Careless Love: A Song History

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"Careless Love" is sung by a young woman who regrets a love affair and dreads what her mother will say when she comes home pregnant.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index lists it as Roud 422 and gives its earliest date as 1911, in the Journal of American Folklore; it shares floating verses with other songs, among them "The Butcher Boy" and "Dink's Song."[1] The sources consulted here do not document where it came from.[1] The collector Mary Wheeler linked it to the Dick Fowler, an Ohio packet boat that ran between Cairo and Paducah, and versions also appear in Vance Randolph's Ozark collection and in Carl Sandburg's The American Songbag.[1]

Drypoint sketch of a line of steamboats on a broad river beneath a pale sky

James McNeill Whistler, Steamboat Fleet, drypoint, 1875. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.

W. C. Handy appears to have written new words to the old tune in 1921 under the title "Loveless Love," and an early edition of that sheet music, published in New York by Pace & Handy Music Co. and now at the Morgan Library & Museum, gives "Careless Love" as an alternative title.[1][2] According to the Ballad Index, Handy at times seemed to claim "Careless Love" as his own, but elsewhere called it a folk song.[1] When Bessie Smith recorded "Careless Love Blues" in New York on May 26, 1925, with Louis Armstrong on cornet, Charlie Green on trombone and Fred Longshaw on piano, the disc label credited Handy as lyricist.[3] Lonnie Johnson recorded "Careless Love" for OKeh on November 16, 1928, and the Johnson Brothers (1927) and Ernest V. Stoneman (1928) also put it on record.[1][4]

Handy himself sang it with guitar for Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress on May 9, 1938.[5] The Library's folk archive also holds field recordings of the song, among them one by Lead Belly for John A. Lomax in Wilton, Connecticut, in February 1935, one by Pete Steele in Hamilton, Ohio, in 1938, and a guitar-and-harmonica version recorded at the Farm Security Administration camp at Shafter, California, in July 1940.[6][7][8]

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Sources

  1. Traditional Ballad Index (Waltz & Engle): "Careless Love".
  2. The Morgan Library & Museum: "Loveless Love" (W. C. Handy, Pace & Handy Music Co., James Fuld Collection).
  3. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Columbia matrix W140626. Careless love blues / Bessie Smith".
  4. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "OKeh 8635 (10-in. double-faced)".
  5. Library of Congress: "Careless love" (W. C. Handy, 1938, AFS 1620 B3).
  6. Library of Congress: "Careless love" (Lead Belly, 1935).
  7. Library of Congress: "Careless love" (Pete Steele, 1938).
  8. Library of Congress: "Careless love" (Ernest Alston and Harding Price, Shafter FSA Camp, 1940).