The Broken Heart Waltz

Bob Nolan
Original copyright: August 14, 1950

Little lady, forgive me.
If I’m not too bold, will you waltz with me
With your arms and the music and soft lights enfolding
My broken heart?
As we glide with the song, sweet forgetfulness.
Oh, but wait!
Why the tear in your eye?
Little lady, forgive me.
I knew not you, too, had a broken heart.

This is one of Bob Nolan's first post-Sons of the Pioneers compositions. An unknown vocalist made a demo but the sound was so poor that we asked Dave Bourne to make a new recording from the sheet music. See below for both recordings.

“I remember years ago, soon after Bob died, that my mom went down to see P-Nuts and brought back a box of old 78s. These records were one-time studio recordings of songs that he wrote and never were recorded [commercially]. But we went out and got a 78 record player, needles, (which were hard to find), and hooked it up to a cassette recorder and recorded all the records. As you can imagine the quality was very poor. A little curl of wax built up before the needle so the sound was virtually destroyed.” (Calin Coburn, July 2, 2000)

The sheet music was published by Bob Nolan Music Inc. in 1950, the year after Bob retired.

Broken Heart Waltz (Bob Nolan Music, Inc.)

Click below to listen to the original recording and make a guess at the vocalist. The song was never recorded commercially by the Sons of the Pioneers.