I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm

Written: 1936

Words and Music by: Irving Berlin

Written for: On the Avenue
(movie, 1937)

On the Main Stage at Cafe Songbook

Judy Garland
with
Count Basie
and His Orchestra

performing

"I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm"

on 'The Judy Garland Show, taped July 7, 1963.

More Performances of "I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm"
in the Cafe Songbook Record/Video Cabinet
(Video credit )

Cafe Songbook Reading Room

"I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm"

Critics Corner || Lyrics Lounge

On the Avenue is a "backstager," that is a show or movie in which the plot takes place behind the scenes of a show or movie that is being created or performed during the course of the production. In the movie On the Avenue, Gary Blake (Dick Powell) plays the leading man in a musical revue about Park Avenue types. The revue, a series of sketches mostly poking fun at Park Avenue life, bears the same title as the movie itself, On the Avenue. All of the sketches are built around a Berlin song.

Meanwhile backstage, Blake's is having a relationship with his leading lady, Mona Merrick (Alice Faye). In one of the sketches, they satirize the richest man in New York Commodore Caraway (George Barbier) and his daughter Mimi Caraway (Madeleine Carroll) who both just happen to be in the audience on opening night (arriving late, of course). Both father and daughter are offended by the their portraya by Blake and Merrick and walk out. All of this serves to initiate a battle between Blake and the offended Mimi. The remainder of the film alternates between the live sketches in the revue and "backstage" scenes about their conflict (which, no surprise, turns into a romance).

The first time we come across "I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm" is over the opening credits as part of a medley or overture. Next, the song is sung as the centerpiece of a sketch from the revue. Gary Blake plays a young, Park Avenue chap being counseled by his butler to bundle up before he goes out into the frigid Park Avenue winter. Blake informs the butler he doesn't need the proffered wraps because he has his love to keep him warm. The sketch segues from just Powell and his butler on stage to a string of chorus girls in mink more or less offering their wamth, and finally to Powell and Alice Faye finishing up the song as a duet.

Dick Powell singing "I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm"
in a recording (c. 1937) without the butler or Alice Faye but with an otherwise very similar arrangement to the on-screen version.

Other sketches from On the Avenue are based on less well known but terrific Berlin songs such as "He Ain't Got Rhythm" featuring The Ritz Brothers and "The Girl on the Police Gazette," neither of which are currently included in the Cafe Songbook Catalog of The Great American Songbook.

The Ritz Brothers sing and dance to Berlin's "He Ain't Got Rhythm," a sketch from On the Avenue based on the idea that long-haired scientists may be very smart when it comes to astronomy and such but it won't get them far in other endeavors such as dancing Cheek to Cheek (a reference to another Berlin songs from his score for Top Hat from 1935, two years before On the Avenue) -- because they "ain't got rhythm."

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