I Didn't Know What Time It Was

"I Didn't Know What Time It Was" is a ballad composed by Richard Rodgers with lyrics by Lorenz Hart for the 1939 Broadway musical Too Many Girls. The song was introduced on stage by Richard Kollmar and Marcy Westcott when the show opened at the Imperial Theater in October 1939, and it quickly entered the popular consciousness through recordings by Benny Goodman (which reached number six on the charts) and Jimmy Dorsey. The melody is built on repeated notes that create a feeling of gentle longing and gradual revelation, while the harmony employs tonal ambiguity that mirrors the lyric's confused sense of time and place. Hart's words trace a dawning awareness of love, moving from disorientation to clarity, and Rodgers supports this arc with suspensions and a contrapuntal bass line that delays strong tonic resolution until the final phrase. The song gained further exposure when Frank Sinatra performed it in the 1957 film Pal Joey. As a jazz vehicle, the tune's rich harmonic movement and its inviting bass line have made it a favorite among both vocalists and instrumentalists, earning it a secure place in the Great American Songbook alongside other Rodgers and Hart standards of the late 1930s.