This is another I’ve known for ages, but only started doing regularly when Sandrine joined me on clarinet. It was published in 1919 by the brothers John and Ben “Reb” Spikes, but Jelly Roll Morton claimed they got it from him and he got the basic melody from another piano player, Kid North — who was a “player” in all sorts of ways and will be a character in my next book project, about a group of hustlers who moved between New Orleans, San Diego, and other points in the early twentieth century.

I got interested in North while writing Jelly Roll Blues, where I mentioned Morton’s recollection that this song was based on his version of a classic streetwalker’s lament:

“Someday Sweetheart” was a tune that a old racetrack man, friend of
mine — Kid North — he only could play one tune. And he told me that I could have the tune since he found that I was a writer of music... The title of the tune that he wanted to give to me, which a part of it was taken for “Someday Sweetheart,” the title was named “Tricks Ain’t Walkin’ No More….”

[The Spikes brothers] wrote up the tune together and called it  “Someday Sweetheart…” At the time Reb and I was working for the mayor’s son in Oakland, in a cabaret there on the main street…. So the tune came out and was quite famous. In fact, I helped to make the tune famous myself.  Of course, my name doesn’t appear on the tune, and I’m not jealous about it. I hope the boys would write ten million other ones like that. 

Morton had a long relationship with the Spikes brothers; Reb recalled that they met in 1911, when the brothers were running the Pastime Theatre, an outdoor venue in Muskogee, Oklahoma: “Jelly Roll Morton drifted into town… [he] did a comedy act in black face . . . he didn’t hire on as a musician . . . the show’s band had a pianist. Before long, Jelly displayed his ability . . . soon took over the piano stool in that band.”

The Spikes are credited with writing lyrics to one of Morton’s most popular tunes, “Wolverine Blues,” and I see no reason to doubt Morton’s claim that he was involved in this one as well. He recorded it a couple of times, though just as an instrumental; the first vocal recording — actually, the first recording of any kind — was by Alberta Hunter in 1922, with somewhat different words.

So that’s the historical background — and for myself, I have no idea where I first heard it or when I learned it. I’m guessing I played it when I was working the Antwerp restaurants with Nick Boons, but that’s just a guess. I clearly had a taste for “someday you’ll be sorry” songs, since my relatively limited repertoire of standards from this period also includes the similarly themed “After You’ve Gone” and “Some of These Days.” I wasn’t the only one: Sophie Tucker did this as a follow-up to “Some of These Days” — and it’s probably not a coincidence that all three of those songs were by Black songwriters; there were lots of good white tunesmiths on that scene, but I find that the songs that have stuck with me were disproportionately by Black writers who were also performers on the Black vaudeville and nightclub circuits. I don’t know what it was that made their songs sound or feel different — maybe it wasn’t the songs themselves; maybe I tended to listen to Black musicians and they favored the Black composers. In any case, I recently noticed this and it seemed worth noting.