That Old Black Magic

There is nothing subtle about this song, and Keely Smith understands that perfectly. The arrangement arrives like a vaudeville-adjacent circus — brash horns, a swinging rhythm that tilts slightly toward theater, the whole thing wound up with an almost comic energy that keeps threatening to tip into chaos. And then Smith opens her mouth, and she is absolutely still at the center of all of it. That contrast — the almost deadpan, barely-inflected delivery set against the extravagance of the production — is the entire joke, and also the entire point. She sounds like someone who has heard this pitch before and is choosing, deliberately, to be amused rather than swept away. The song is nominally about helplessness in the face of desire, but Smith's reading makes it something else: a woman watching herself be enchanted and maintaining perfect composure about it. The big band context places this squarely in mid-century American popular entertainment, the kind of music that filled television variety shows and Las Vegas showrooms, where wit and timing mattered as much as vocal beauty. Louis Prima's shadow looms over this recording, given their professional and personal partnership, but Smith commands her own space entirely. You play this when you need something that feels alive and a little ridiculous and completely in control of itself — a party starting, the best kind of argument, the particular pleasure of watching someone be brilliant at something they make look easy.