Song of the Day

Let Me Call You Sweetheart

This evening we welcome our District Governor and other distinguished guests with a song that takes us back to the very early days of Rotary.  Let Me Call You Sweetheart (song 196 on page 39 of our Song Book) was one of the big hits of 1910.  Its special significance to Rotarians is that it was the first song ever sung at a Rotary meeting. (see below)

Harry Ruggles, known as the fifth Rotarian because he joined the Chicago Club at its second meeting on 9 March 1905, was also its first song master.  At a rather dull club meeting one evening in the Sherman Hotel, he suddenly shouted “Gosh fellows, let's sing!”  "By that time," he reminisced many years later, "I was standing on my chair, waving my arms and swinging into Let Me Call You Sweetheart."  Was it a coincidence that the hit had been published in Chicago?

The song was the biggest success ever for the song writing team of Beth Slater Whitson (1879-1930), who wrote the words, and Leo Friedman (1869-1927), who composed the music, following on from an earlier hit they had had with Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland.  An evergreen, it has featured in over twenty films between 1929 and 1998.  Bing Crosby’s 1934 recording is famous, and Ethel Merman sang it in a 1932 short of the same name.  It was even in a 1997 television adaptation of a crime novel of the same name by Mary Higgins Clark.

There is actually a lot more to the song than the well known chorus in our Song Book.  For the record, the complete lyric is as follows: