"Careless Love"

Here’s a tune that has touched the hearts and minds of more than a hundred years’ worth of Flood heroes.

At the very start of the 20th century, it was one of the best-loved numbers in the repertoire of jazz legend Buddy Bolden down in the hot, dark streets of New Orleans.

A couple decades later up in Memphis, W.C. Handy co-opted it, copyrighting a variation after he heard an old guy singing it in a railroad station.

It was one of the first songs waxxed when the recording revolution began in the 1920s. Bessie Smith and a kid named Louis Armstrong had a huge hit with it in 1925.

After that, it was recorded by … well, by everybody from Lula Jackson and Lonnie Johnson to Jack Teagarden and The Mills Brothers, from Kid Ory and Baby Dodds to Bunk Johnson and George Lewis.

Country versions were done by The Texas Rangers, The Dixie Ramblers and by Riley Puckett, blues versions by Big Joe Turner and Josh White, straight-up jazz takes by Sidney Bechet and Billie Holiday, early rock and pop renditions by Fats Domino and Elvis Presley, Ray Charles and Nat “King” Cole, earnest folk treatments by Jean Ritchie and Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and Dave Van Ronk.

The Song’s Origins

The origins of “Careless Love” are obscure indeed, though it is thought to be essentially British, re-made in America with new stylistic influences. In the US, for instance, folklorist Vance Randolph collected a version in 1948 that he was told was learned in 1880.

In Father of the Blues, W.C. Handy’s 1941 autobiography, the composer acknowledged that the song he copyrighted as “Loveless Love” was “based on the ‘Careless Love’ melody that I had played first in Bessemer (Ala.) in 1892 and that has since become popular all over the South.”

Meanwhile, uh, What About the Murders? ...

Handy’s autobiography also introduced a curious twist when a notorious double-murder case glommed onto the “Careless Love” story.

While living in Henderson, Ky., with his new wife, Elizabeth, “I was told that the words of ‘Careless Love’ were based on a tragedy in a local family,” Hardy wrote, “and one night a gentleman of that city's tobacco-planter aristocracy requested our band to play and sing this folk melody.”

The tragedy in question was the April 1895 shooting death of one Archibald Dixon Brown, who happened to be the 32-year-old son of Kentucky Gov. John Young Brown.

Newspapers across the country reported the scandal, how the jealous husband of Archie’s 28-year-old lover, Nellie Gordon, caught the two of them in a bedroom in a disreputable neighborhood in Louisville and shot each of them to death. Fulton Gordon was captured by police several blocks away, where he confessed to the murders. Soon balladeers were hard at work, singing the news.

Our Take on the Tune

“Man, I love those chords you found!” Joe Dobbs used to say whenever The Flood played “Careless Love.” It’s true that the country version of the song Joe grew up hearing — with its simple I-IV-V structure — made for a pretty boring tune to solo on.

That’s why when The Flood started doing the tune a couple of decades ago, Charlie Bowen dug around to find what Joe liked to call “those Nawlins chords,” the changes favored by early jazz bands when they performed the song.

And since then, each iteration of the band over the years has found lots of space for ad-libbing in those roomy chords inherited from the song’s sweet Dixieland roots.

Just listen, for instance, to all the ideas that Sam St. Clair, Danny Cox and Randy Hamilton come up with in this latest rendition from last week’s rehearsal.

The Fakebook

Oh, and by the way, if you’d like to pick along on this or other songs in The Flood catalog, visit the band’s Fakebook section on its website.

There you’ll find chord charts for dozens of tunes in The Flood songbag, along with links to the band’s renditions over the years. Click here to check it out.