For decades, Johnny Mathis represented a particular kind of musical romance—elegant, sophisticated, and seemingly untouched by changing fashions. His unmistakably smooth voice made songs feel intimate even when surrounded by sweeping orchestras, and recordings such as “Chances Are,” “Misty,” and “The Twelfth of Never” helped establish him as one of the defining romantic vocalists of his generation.
But by the end of the 1970s, popular music had entered a dramatically different world.
Disco was everywhere. Dance floors glowed beneath mirrored balls, orchestral strings collided with pulsing bass lines, and extended versions of songs were designed to keep clubs moving long into the night. For an artist so closely associated with traditional pop and romantic ballads, embracing that sound might have seemed unlikely.
Johnny Mathis did it anyway.
And instead of choosing a contemporary composition, he reached back more than four decades to one of Cole Porter’s most sophisticated standards: “Begin the Beguine.”
The result was one of the more fascinating stylistic turns in Mathis’ long career—a lush, rhythm-driven reinvention that brought the elegance of the Great American Songbook directly onto the late-1970s dance floor.
An Unexpected Johnny Mathis Reinvention
Mathis recorded “Begin the Beguine” for his 1979 album The Best Days of My Life. A “Special Disco Version” pushed the transformation even further, expanding the song into an extended dance-oriented performance that fully embraced the musical atmosphere of the period.
It was a striking combination.
On one side stood Mathis, whose crystalline vocals and refined phrasing belonged to a tradition of sophisticated romantic pop. On the other was disco, a genre built around momentum, repetition, orchestration, and irresistible rhythm.
Rather than allowing one style to overpower the other, the recording found a surprisingly natural meeting point between them.
Mathis remained unmistakably Mathis. His voice did not suddenly become aggressive or overly theatrical simply because the rhythm had changed. Instead, he maintained the elegance that had defined his career while allowing the arrangement to create an entirely different environment around him.
That contrast became the performance’s greatest strength.
The “Special Disco Version” also gave the recording a life beyond the traditional Johnny Mathis audience. In Britain, the single reached No. 37 on the UK Singles Chart during the summer of 1979. Its parent album, The Best Days of My Life, also entered the UK Albums Chart, reaching No. 38.
For a veteran performer already decades into his recording career, the reception demonstrated something important: Johnny Mathis could enter a changing musical landscape without abandoning the qualities that had made him famous.
The Extraordinary History Behind “Begin the Beguine”
Long before disco existed, “Begin the Beguine” already had a remarkable story.
Cole Porter wrote the song in 1935, and it was introduced in the Broadway musical Jubilee. The composition would eventually become one of the most recognizable standards associated with Porter, yet structurally it was anything but ordinary.
Popular songs of the period commonly followed relatively compact forms. “Begin the Beguine,” however, unfolds across an extraordinary 104 bars.
That unusual length gives the melody its distinctive feeling of continuous movement. Instead of quickly arriving at a familiar refrain and repeating itself, the song seems to wander through memory. One musical thought leads into another, creating the sensation that the listener is being carried deeper into a recollection from which the narrator does not entirely want to escape.
Even the title contains an exotic element.
The beguine refers to a dance and musical style associated with the French Caribbean, sharing characteristics with a slow rumba. Porter uses the dance not simply as decoration but as the emotional trigger at the center of the song.
When the beguine begins, memory begins with it.
A Song About the Dangerous Beauty of Memory
At its emotional core, “Begin the Beguine” is not simply about dancing.
It is about what music can awaken.
The narrator hears a familiar melody and is suddenly transported to another place and another time—a romantic evening filled with tropical beauty, music, and the presence of someone who once seemed to make the world complete.
The past becomes almost tangible again.
That is what gives the song its bittersweet power. The narrator knows that the perfect moment cannot truly be recreated. Time has moved forward. Whatever love existed belongs to another chapter of life.
Yet music has the extraordinary ability to temporarily erase that distance.
A melody can restore a room, a night, a face, or a feeling with startling clarity. For a few minutes, something believed to be lost can feel astonishingly close again.
That tension between happiness and heartbreak is what has allowed “Begin the Beguine” to endure through generations.
It celebrates memory while simultaneously acknowledging its cruelty.
