"If I Loved You" is a show tune from the 1945 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel.
The song was introduced by John Raitt as "Billy Bigelow" and Jan Clayton as "Julie". It was performed in the 1956 Carousel (film) version by Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones.
In the show, the characters of Billy Bigelow and Julie Jordan sing this song as they hesitantly declare their love for one another, yet are too shy to express their true feelings.
The song was in turn inspired by lines of dialogue from Ferenc Molnár's original Liliom, the source material for the musical.
There are many recordings of "If I Loved You" including by:
Demetri Evan Martin (born May 25, 1973) is an American comedian, actor, artist, musician, writer, and humorist. He is best known for his work as a stand-up comedian, being a contributor on The Daily Show, and his Comedy Central show Important Things with Demetri Martin.
Martin was born on May 25, 1973 to a Greek American family in New York City, New York, the son of nutritionist Lillian and Greek Orthodox priest Dean C. Martin (now deceased). He grew up in Toms River, New Jersey, and has a younger brother named Spyro.
Martin graduated from Yale University in 1995. During his time there, he wrote a 224-word poem about alcoholism as a project for a fractal geometry class, which became a well known palindromic poem. He was also a member of the Anti-Gravity Society, whose members juggle objects on Sunday evenings on Yale's Old Campus.
Although Martin was accepted into Harvard Law School, he went to New York University School of Law after he received a full scholarship. Martin withdrew from law school before the start of his final year, opting to pursue comedy over finishing his Juris Doctor.
"Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. We'd, we'd like to dispense with the-uh, it so
happens that we
just happen to have a couple of arrangements along with us. And, uh,
Remember, your elders
are sitting all around you. We would like to, uh, do, as one of our encores, a very
lovely song. This,
if we may digress for a minute, is not from a motion picture-it is from a show called "Carousel", it's
a very lovely
tune called "If I Loved You."
If I loved you, time and again I would try to say
All I'd want you to know
If I loved you, words wouldn't come in an easy way
`round in circles I'd go
Longin' to tell you but, afraid and shy,
I'd let my golden chances pass me by
Soon you'd leave me, off you would go in the mist of day
Never, never to know
How I love you, if I loved you
Soon you'd leave me, off you would go in the mist of day
Never, never to know