Give a Broken Heart a Break

I think because it's an Mp4, you have to click this link to download the song.

After a lot of searching, this song apparently is not composed by Cleo Brown but by a guy called David Franklin, who (according to allmusic.com) has been an active composer, engineer and guitarist from 1910 through present day, and is also an actor (what?).

Anyhow, the song is a lilting, playful, tightly knitted little number with an adorable rhyme scheme. Built around a simple, conversationally punny refrain, this songs power is in its tapdancing obliviousness to the devastating subject matter ("all my life was full of laughter/now it's just an empty ache/won't you give a broken heart/a break"). I enjoy listening to it so much, I hardly noticed that fact (until now) that it has a total of two verses and a bridge.

Here, Cleo Brown does it up in her typical fats waller-meets-aristocratic preteen vocal treatment, complete with her "two-fist" piano style, which makes all her songs sound to me like she's singing in a paddleboat full of wrenches.