The Songs

Please note that these songs are copyrighted and are the property of the various copyright holders.  I will not violate the copyright laws by posting or e-mailing lyrics, so please do not ask.  I highly recommend the source for most of the information for this listing: The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter, edited by Robert Kimball and published by Da Capo Press, available from all bookstores and most libraries.  Thank you.

A Note on Dates

In the era of Cole Porter and his contemporaries, songs were often not copyrighted until years after first performed.  To place a song into an historical perspective, I've included additional dates.  If a song was used in a stage or film production, there is a performance date ("Per.").  For a stage show, the date is for its first public performance (usually the tryouts), and for a film, the date is the month of its original release.  Please note that a song can be shown as "unused" but have a performance date.  In this case, it was probably dropped during the tryouts.  Although hard to believe, a great percentage of Porter's work remains unpublished.  If the song has been published (i.e. a printed copy of both lyrics AND music available to the public), the original date of publication ("Pub.") is given.  If a song was neither published nor publicly performed, I've tried to approximate the date of writing ("Wr.").  I have also highlighted the Top Thirty Cole Porter Songs, based on the number of recordings made of each song, a determination quite unscientific.

A Note on Alphabetization

The articles "A", "An", and "The" are not considered when beginning the title, but are when they're in the body of the title.  Apostrophes ( ' ) are alphabetized before letters, and spaces between words come before both.  So "I Sing of Love" comes before "I'm in Love" which would be followed by "If You Could Love Me".  "I've Got You Under My Skin" comes before "It's Bad For Me".  Got it?  Good.

Some Statistics

This list includes 991 titles of 929 distinct songs or instrumental numbers.  If a song is known by more than one title, there is a reference back to the most commonly used one.  Of those 929 songs, 163 are fragments (unfinished) or are missing either their lyrics or music, or both.

Use the alphabet bars to jump forward in the list.
They are located at the top of each letter's section.