We can revisit the past emotionally, but we cannot live there again.
Gene Page Brings Cole Porter Into the Disco Era
Johnny Mathis’ 1979 recording becomes especially interesting because its arrangement gives that nostalgia an entirely new sense of motion.
With shimmering orchestral textures associated with arranger Gene Page and a driving disco pulse beneath Mathis’ vocal, the song suddenly exists in two eras at once.
Cole Porter’s sophisticated 1930s songwriting remains at the center, but the musical surroundings belong unmistakably to the late 1970s.
Strings sweep dramatically across the arrangement. The rhythm section pushes forward. The production feels polished, expansive, and cinematic.
Above everything floats Mathis’ unmistakable voice.
The combination could easily have become a novelty—a veteran crooner awkwardly chasing a fashionable trend. Instead, Mathis’ natural elegance gives the arrangement credibility. He does not compete with the beat. He glides over it.
That distinction matters.
The disco elements modernize the recording, but they never erase the song’s emotional core.
If anything, the stronger rhythm creates an intriguing contradiction: the music encourages the body to move forward while the lyrics keep pulling the heart backward.
The Old and New Meet on the Dance Floor
That contradiction is perhaps the most fascinating element of Mathis’ “Begin the Beguine.”
Disco was intensely connected to the present moment. Its culture celebrated nightlife, movement, glamour, escape, and the temporary freedom of the dance floor.
“Begin the Beguine,” meanwhile, is obsessed with the past.
Putting the two together created an unusual emotional experience.
You could dance to the recording while listening to a man remembering a love he could never completely recover.
The beat says move.
The lyrics say remember.
And Johnny Mathis somehow stands perfectly between those two impulses.
For listeners who experienced the disco era firsthand, the recording can now create another layer of nostalgia that Cole Porter could never have anticipated. A song originally written about remembering an earlier romantic night has itself become a reminder of another vanished era.
Hearing Mathis’ recording today can evoke images of crowded dance floors, shimmering lights, elaborate evening clothes, orchestral disco arrangements, vinyl records, and late nights dominated by music.
The song became nostalgia about nostalgia.
Why Johnny Mathis Could Make It Work
The experiment succeeded largely because Johnny Mathis never attempted to become someone else.
By 1979, he had already spent more than two decades establishing one of the most recognizable voices in popular music. His identity was secure enough that he could experiment without losing it.
That confidence is audible throughout “Begin the Beguine.”
Mathis brings the same qualities to the performance that defined his greatest romantic recordings: impeccable control, delicate phrasing, emotional restraint, and the ability to make enormous melodies sound personal.
The production may belong to disco, but the storytelling remains classic Johnny Mathis.
It also reveals something about his longevity.
Artists who survive multiple generations rarely do so by remaining completely frozen in time. They understand when to preserve tradition and when to allow contemporary influences into their work.
Mathis’ interpretation of “Begin the Beguine” demonstrates precisely that balance.
He did not discard the past to embrace the future.
He allowed the two to dance together.
More Than a Disco Curiosity
Decades later, Johnny Mathis’ 1979 version of “Begin the Beguine” deserves to be remembered as more than an interesting experiment from the height of disco.
It represents a remarkable meeting of musical generations.
There is Cole Porter’s sophisticated songwriting from the 1930s. There is Johnny Mathis’ romantic vocal tradition, shaped during the golden age of traditional pop. And surrounding both is the lush, dramatic energy of late-1970s disco.
Three musical worlds occupy the same recording without completely surrendering their individual identities.
That is precisely what makes it so compelling.
Beneath the strings, rhythm, glamour, and polished production remains a timeless human experience: the sudden return of a memory we thought had faded.
Perhaps that is why “Begin the Beguine” was such a natural choice for Johnny Mathis after all.
Few singers have spent their careers exploring memory, longing, romance, and the fragile beauty of love with such consistency. In his hands, Cole Porter’s classic became both a dance record and an emotional time machine.
And there is something wonderfully fitting about that image: Johnny Mathis standing at the center of a glittering 1979 dance floor, his timeless voice soaring above the disco beat while singing about a perfect night that exists only in memory.
The world around him had changed dramatically.
The rhythm had changed.
Popular music had changed.
But romance, as Johnny Mathis proved once again, had not.