“Miss Otis Regrets” turns a perfectly mannered message into a shock of human cruelty—polite words hovering over a story of passion, punishment, and a life ended without mercy.
Linda Ronstadt recorded “Miss Otis Regrets” for her 2004 jazz album Hummin’ to Myself (released November 9, 2004), and her choice of this particular Cole Porter song tells you everything at once: she wasn’t returning to standards for decoration—she was returning for truth. The album arrived with real chart presence, debuting at No. 3 on Billboard’s Top Jazz Albums and reaching No. 166 on the main Billboard album chart.
The song itself is older than most of the voices who have carried it. Cole Porter composed “Miss Otis Regrets” in 1934, and its premise is as chilling now as it was then: a society woman murders her unfaithful lover, is jailed, and is ultimately lynched—all delivered through the immaculate social fiction of a servant’s apology: she regrets she’s unable to lunch today. The first stage performance is commonly traced to Douglas Byng in the London revue Hi Diddle Diddle, opening at the Savoy Theatre on October 3, 1934.
What makes Ronstadt’s interpretation so affecting is how she understands the song’s central weapon: contrast. This is not a “story song” meant for theatrical winking. It’s an indictment of how easily brutality can be wrapped in etiquette—how quickly “good society” can move from gossip to violence, then back to table settings as if nothing happened. Ronstadt sings it with the kind of control that feels almost like composure forced upon someone who would rather break down. You can hear the discipline in the pacing, in the careful placement of each phrase, as though the singer is refusing the listener the comfort of melodrama. In that refusal, the horror becomes clearer.
The backstory around Ronstadt’s Hummin’ to Myself adds another layer of poignancy. The album is described as a return to the jazz standards world she had explored earlier—only this time with a band rather than an orchestra. In interviews discussed in album histories, Ronstadt also pointed out that some of these songs were ones she had wanted to record with Nelson Riddle but couldn’t because of his death. That detail matters: it suggests an artist revisiting the Great American Songbook not just to “sound classic,” but to finish a conversation left unfinished.
And “Miss Otis Regrets” is a conversation worth finishing. Beneath the narrative lies a sharper meaning: the way a woman’s desire, once it spills beyond the boundaries of acceptable behavior, becomes a public spectacle—and then a public sentence. The song’s cruelty isn’t only in the mob. It’s in the deadpan tone of the reporting, the way the tragedy is relayed as if it were merely a scheduling inconvenience. Porter’s genius was to make the listener feel complicit—because the song invites you to “listen politely,” the way people often do when the world’s ugliest stories arrive dressed as small talk.
Ronstadt, for her part, does not soften the ending with sentimentality. She lets the listener sit in the aftertaste: the image of a “lovely young woman” hanging, while the messenger still speaks in the language of luncheon etiquette. That is the song’s final bruise—how society can preserve its manners even as it destroys a person.
It’s also telling that Ronstadt returned to the title again later: in 2007 she contributed “Miss Otis Regrets” to the Ella Fitzgerald tribute compilation We All Love Ella: Celebrating the First Lady of Song—a quiet sign that the song kept its hold on her imagination.
In the end, “Miss Otis Regrets” in Ronstadt’s hands doesn’t feel like a performance that ends when the track fades. It feels like a letter left on the table after everyone has gone home—carefully worded, flawlessly polite, and absolutely devastating once you realize what it’s truly saying.