Subject: RE: Help: Careless Love / Bunch of Thyme
From:
masato sakurai
Date: 01 Sep 02 - 12:04 AM
From: James J. Fuld, The Book of World-Famous Music, 4th ed. (Dover, 1995, p. 163):
Words of this song, one of the earliest blues, appeared in Howard W. Odum, "Folk-Song and Folk-Poetry as Found in the Secular Songs of the Southern Negroes" in Journal of American Folklore, Lancaster, Pa., and New York, N.Y., July-Sept., 1911, p. 286, under the title Kelly's Love; ULS, p. 1435. Words also appeared in 1915 under the title Careless Love in Perrow, p. 147, with a notation "From Mississippi; country whites; MS of R. J. Slay; 1909." As "Kelly's" and "Careless" have similar sounds, one is probably a corruption of the other; but which came first is not known.
The music (and words) were published on Jan. 1, 1921, under the title Loveless Love, a "Blues Ballad," with music and words attributed to W. C. Handy. First edition: Front cover has a drawing of a girl's face in a heart and is orange, black and white. The publisher is Pace & Handy Music Co. Inc., 232 West 46th Street, New York, N.Y. m. on pp. 2-5. Back cover adv. Pace.. No price or plate number. LC(CDC), NYPL and JF.
W.C. Handy copyrighted "Careless Love" (1926) and "Loveless Love" (1921) separately. Both versions are in Blues: An Anthology, edited by W.C. Handy (1926; 1949; Macmillan, 1972, pp. 55 & 146-149). Abbe Niles wrote notes (pp. 206 & 212):
Careless Love
An old and very widely known lament, called also Kelly's Love, under which title a version (without music) appears in Odum and Johnson, page 194. So far as is known, first published with its music in the original edition of this book. Careless Love, despite loose references to it in some books, is obviously not a blues. It was, however, married to the blues in Handy's Loveless Love (page 146), whose introductory section is pure blues--and pure Handy. He himself had heard and played the original tune of Careless Love as early as 1892, in Bessemer, Alabama.
Loveless Love
This is the ancient Careless Love in a series of arrangements prefaced by an original Handy blues (not only one of his best, but unusual in the total ansence of the "blue note"); the words are on a theme suggested to Handy by the discourse of a street-corner Jeremiah on 44th Street, New York; the concluding blues lines, however, may be compared with the folk-verse Nora's Faithful Dove, at page 13.
See also The Traditional Ballad Index: Careless Love, with little info on the origin.
~Masato
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sj
