Widow's Lament

I'll never smile again

Until I smile at you;

I'll never laugh again,

What good would it do?

For tears would fill my eyes,

My heart wouldrealize

That our romance is through.*

These rhymes were not written in Tin Pan Alley's crocodile tears. When her husband died last summer, grief-stricken, 24-year-old Ruth Lowe meant every word.

She could not help giving her song a professional veneer; for eight years she had drudged along at a keyboard, plugging pop tunes in music shops, accompanying Canadian crooners over radio hookups, playing in the all-girl band of curvaceous Ina Ray Hutton. An insatiable itch to scribble notes had led her to many a music publisher, a disregard for slammed doors had kept her going. Last week, as she watched nationwide sales of I'll Never Smile Again pile up, her smile belied her song: it had sold 135,000 copies of sheet music, topped the sales of all other current tunes. Its most popular recording--by bespectacled, hawk-nosed Tommy Dorsey for Victor--had passed the 120,000 mark.

The doors of music publishers opened like magic to quiet, modest Miss Lowe.

No dirge is I'll Never Smile Again; it is hardly calculated to touch the funereal depths of 1936's lugubrious European ballad, Gloomy Sunday, which prefaced the suicides of 18 impressionable Hungarians (TIME, March 30, 1936). I'll Never Smile Again belongs to the great moon-June-stars-above-love tradition, is paradoxically reminiscent of last year's best-selling I Get Along Without You Very Well.

* By permission of the copyright holder, Sun Music Co., Inc.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.