Son of My Heart

Lyricist. Edward Teschemacher

Publisher. M. Witmark & Sons

Date. 1915

Key/Range. D Major (e' -- g" [a” ossia])

COMMENTARY

With Edward Teschemacher’s sentimental lyric, this song serves as a companion piece to “Mother o’ Mine,” not only because of its theme of unabashed male familial affection, but because Tours’ music is as rich and tuneful a setting as he ever composed. The Irish tone of the music and lyric is more in keeping with the American songs written by and for Chauncey Olcott than any traditional music from Ireland. And yet, the song’s fetching theme was created with a palette of harmonic color that was never heard in the music of Ernest Ball. When most composers of sentimental songs in Tin Pan Alley at the time used secondary dominants on at most a few scale degrees, Tours uses some type of non-diatonic seventh chord (dominant, half-diminished, or diminished) on every step of the chromatic scale except ♭II during the course of the song. Nor was the gracious lilt of the melody constructed with the compositional symmetry of Ball’s justifiably famous “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” with its 32+32-bar binary verse-and-chorus form. Instead, Tours employed a broad A-B-A’-form in which the main section is comprised of four four-measure phrases plus a two-measure tag that are all different, giving the song a constant sense of progression and development. When the melody does recapitulate after forty measures, it returns with new lyrics that warn the boy of the challenges that lie ahead. Although most of the song sits high in the voice, the end brings a powerful climax with five fermatas that call for a sustained fortissimo at the top of the range, conveying the father’s heartfelt emotion with an undeniable and touching sincerity.