In 1926, South Bend Was “Sorry and Blue”

The Elbel family represented South Bend music royalty. By 1926, they had a national hit.

BY AARON HELMAN // POSTED DECEMBER 27, 2025

If South Bend had a sound in 1926, it was probably the industrial churn of its factories, the rattle of automobiles and the blaring of their obnoxious horns. More often than you would expect, there was the sound of two of those cars crashing into each other. It wasn't a particularly pretty sound.

But on the evenings and the weekend, at the clubs and the dance halls, there was the sound of music — 1920s Big Band collectives from across the city and across the region. Those bands played the songs that had become popular in New York and Chicago, bringing the tastes of the big city to South Bend's burgeoning metropolis.

But in 1926, the music was going to flow in the other direction. A pair of South Bend cousins had just authored a new waltz — and it was about to become a hit.

The Elbel family had been at the center of South Bend's music world ever since they arrived in town in the 1840s. It started with brass bands. It expanded to orchestras. The earliest Elbels even started the city's very first choir in the years before South Bend's incorporation.

It's difficult to imagine how big a deal the Elbels were, but there were years and even decades when the only professional music in South Bend came from this one family. In his History of St. Joseph County, Judge Timothy Howard notes the family this way:

“No name figures more conspicuously or is mentioned with greater honor on the pages of the history of St. Joseph County than the Elbel family. What the Olivers and Studebakers have been to the industrial life of South Bend, the Elbels have been to the musical life.”

The Elbels would receive even higher praise in the years to come. When South Bend's own Louis Elbel composed Michigan's fight song, 'The Victors', none other than John Philip Sousa called it “the best college march ever written”. More than a hundred years later, that sentiment still rings true. 'The Victors' has continued to be recognized by contemporary judges as the number one college fight song.

But in 1926, marches had fallen out of style, and no one had ever imagined that 'The Victors' was a song that you'd slow dance to. Instead, it was the era of big band waltzes and moody love songs. Fortunately, a new generation of Elbels was ready to step into that world too.

The original Elbel brothers married and had children. Their children married and had children. Three generations after coming to the United States, there were enough Elbels to fill an entire orchestra. Sometimes they did.

But that third generation had different experiences and different tastes. Their preferences were distinctly American, and in the 1920s that meant big bands playing ballads and love songs sung by Irving Berlin. That's the world that Bob and Don Elbel rushed into when they wrote their first hit, “Sorry and Blue.”

The song was a smash hit in the sheet music world, during the days when music was still more likely to be disseminated via the printed notes on the page than on the radio or on a record.

The radio was becoming a household fixture, to be sure, and the record player was hardly a new invention. But neither came close to the sound fidelity that came with an orchestra. Every town had its own big band and big cities had several. Those bands flocked to the music stores on a weekly basis to shop new music, to make sure their repertoire kept up with trends in the big cities, and to make sure they stayed at least as current as their competitors.

In January 1926, “Sorry and Blue” was at the top of the charts. So far as I can tell, there's only one historic recording of the song. Enjoy:

“Sorry and Blue” might have become one of the standards of its era, but for a significant spat of celebrity drama that hit the newspapers at almost the exact same time that “Sorry and Blue” became a hit.

Irving Berlin was the most prominent musician of the 1920s, and according to the South Bend Tribune, Berlin was set to do a recording of “Sorry and Blue” for release to the masses. But before he could do that, there was the matter of his wedding to heiress Ellin Mackay.

The marriage between Berlin (a Russian Jew) and Mackay (an Irish Catholic), created something of an interfaith scandal, enough that Mackay's parents went to the papers to make sure the world knew that they had publicly disowned their daughter. The scandal and the story and the lavish honeymoon became a media spectacle three decades before paparazzi even became a word.

Berlin never did make that recording of “Sorry and Blue”. Maybe the unwanted attention disrupted his recording schedule. Maybe he'd never been quite so intent on recording the tune as the Tribune intimated. Maybe by the time he got back into the studio, the buzz around the Elbel's waltz had vanished. Music can be fickle that way.

Robert Elbel died in 1938 at the age of 32. He is buried in the Saint Joseph Valley Memorial Park Cemetery.

Donald Elbel died in 1984, aged 87. He is buried in the Riverview Cemetery. His obituary remembered that he'd written “Sorry and Blue” with his cousin six decades earlier.