My Heart in Deep Despair

Bob Nolan
Original copyright: September 24, 1985

The blues dropped by to say,
“You know it’s just a waste of time
To want her back again.
You know she’ll only send
Your heart in deep despair.”

But still, I’ll take a chance.
If fortune sends her back to me,
A moment to be kind
If she were here to find
My heart in deep despair.

Blue is the swallow homing from the sea.
Blue is this hollow where my heart should be.

So, send my darling home, oh Lord.
It’s such a hopeless thing
To find I love her still.
I know she’ll always fill
My heart in deep despair.

Bob Nolan's wife and daughter registered this song for copyright on September 24, 1985, five years after his death. It was never commercially recorded and there are no rough lyric sheets, just the demo Bob made on his home recorder. He accompanied himself on his little Martin guitar and whistled the introduction. Bob set this poem to music that does not quite match the words.

Bob had an old home recording machine, and he made his own wax demos on it. Many years later, his grandson rented a record player and transferred the old demos to tape.

“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)

We do not have any sheet music for this song.