Irving Berlin wrote “Cheek to Cheek” for the 1935 Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers vehicle Top Hat. As you can see in the video below, Astaire sings the song to Rogers as they dance, of course.
This was a good song for Astaire as his recording of it spent five weeks at #1 in 1935 on Your Hit Parade and was named the #1 song of the year. It was also nominated for the Best Song Academy Award for 1936, but lost to “Lullaby of Broadway.” Can’t have everything.
The Jazz Standards website ranks this one at #187 of standards all-time and writes this about the Astaire/Rogers movies:
The American public went crazy for the duo of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the mid-1930s. Their RKO musicals were the perfect escapist fare, showing how the “other half lived” during the tough days of the Depression. Astaire (dressed to the nines, suave and debonair) and Rogers (coquettish and elegantly clad in evening attire) along with superb music and choreography made these films sure-fire hits.
For the musicians in the room, they also write this:
“Cheek to Cheek” took some time to become comfortable to jazz musicians. Its unusual 72-bar length and A-A-B-C-A structure proved a bit daunting for some players, but the more advanced ones found the tune the perfect challenge with its engaging melodic and chordal structure.
The Discogs website lists countless covers: Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, Bing Crosby, Pharoah Sanders, Joshua Redman, Charlie Mingus, and on and on. More recently Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga took a run at it on an album of jazz classics with this as the title track.
Not the best voice in the biz but Fred could sure work a song.