"Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me"
#560 / Flood Time Capsule
Many songs in The Flood’s repertoire capture the dizzy, ditzy joys of the Roarin’ Twenties, none better than one of the oldest in the batch.
“Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me” was regularly front and center in Flood shows, like the one in the video above with audio from a gig 23 years ago this week, featuring Chuck Romine’s rollicking tenor banjo and Dave Peyton’s raucous kazoo.
About the Song
Written in 1919 by a trio of Tin Pan Alley songwriters, “Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me” captures the post-World War I “Jazz Age” excitement with its playful, suggestive lyrics about the blues a lover provides.
It was first recorded that same year by singer Irving Kaufman, a popular early recording artist who sang with such jazz greats as Bix Beiderbecke and Eddie Lang.
Few know Kaufman’s name today, nor, for that matter, the names of the number’s composers — Carey Morgan (1884-1960), Charles McCarron (1891-1919) and Arthur Swanstrom (1888-1940) — but their song has had more than a century of celebrity.
“Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me” has been given jazz and swing treatments (Ted Lewis, Gene Krupa, Sidney Bechet, Eddie Condon, Wild Bill Davison), folk renditions (the Greenbriar Boys, Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band, John Denver), even rock and country versions (from Spanky and Our Gang to Glen Campbell.)
More than 50 years after the tune’s composition and first recordings, the song was incorporated into the 1975 Broadway musical Doctor Jazz. Thirty years after that, Jimmie Noone’s recording of it was used on the soundtrack to Woody Allen’s 2013 film Blue Jasmine. And as recently as four years ago, a new recording of the song by Cherise Adams-Burnett was used in the 2022 film Downton Abbey: A New Era.
So, Who ARE the Writers?
The men behind the music came from vastly different backgrounds, but found a shared rhythm in the high-energy world of vaudeville and theater.
Charles McCarron was a vaudeville legacy, the Wisconsin-born son of a veteran actor and manager. After moving to New York in 1912, he became a prolific composer of WWI hits and comedic “stuttering songs.” Sadly, he never knew the wild success of his greatest hit. Just 27, McCarron died of pneumonia in 1919, the year of the “Blues” release.
Carey Morgan served as the vital bridge between the three writers. A minister’s son from Indiana, Morgan’s early career was spent as a typewriter salesman before he came to songwriting and what he called his “low-brow appreciation of high-brow art.”
He was a master collaborator who had already established a successful partnership with McCarron by 1918, producing popular (though now long-forgotten) tunes like “I’m Glad I Can Make You Cry.”
The third member of the team, Arthur Swanstrom, was a Brooklyn-born dynamo and the son of a prominent local politician.
Swanstrom didn’t start as a writer; he began his career as a ballroom dancer in nightclubs and on the vaudeville circuit. His partnership with Morgan was particularly synergistic: Swanstrom would sing while Morgan manned the piano or conducted the orchestra. Together, the duo eventually producing acclaimed revues like the Greenwich Village Follies.
So, it was that blend of vaudeville heritage, salesmanship and dance-floor rhythm that created a lasting musical standard.
Back to The Flood
A year or so before “Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me” was included in the January 2003 gig featured in today’s video above, it was recorded by the guys on The Flood’s first studio album engineered by our late friend Buddy Griffin.
Click the button below to hear that rather staid 2001 rendition:
Footnote: Epic Fail
Meanwhile, for Charlie Bowen, this tune often calls to mind just how badly we (well, okay, he) screwed up in front of our heroes at the great Coon-Sanders Nighthawks Reunion. Confession time. Click the button below to hear Charlie tell that story: