“Love Me or Leave Me” by composer Walter Donaldson and lyricist Gus Kahn was introduced in the 1928 Broadway show Whoopee! by Ruth Etting. She stopped the show with her performance, and the song became her signature song. Etting recorded “Love Me or Leave Me” just days after the show opened in December, and it reached number two on the charts in 1929. Benny Goodman took the song to the charts twice: in 1934 for two weeks and again in 1936 in a new version which rose to number four. Eddie Cantor, the star of the show introduced “Makin’ Whoopee” which also became a jazz standard.

Produced by Florenz Ziegfeld, Whoopee! ran for 379 performances and would have run longer if Ziegfeld had not gone broke and had to close the show. According to David Ewen in The Complete Book of the American Musical Theater Ziegfeld had to sell the movie rights to Samuel Goldwyn and release Cantor to act as consultant and star in the film. The 1930 film, which closely follows the Broadway musical, was Cantor’s first movie and made a star of him. Whoopee! enjoyed a successful revival on Broadway in 1979.

Love Me or Leave Me became the title of a 1955 film about dancer/singer/actress Etting’s life starring Doris Day whose hit recording revived interest in the song. The movie was nominated for several Academy Awards, and Daniel Fuchs and Isobel Lennart won the award for Best Writing, Movie Picture Story.

In 1958 pianist/singer/songwriter Nina Simone recorded a definitive version of “Love Me or Leave Me” in her debut album Little Girl Blue, and the song became forever associated with her. Her version appeared on the soundtrack of Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss (1998).

In 2005 “Love Me or Leave Me” was inducted into the GRAMMY Hall of Fame, and Ruth Etting’s 1928 recording of the song was added to the Recording Academy’s “timeless list” of 659 titles.

In The NPR Curious Listener’s Guide to Popular Standards Max Morath ponders the popularity of “Love Me or Leave Me”: “Is it the unusual chord progression or the blunt lyric that has made this song so ubiquitous? ‘...I’d rather be lonely than happy with somebody else...’ is one of the lines attached to the melody as it jumps from its initial minor key into the relative major with nary a passing chord to warn the ear. But it works, and jazz musicians have improvised endlessly on the tight AABA standard.”

In Reading Lyrics editors Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball refer to Kahn’s art: “Like Irving Berlin, Kahn was a superb and meticulous craftsman who made a lyric seem easy, even inevitable, rather than calling attention to its ingenuity or wit. But no one was fooled; it was clear to his colleagues just how good he was.”

In The Poets of Tin Pan Alley: A History of America’s Great Lyricists author Philip Furia points to Kahn’s skillful use “...of Donaldson’s insistent, repeated phrases to create a faceted verbal mosaic whose theme itself is monotonous oscillation.

Love me

or leave me

and let me

be lonely

you won’t

believe me

and I love

you only.

“While repetitive, Donaldson’s music nevertheless swerves up and down within the octave and even jumps keys, and Kahn’s lyric follows with sharp vacillations between plea and ultimatum. At the highest reach of the release Kahn comes up with a paradoxically helpless boast:

I intend

to be

independ

ently

blue

“Here again Kahn rings his characteristic changes on the figure of the lover as defiant victim, oscillating, with the music, between soaring assertion and repetitive moaning that stretches ‘blue’ over three notes.”

“Love Me or Leave Me” has been recorded by vocalists from Bing Crosby and Ella Fitzgerald to Jane Monheit (2004) as well as by a variety of instrumentalists: saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, pianist Johnny Guarniere, guitarist Mundell Lowe, The Soprano Summit, trombonist Ray Anderson, and drummer Chico Hamilton.