I can’t remember when or where I learned “After You’ve Gone,” but I’m pretty sure I played it when I worked the restaurants in Antwerp with Nick Boons (which I’ve written about in a previous post). We would have just played the chorus, and I picked up the verse more recently, probably from the redoubtable Martin Grosswendt. He sang it, but I just play it and sing the chorus.

One more thing about the verse — there is an F to Bb change in the third bar of the second half, and I was having trouble figuring out a comfortable way to play the melody over it… and then realized I could get it easily by using the Gary Davis D to G move I explained in my previous post about “You Got to Move” — Davis is like a school for how to play ragtime and tin pan alley tunes on guitar.

“After You’ve Gone” was published in 1918, part of a new wave of pop material written by Black songwriters — in this case the team of Turner Layton and Henry Creamer, who also wrote “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans” and a hit about the first national blues craze, “Everybody’s Crazy ‘Bout the Doggone Blues (But I’m Happy).” Creamer later teamed up with the Harlem stride pianist James P. Johnson, and produced “If I Could Be With You (One Hour Tonight).”

Layton meanwhile went to London, where he teamed up with Clarence “Tandy” Johnstone and became one of the most popular cabaret and recording teams in the UK, making dozens of records — including a couple that are additionally interesting for including the only recorded solos by Joseph Kekuku, the inventor of the Hawaiian steel guitar style. (Tip of the hat to Bernard MacMahon, who discovered those and presented them in the documentary series American Epic, for which I wrote the accompanying book.) Johnstone returned to the US in the 1920s, but Layton remained a favorite of London audiences until his death in the 1940s.

Like “Some of These Days,” a composition from eight years earlier, likewise by a Black songwriter and popularized by Sophie Tucker, “After You’ve Gone” is a classic kiss-off ballad, on the theme “you broke my heart and you’ll be sorry,” and I’m tempted to think it was written to capitalize on the earlier hit, but that’s just a guess. In any case, it’s a fun one to play and sing.