Baby, It's Cold Outside

Vocals by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan.  Ella gets my vote for best vocalist of the 20th century.  Incredible tone control no matter where she is in the register and she makes it seem so smooth and effortless.  THC has featured her once before doing a stunning version of Summertime on German TV in 1968 and it's an incredible performance even with the crummy YouTube sound. UPDATE:  The version of Summertime linked to in the prior post does not work.  You can find an active version here.

Louis Jordan is not well-known today but was a very popular singer and bandleader in the 1940s and early 1950s and was one of the first black artists to have crossover hits with a white audience.  From 1942 through 1950 he had 36 Top 3 singles on the Billboard R&B charts along with 12 Top 10 on the Billboard US and Country charts, including three number 1s.  He's credited as one of the key originators of the R&B style that evolved into Rock n Roll in the early 1950s and was cited as an inspiration by Chuck Berry, Little Richard and James Brown.

Baby, It's Cold Outside was written by Frank Loesser, who also wrote the lyrics and music for Guys and Dolls and How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying.  He wrote it in 1944 for a house party and performed it as a duet with his wife.  It made its first commercial appearance in the 1949 film, Neptune's Daughter, where it was performed twice, once by Ricardo Montalban and Esther Williams and then by Red Skelton(!) and Betsy Garrett.  Loesser won the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

The song was immediately recorded by many artists with seven versions being released just in 1949 and it is still often covered today (including by Zooey Deschanel and Will Ferrell in Elf).  The Ella/Louis version was part of that first wave in 1949.