“Miss Otis Regrets” is a polite note written on the lip of a catastrophe—good manners standing perfectly upright while the world below it turns brutal.
If the earlier picture felt incomplete, it’s because Linda Ronstadt didn’t just visit “Miss Otis Regrets” once—she returned to it decades later, and that later return is the most up-to-date part of her relationship with the song.
Her first widely known recording came on What’s New (released September 12, 1983), produced by Peter Asher and arranged/conducted by Nelson Riddle—the album that famously opened the door for a new generation to hear classic standards through a contemporary superstar’s voice. But the later, and in many ways even more intimate, Ronstadt take arrives on Hummin’ to Myself (2004), where she revisits the Great American Songbook in a small jazz combo setting rather than a full orchestra—and “Miss Otis Regrets” is on that album’s track list, too.
That two-chapter arc matters, because it changes how we hear the song. In 1983, Ronstadt is stepping into the chandelier light—gown, orchestra, and that thrilling sense of risk that comes from doing something your own era doesn’t quite expect of you. In 2004, she’s stepping closer, as if the room is smaller and the story can be told in a lower voice.
The chart story belongs mainly to What’s New, not to the song as a single. “Miss Otis Regrets” itself was not launched as a major U.S. singles campaign, so it doesn’t have a meaningful Hot 100 “debut position.” But the album became a genuine phenomenon: it spent 81 weeks on the main Billboard album chart and famously held No. 3 for five consecutive weeks, kept from climbing higher only because Thriller and Can’t Slow Down were entrenched at the top. It also earned Triple Platinum certification in the U.S. Those are not footnotes—those numbers explain why a song as darkly ironic as “Miss Otis Regrets” ended up living in so many homes. People didn’t just hear Ronstadt sing standards; they lived with them.
Now, the song itself: Cole Porter wrote “Miss Otis Regrets” in 1934, and the premise is as chilling as the delivery is refined. Miss Otis—society’s idea of a “proper” woman—kills her unfaithful lover, is arrested, and is ultimately lynched, all while the message that reaches “madam” is only that she regrets she cannot come to lunch. It was first performed by Douglas Byng in the revue Hi Diddle Diddle, which opened at London’s Savoy Theatre on October 3, 1934. Porter’s genius here is not simply in the twist, but in the cruelty of the contrast: etiquette as a mask the world insists you wear even as it prepares to destroy you.
So what does Linda Ronstadt do with a song like this?
On What’s New, she understands the central trick: the song is funniest—and most horrifying—when the singer refuses to wink. Her voice stays composed, luminous, almost disarmingly “proper,” letting the narrative’s violence bloom without melodramatic emphasis. The orchestra around her (Riddle’s world) becomes candlelight and satin: beautiful, orderly, and therefore the perfect frame for a story that is anything but. You don’t feel like you’re being “told” a moral; you feel like you’re overhearing a society ritual continuing while something unspeakable happens just outside the door.
Then comes the later chapter: Hummin’ to Myself. Here, Ronstadt returns to standards with a jazz-leaning ensemble approach—no grand orchestral cushion, more air between the notes. In that setting, “Miss Otis Regrets” can feel less like theater and more like a confidant’s recital: the same exquisite manners, but closer to the bone. It’s as if time has taught the singer that Porter’s joke isn’t only a clever punchline—it’s a portrait of how politely the world can treat tragedy.
That’s the enduring meaning of “Miss Otis Regrets” in Ronstadt’s repertoire: a reminder that civilization’s surface can be flawless while its heart is still capable of barbarity. And because Ronstadt recorded it both at the height of her arena-sized fame (1983) and again in a later, jazzier, more inward season (2004), the song becomes something rare: not a costume she tried on once, but a story she kept returning to—each time hearing new shadows in the same impeccable words.
