Einar Swan was a Finnish-born American composer, arranger, and multi-instrumentalist active in the late 1920s and 1930s. Working under the professional name E. A. Swan, he served as lead saxophonist and arranger for the Vincent Lopez orchestra from 1925 to 1930 and played alongside the Dorsey brothers, Red Nichols, and Xavier Cugat. Swan's enduring contribution to American popular music is When Your Lover Has Gone, for which he wrote both words and music. Introduced in the 1931 film Blonde Crazy, the song quickly entered the jazz standard repertoire and has been recorded by Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, and many others. His remaining catalog includes Trail of Dreams and In the Middle of a Dream. Swan died suddenly in 1940 at age thirty-seven, leaving behind a small body of work anchored by one of the most recorded ballads of the twentieth century.
