Someday (You’ll Want Me to Want You)

This is another I learned off Red Steagall’s Lone Star Beer and Bob Wills Music LP, and the odd thing is I’d never heard it before and have rarely heard it since, though it has been recorded by dozens of major artists, from Elton Britt, Gene Autry, Vaughan Monroe, and the Mills Brothers in the 1940s up through Patsy Cline, Ray Charles, Dean Martin, Della Reese, The Drifters, Brooke Benton, Brenda Lee, Ricky Nelson, Willie Nelson… and so on and on.

The songwriter, Jimmie Hodges, is virtually unknown except for this song, which apparently hit as he was turning sixty after a long career as a producer of musical comedies. He did write some others, but I have been unable to find any recordings of them. From the titles, most sound pretty generic — “Dear Old Girl Of Mine” — or eminently forgettable — “Blackberry Jelly Nellie” and “Ding Dong Dell (The Belle of Chinatown).”

Hodges was apparently born in 1885 and shows up in a few show biz journals in the teens and twenties as a producer of musical comedies, for example 1920’s All Aboard for Cuba, which was presumably a lighthearted reaction to the passage of Prohibition. (A more famous relic of that moment and inclination is Irving Berlin’s “I’ll See You in C-U-B-A.”)

Anyway, I’ve noticed over the years that there are songs you like and then there are songs that like you — sometimes I love a song but it doesn’t work for me as a performer, and sometimes a song that didn’t particularly strike me when I heard someone else play it just feels right to me when I do it myself. This one liked me from the first time I played it: the guitar part fell comfortably under my fingers, the lyrics flowed, and it always got a good response. So I’ve been playing it for over thirty years and that’s that.