My Sweetie Went Away (Cover)

By Roy Turk and Lou Handman

Genre: Old Timey, Dixieland Jazz

This is the first “cover” tune I’ve released. My inspiration came from two very unrelated sources: my grandmothers… and David Bromberg.

Ruth and Fannie

My grandmothers were both piano players. While their births coincided roughly with the dawn of commercial recordings, they still got most of their “tunes” from sheet music. Rather than listening to phonograph records, they enjoyed sitting at their keyboards and playing the popular songs of the day from the printed page.

Sadly, both women gave up playing, a hobby eventually crowded out by childrearing and housekeeping responsibilities. By the time I was born, their upright pianos were either sold or collecting dust in the dining room, so I never had the opportunity to hear either one of them play. Still, they had a respectable collection of old hits from the 1920s stuffed in their piano benches or closets. That’s how I came to know of some—to me—obscure titles like “The Japanese Sandman,” which my Mom had grown up hearing her mom play. She encouraged me to learn them on the accordion, so I was predisposed to be on the lookout for these types of songs.

“My Sweetie Went Away” was not one in my grandmothers’ collection, but it was definitely from the same era—when both grandmothers were in their late ‘20s. The authors, Roy Turk and Lou Handman, were New York City-born vaudeville performers. Handman was a composer; Turk primarily a lyricist. They toured and collaborated on clever novelty tunes with titles like “Two Ton Tessie” and “I’m Gonna Charleston Back to Charleston.” Turk was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970; Handman in 1975. They also wrote “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” (made popular by Elvis Presley in 1960). The song “Mean To Me,” which Turk wrote with composer Fred E. Ahlert, is now a jazz standard. 

I first encountered the song through Bessie Smith’s masterful performance. Bessie Smith made everything sound bluesy even when it wasn’t technically a “blues,” and this one is just such a song. I’ve always loved it for its clever, story-like lyrics, its concatenated interrogatives (where-when-why/who-when-what), and its striking bridge.

David Bromberg

I’ve always been a great admirer of David Bromberg. I love his acoustic guitar playing, his songwriting, and his self-deprecatory sense of humor.

I had the good fortune to see him perform in a short-lived, but cozy club called the Blue Note on the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder when I first moved here in the late ‘70s. Bromberg took a long hiatus from performing to hone his skills as a luthier (violin), but I’ve since seen him at eTown after he returned to the performance stage. His shows are always crowd pleasers.

I particularly loved his revivals of classic old tunes, replete with complementary horn section arrangements. His rousing, updated version of “Send Me To the ‘Lectric Chair” (another tune first made famous by Bessie Smith in 1927) is a classic. “Stealin,’” his take on the old Memphis Jug Band song, written by Gus Cannon, is another favorite.

In doing this arrangement, I was inspired by these examples. When “My Sweetie Went Away” entered the public domain last year, I naturally envisioned it as an upbeat, Dixieland style tune with lots of horn accompaniment.