No. 2. “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” (Show Boat, 1927)

Music by Jerome Kern, Lyrics & Book by Oscar Hammerstein II. Based on Show Boat by Edna Ferber

Show Boat treated musical theater as a serious art form capable of using musical conventions to enhance dramaturgy. It marks the evolution of the musical comedy into a musical theater capable of all the complexities of its non-musical counterparts. There’s enough history surrounding Show Boat to fill a 12-part Ken Burns documentary (manifesting!), and “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” embodies a lot of that legacy.

• It does a lot of dramaturgical heavy lifting at a time when having songs relevant to the plot at all was optional.

• It features white and black characters sharing a scene as friends, which was shockingly progressive for 1927.

• Despite taking a definitive “racism is bad” stance, it also contains racial stereotypes and language that merited criticism from the black community in 1927 and continues to be a challenge contemporary productions have to navigate. In “Can’t Help…” specifically, Queenie and Joe’s verses have been revised, rewritten, or cut for decades because of their negative tropes. Even the song’s title (with its affected dialect) has not aged well. There’s a century of discourse on race and Show Boat. This recent article in The NY Times is a good primer on the topic.

  
  

Most importantly though, the song is an absolute banger.

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