Songfacts®:

• This uplifting tune comes at a pivotal moment for Gene Kelly's character in the 1955 musical It's Always Fair Weather, when the interest of a beautiful woman (Cyd Charisse) renews his self-confidence. "If someone as wonderful as she is can think I'm wonderful," he reasons, "I must be quite a guy!"
• Kelly is Ted Riley, a soldier-turned-gambler who gave up on his dream of becoming a lawyer. After escaping a couple of disgruntled gangsters at a skating rink, a relieved Riley launches into this sunny musical number – complete with tap dancing on roller skates. (Kelly wasn't the first to accomplish this feat: Donald O'Connor did a skate-tape routine to "Life Has Its Funny Ups and Down" two years earlier in I Love Melvin and Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers' performed a skate dance to "Let's Call The Whole Thing Off" in 1937's Shall We Dance.)
• According to Robert Trachtenberg, who wrote and directed the American Masters documentary on Gene Kelly, Kelly bought the skates himself at Pioneer Hardware, which was a block down from the dancer's house in Beverly Hills. "He also mentioned that the skates were not altered in any way," Trachtenberg told PBS. "They weren't locked to his shoes, so when he tapped in them, he had no help."
• Screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green - the same team behind Kelly's 1952 musical smash Singin' In The Rain - also wrote the lyrics, with music by Andre Previn.
• While the musical was only a modest commercial success, it was a hit with critics and garnered two Academy Award nominations: Best Story and Screenplay for Comden and Green, and Best Scoring of a Motion Picture for Previn.
• Jazz singer Blossom Dearie covered this on her 1959 album Blossom Dearie Sings Comden and Green.
• In the 1993 action thriller Leon: The Professional, hitman Leon (Jean Reno) watches It's Always Fair Weather in a movie theater and is delighted by the "I Like Myself" sequence.
• Seth MacFarlane recorded this for his 2017 album, In Full Swing.