keep on wearin' those frills and satins . . . ." Hope's rendition was, however, preceded by Dinah Shore's record (actually recorded November 30, 1947) on which she changes the second person pronoun "you'll" to the first person "I'll," (and continues such changes throughout the song) so it makes sense from a woman's point-of-view. The songwriters, Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, were probably instructed by their employers, Paramount Studios, to make sure both options were available because, as Gary Marmorstein points out, the song was "pushed hard by Dinah Shore's record, shrewdly released by Capitol weeks before the picture" (p. 177). This not only gave the song a head start but was terrific advance publicity for the movie. To accomplish this the song had to be singable by both Shore and Hope, as it was.

In the movie, Calamity Jane (Jane Russell) is a federal agent assigned to discover who's smuggling rifles and dynamite to the Indians. As a means of infiltrating the smuggler's ring, Jane tricks "Painless" Peter Potter (Bob Hope), a hapless dentist into marrying her. They travel west on a wagon train and shortly after the wagons embark, Hope sings "Buttons and Bows" while sitting on the seat of the wagon they share, singing it to Jane as a statement about his reluctance to travel west. The lyric reflects Peter's desire to return to the life of a city slicker where "women are women" and don't wear buckskin but are decked out in "Those frills and flowers and buttons and bows, / Rings and things and buttons and bows."

For Philip Furia and Laurie Patterson, in their book The Songs of Hollywood, Hope's presentation of the song misses the mark. He sings it, they say, in a "nasal 'hillbilly' style rather than in the 'Easterner persona that the song's lyric calls for." Evans' words clearly demonstrate that Potter, who is comically proud of his sowardice, wants nothing to do with the West and longs to live and die in his beloved big city: "Don't bury me in this prairie, / Take me where the cement grows" (p. 166). Hope may not do the lyric justice, but really the fault lies in a script that creates a character who is too much of a boob to carry off the wit of Evans' lyric.

Bob Hope sings "Buttons and Bows" in The Paleface (1948).

"Buttons and Bows" is reprised with variations, somewhat belatedly, by Hope, Russell and Roy Rogers in the sequel, Son of Paleface (1952). In this version, Russell's character has requested the song from the first movie, and Rogers (a real man of the West) sings it because he wants to please her, not because he subscribes to its anti-western bias -- again making singer and lyric somewhat of a mismatch. Hope, playing the equally idiotic son of his original character, chimes in with Evans' latter-day variations.

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