What Latin Rhythm Is That We Hear In The Theme To "I Love Lucy"?

Way back in the lost mists of time I read a magazine article describing a debate among musicologists who were trying to solve this pressing question: "What type of music was the theme from I Love Lucy?" The song has a distinctly latin beat, but what kind of latin beat? That is the question. Is it a Mamba, a Samba, a Conga, or a Rumba?  No one interviewed for that article seems to have known, although I believe I read that piece while Desi Arnaz was still alive.  Seems to me someone could have asked him.

As far as I know, that question has never been officially resolved, but I'm going to resolve it for you now. The theme from I Love Lucy was written and performed as a Mamba. There, now let's end the niggling. Lucky I'm a trained musicologist, or I would have been forced to just guess. There's the theme song at the top of this article. Listen carefully to the uderlying percussion and tell me what you think.

How do I know it's a Mamba? Well, first off it sounds like a Mamba. Also Mambo was the type of music Desi Arnaz was knkown for.  So it stands to reason the theme song for his TV show would reflect that Mamba beat, which was very popular at the time. Further, Arnaz started out playing in Xavier Cugat's band, and Cugat was a Mambo artist as well. These are all clues worth taking into account.

There have been two major obstacles in the way of anyone attempting to definitively arrive at which style of rhythm is represented by the theme from I Love Lucy.  In the first place, Mamba, Samba, Conga, and Rumba are all similar styles.  Both Mamba and Conga come to us through Afro-Cuban dance, so they sound somewhat similar.  Samba is a Brazillian beat, so we can dismiss that right now, along with the Bossa Nova, which also came by way of the Samba and began to surface around the time Samba was running its course.  That leaves us with the Mambo, the Congo, the Rumba, and the Italian Mambo (if we are to believe Dean Martin.)

But we are not going to believe Dean Martin. There is no such thing as Italian Mamba. That was just a quasi-Mamba song sung by an italian guy who was trying to cash in on the Mamba craze that was all the rage in 1954. So Dean Martin is right out.

Take a hike, Poseur.

Complicating the puzzle even further is that you can often tell when a song is a Conga because the singer is playing the conga drum, a long cylindrical drum that originated in Africa.  But that's not always the case,  Desi Arnaz often played the conga drum even while he was singing the Mamba. So we can't go by that alone.

Sometimes whether a song is a Mamba, a Conga, or a Rumba has little to do with the percussion instruments being played and more to do with the dancing  Here are Ricky and Lucy dancing a Mamba. I can detect a rhythm in this song showing up in places that is close to that of the show's theme music, can you?

The clip below shows us what the Conga looked and sounded like. Although Desi Arnaz is known for his Mamba playing, the drum he's beating frantically in this wild number is a Conga drum and the dance is definitely a Conga dance. You can tell it's a Conga by the hints of the cha-cha, cha-cha, cha-CHA! beat -accent on that last "CHA" as the dancers throw their hands in the air beginning around minute 2:07. (Don't look for them to actually shout "Cha Cha Cha; this is too early in the Cha-Cha craze; people didn't start actually saying "cha-cha-cha" while they were dancing until a bit later.  But you can definitely hear them shouting "Way OH!" on the downbeat.

                                                           Pretty wild for 1940, right?

The Cha-Cha dance craze of the 50's was another craze descended from the Mamba AND the Conga by way of Cuba. (I should note here that teenagers of the 50's were not into the Cha-Cha; not in the least little bit.  That dance belonged to the Rob and Laura Petrie generation. No self-respecting teenager would be caught dead dancing like cocktail party grownups back then. That dance was for squares.)

Oh, one more thing I neglected to mention about the theme from "I Love Lucy." It wasn't written by Desi Arnaz. It wasn't even written by anyone of Latin descent. The songwriter was one Eliot Daniel, who penned a passel of hits for a variety of recording artists such as Rosemanry Clooney, Dinah Shore, Bing Crosby , Roy Rogers, and others.  He was also the composer of one of the records I listened to incessantly as a child: Burl Ives singing "Lavender Blue (Dilly Dilly).  Like any good composer worth his salt, Eliot Daniel knew how to write a song so it sounded latin.  


Oh, I almost forgot. This is what the Rumba looks like: