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Cassandra Wilson - You Don't Know What Love Is (live)

Cassandra Wilson and Band perform at the Funchal Jazz Festival in Funchal, Portugal.

Reginald Veal - acoustic bass

Marvin Sewell - electric guitar

Gregoire Maret - harmonica

Jon Cowherd - piano

Lekan Babalola - percussion

John Davis - drums

"You Don't Know What Love Is," a popular song of the Great American Songbook, was written by Don Raye (lyrics) and Gene de Paul (music) for the Abbott and Costello picture Keep 'Em Flying (1941), in which it was sung by Carol Bruce. The number was deleted prior to release.

Universal ended putting the song into the Raye/de Paul score of one of its B musicals, the 60-minute Behind the Eight Ball (1942), starring the Ritz Brothers and re-teaming Carol Bruce and Dick Foran from "Keep 'Em Flying." Here, "You Don't Know What Love Is" was again sung by Carol Bruce, in her third and final film until the 1980s. Bruce would find her greatest success on Broadway.

From such curious beginnings as an outtake in an A picture and an introduction in a B, both by the same singer, no one could have predicted that in later years the song would emerge as a masterpiece—a jazz standard to be recorded several hundreds of times, starting when Miles Davis and other jazz musicians began recording and playing the song in the 1950s.

The song also appears on the soundtrack to the film The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999).

The lyrics:

You don't know what love is

Until you learn the meaning of the blues

Until you've lost a love you had to lose

You don't know what love is

You don't know how lips hurts

Until you've kissed and had to pay the cost

Until you've flipped your heart and you have lost

You don't know what love is

Do you know how a lost hearts fears

The thought of reminiscing

And how lips that taste the tears

Lose their taste for kissing

You don't know how hearts burn

For love that cannot live yet never dies

Until you've faced each dawn with sleepless eyes

You don't know what love is

(Music)

Do you know how a lost hearts fears

The thought of reminiscing

And how lips that taste of tears

Ooh, they lose their taste for kissing

You don't know how hearts burn

For love that cannot live yet never dies

Until you've faced each dawn with sleepless eyes

You don't know what love is

You don't know what love is