Let Me Call You Sweetheart: A Valentine’s Message for You

"Let me call you "Sweetheart," I'm in love with you.""Let me hear you whisper that you love me too..." "Let Me Call You Sweetheart" is a book-length valentine using the words of the beloved 1910 song as the text. It is illustrated on every page with a beautiful vintage valentine from the Laughing Elephant's vast treasure trove. "Let Me Call You Sweetheart" is die cut, like an over sized Valentine's day card, and is in the same format as the Laughing Elephant's popular line of die cut, shaped, books. Crafted to look like a lovingly filled out scrap book, with hand written text, Victorian scraps and Valentine's and the sweet words of the song hand written in old fashioned cursive, replete with an elaborate border area for personal inscription. "Let Me Call You Sweetheart" will make a stunning Valentine's Day gift for those times when a card just isn't sufficient.

Beth Slater Whitson (1870-1930) is part of the great songwriting tradition of the American South in general and Tennessee in particular. In 1925 she wrote of her career: ＂Between the little frame house in the valley where I wrote my first song-poem, and the sturdy old brick building with its adjoining flower gardens where today I am trying to grow the song-poems I can no longer write, there is a long road of fifteen years. It is an upgrade road of but few level stretches, the rough and rocky road of the average songwriter.＂＂ ＂＂I do not call myself a ＂has-been,＂ for I have no consciousness of having failed. During the long years of striving I have, at least, ＂touched the hem of success; and, in a measure, consider myself one of the specially anointed. With more than four hundred songs published under by own name and various nom-de-plumes, I feel that I have something of interest to say about my subject.＂＂ ＂＂In the spring of 1909, a little country girl with a one-way ticket to Chicago in her near-leather handbag boarded a train at a small Southern town. In the handbag, which was a bulky affair with nickel trimmings, there were close to fifty song-lyrics - the fruit of three years’ labor.＂＂ ＂＂The girl was timid and awkward and a dreamer. She wore a homemade coat-suit, which consisted of a very long skirt and a very short coat that had caused a member of the family to remark that ＂sister showed her collar-button whenever she leaned’＂＂＂ ＂＂That country girl was I. I knew that my coat was too short and my skirt was too long. I knew that my shoes were clumsy and my gloves too stiff. I knew that I was a frump in appearance and that, figuratively, I did show my collar-button when I leaned. But I also knew that there were songs in my soul.＂ From True Confessions Magazine, February, 1925