Before You Came

Lyricist. Irene Castle

Publisher. M. Witmark & Sons

Date. 1918

Key/Range. D Major (d' -- f♯")

COMMENTARY

The lyrics for all four songs in this set were written by Irene Castle in homage to her late husband Vernon, who had died in a plane accident that year while training young pilots in Texas during World War I. The Castles had become influential in the early 1910s as a dancing team that drove fashion trends at a time when social dancing was the most popular form of entertainment in the United States. Tours had met the couple during the tour of Irving Berlin’s Watch Your Step and he maintained a close relationship with Irene during her husband’s long absences during the war. When Vernon died, her friendship with “Frankie” was surely a source of comfort, not least of which because he gave her a vehicle to express her grief in their collaboration on these songs. “Before You Came” is organized in three long sentences, although the punctuation in the sheet music does not accurately reflect this grammatical structure. For instance, the period at 29 should be a comma, since the next phrase (“turning sorrow into song”) needs to be in the same sentence as “a little love.” For, not only are they are causally connected, the phrase has no subject or verb otherwise. Tours set the first sentence as the first half of the song’s binary form using four large musical ideas that gives the listener no sense that Castle’s poem is in iambic hexameter. The harmonic conceit that illustrates the poetic image of life before the lovers met is the fact that Tours never arrives at the tonic until the end of the sentence on the final appearance of the word “came.” He illustrated more specifically the line “my lonely soul had wandered far” with meandering parallel dominant sonorities that cause the listener to lose any sense of mooring in D Major. The song climaxes near the end of the second half of the binary form on the words “since you have come to me at last” followed by a series of dominant chords through the circle of fifths on the words “I shall forget the years that passed” that wend inevitably to a musical homecoming that is, nonetheless, difficult to see (or hear) in advance. This song is one of Tours’ most subtle and sophisticated examples of text painting.