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"After You've Gone": song history, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video

"After You've Gone"

Editor's note: Al Jolson was crucial to the spread of popularity of "After You’ve Gone." He sang it to a vaudeville audience at the Wintergarden Theater in 1918, and that prompted other artists to record it. It was Marion Harris’ rendition, recorded July 22, 1918, however, that became the song's standard bearer. By 1919, her recording had risen to number one on the charts and remained there for three weeks.

About the Show So Long Letty and the Song's Early History

So Long, Letty (1917—In 1917, Creamer and Layton wrote "After You've Gone" to liven up an ailing road show called So Long, Letty that had already closed in New York. The original 1916 Broadway production of the show did not include "After You've Gone." It was only after the road show failed that the song, having hooked audiences, began its independent life.

"The first-ever recording of 'After You've Gone' was likely by its composers. Tim Brooks, in his [book] Lost Sounds, discovered that the pair cut a now lost trial record for Columbia in April, 1918, although the title of the song wasn't listed. However, while Columbia [Records] rejected the Creamer/Layton disc, it produced the first surviving recording of "After You've Gone" eleven days later, with regular session singers Albert Campbell and Henry Burr (suggesting that Columbia used the Creamer/Layton recording . . . as a template)" (source: Locust St.)

Early Recordings that made the charts (year and chart #)

“After You’ve Gone” made 10 trips to the pop charts between 1918 and 1937:
Marion Harris: (1919, #1)
Henry Burr and Albert Campbell (1918, #2)
Billy Murray and “Rachel Grant” (Gladys Rice) (1919, #9)
Bessie Smith (1927, Fletcher Henderson, piano, #7)
Sophie Tucker (1927, with Miff Mole’s Molars, #10)
Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra (1930, Bing Crosby, vocal, #14)
Louis Armstrong (1932, #15)
Benny Goodman Trio (1935, instrumental, #20)
Lionel Hampton (1937, #6)
Quintet of the Hot Club of France (1937, instrumental featuring Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli #20)" (Source: WICN FM)

Stage: 1975: Linda Hopkins, Broadway biography of Bessie Smith, Me and Bessie; 1979: Thais Clark, off-Broadaway review, One Mo' Time; 1989: Linda Hopkins and Bernie Manners, Broadway show Black and Blue.


In this clip from the 1934 movie Sadie McKee, Gene Austin and his combo, featuring Gene Austin (piano), Candy Candido (bass), and Otto Heimel (guitar), perform "After You've Gone" for Sadie (Joan Crawford), a working girl who has been picked up by a besotted millionaire, Jack Brennan (Edward Arnold). The other man at the table is the millionaire's attorney (Franchot Tone) who has been in love with Sadie since he was a boy. A recorded version of Austen singin "After You've Gone" appears on the album This Is Gene Austen.

Other Movies in which "After You've Gone" is used: 1941: Marsha Hunt in Unholy Partners; 1942: Judy Garland in Me and My Gal; 1944: Constance Moore in Atlantic City; 1946: Benny Goodman Quartet in the Disney animated film Make Mine Music; 1949: Al Jolson dubbing Larry Parks in Jolson Sings Again; 1958: Shirley MacLaine and male trio in Some Came Running; Louis Armstrong in The Five Pennies; 1979: Leland Palmer in All That Jazz; and others.

In the Video below, the performance is by the Benny Goodman Quartet but from a decade or so later (1946) than the recording in the Record/Video cabinet, and some of the personnel have changed from the rendition on the album: Benny Goodman Clarinet, Teddy Wilson Piano, Cozy Cole drums, Sid Weiss bass. They play "After You've Gone" for the Disney animated film Make Mine Music, in which the instruments come to life and dance to their own playing of Turner Layton's tune.

Alec Wilder writes, "In 1918 Henry Creamer and Turner Layton, an outstanding team of Negro songwriters, published 'After You've Gone', one of the most long-lived jazz standards. And if by this time I haven't conveyed to you by illustration and citation what I mean by an American-sounding song, 'After You've Gone' should tell you."

Wilder also points out one of the reasons why "After You've Gone" has become a standard, especially for jazz musicians: "No chord holds for longer than a measure and in most instances only for half a measure. This fact is an instant attraction to the improviser.” (AlecWilder, American Popular Song The Great Innovators, 1900-1950, New York: Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 26 -- hard cover edition)

Philip Furia in his book about Tin Pan Alley lyrics, cites "After You've Gone" as an example of a "torch song" of unrequited love. Torch songs generally being, as noted by another commentator, "white offshoots of the blues." In this context, he sees "After You've Gone" as a precursor to many Great American Songbook standards "coloring the great 'ballads' of the 1920s, from Berlin's 'All by Myself' to Richard Whiting's '(I Got a Woman Crazy for Me) She's Funny That Way' (1928), and flowering in the earthy lyrics of Johnny Mercer set to Harold Arlen's bluesy melodies in the twilight of the golden age." (Philip Furia, The Poets of Tin Pan Alley: A History of America's Great Lyricists, p. 37.)

Furia along with Michael Laser add, in their book America's Songs, "We usually assume that happy songs will be up-tempo and sad songs slow, but a strange streak runs through our popular music largely before 1930: a batch of melancholy songs that insists on sounding good-natured. In 'After You've Gone," the betrayed lover responds with a promise of retribution, set to the bounciest of tunes:

There'll come a time, don't you forget it There'll come a time when you'll regret it."

"'Now listen' [from the verse of "After you've Gone"] is a concise command that belies the sentiment of the rest of the song, which quickly veers from desperation to delusion. Quincy Jones once called this type of song a 'beg,' and said you had to throw in one per album. But as it proceeds, the song goes from a beg to a hopeful, desperate curse. The singer, despite her pleas, realizes in her heart that it's over. Beyond the last wave of self-deceptions, the failed, mustered attempts at pride, lies despair and invective: 'One day you will hurt as much as I do now.'"

"The song's finest interpreters--[Marion] Harris, [Bessie] Smith, [Sophie] Tucker, Judy Garland, Blue Lu Barker, Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington, Nina Simone and Fiona Apple--all convey the song's power and grace, its measures of rancor and heartache, its futile delusions and its hidden strengths. Each of these records has its own treasures: Garland's frantic attempt at exuberance; Apple's show of determined petulance; Simone's slow boil (she opens the verse almost sleepily, as though she's still letting the blow sink in). "After You've Gone" lends itself to such spectacle and performance: after all, it is the last will and testament of a failed marriage, a desperate coda to a breakup."

Notes

Questions

What is After You've Gone?

Editor's note : Al Jolson was crucial to the spread of popularity of "After You’ve Gone." He sang it to a vaudeville audience at the Wintergarden Theater in 1918, and that prompted other artists to record it. It was Marion Harris’ rendition, recorded July 22, 1918, however, that

How should After You've Gone be cited?

Cite this page as ""After You've Gone": song history, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video," Cafe Songbook, https://greatamericansongbook.net/pages/songs/a/after_youve_gone.html

Which Cafe Songbook pages are related?

Also read "Ain't Misbehavin'" (https://greatamericansongbook.net/pages/songs/a/aint_misbehavin.html); "An Affair to Remember" (https://greatamericansongbook.net/pages/songs/a/affair_to_remember.html); "Ain't She Sweet?" (https://greatamericansongbook.net/pages/songs/a/aint_she_sweet.html); "Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive" (https://greatamericansongbook.net/pages/songs/a/accent-positive.html).

Cite this page: "After You've Gone": song history, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video, Cafe Songbook, https://greatamericansongbook.net/pages/songs/a/after_youve_gone.html