I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles
(1919)
Words: Jaan Kenbrovin
Music: John W. Kellette
Arranged by: Ruth Randle
This wistful song was the result of a cooperative project by three professional songwriters, James Kendis, James Brockman and Nat Vincent. They combined their talents and their names as aliases, and published their work with a copyright by the Kendis-Brockman Music Co. As a model for this song, they used the same theme as that of a 1918 best seller called I’m Always Chasing Rainbows. Both songs tell the story of the sadness of pursuing false hopes without success. Ironically, the copyright to this song was sold a few months after completion to Jerome H. Remick & Co. It soon became a best seller and the new publisher enjoyed most of the profit.
Ruth’s arrangement of this tune includes the verses of the introductory lyrics, as well as the more familiar chorus. To play the introduction, you will need to use a 1+ fret. That fret is not necessary, however, to play the chorus appearing on page two. As you will hear from the sound file, this song is played rather slowly, in a dreamy fashion. In several places there are tied half-notes and dotted half-notes requiring five or six beats. In these cases, In the JPG and the PDF files, Ruth has shown the “extensions” of these chords (in the tablature) in parentheses. In the TEF file, the ties are present, but with no tab numbers after the ties. Here you may simply “hold” the chords or use fill notes to satisfy the tempo required.
Note also the appearance of the 0/1/5 chord in two places. If you are unable to make the finger stretch, just play the melody note on the fifth fret.
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Please note these additional comments about this month’s tab offering:
Although the introductory portion of the song (page 1) was arranged using the 1+ fret for convenience, we later noticed that it was not actually necessary for this portion of the music. Since there is an important lesson to be learned here, we refer readers to Learning Aid #7 on this website.
As shown there, among the 22 “new” chord patterns added by the 1+ fret, you will find the three used in this month’s tab offering. They are the 2/1+/3 (D), 2/1+/2 (F#m), and the 1/1+/2 (A) chords. Notice that all require the same note (A) provided by the 1+ fret on the middle string. This is a note already present on our D-F#-A fretboard, without the 1+ fret! The lesson here is that we could have avoided the need for the 1+ fret in this case.
For those wishing to play page 1 of this month’s selection without a 1+ fret. we have posted below a second version of the piece. Readers are encouraged to download and print both versions, to compare differences in chord fingering, as well as the sound files. The files titled “v2” are for the arrangement which does NOT require the 1+ fret.