The following was in a message I received from Joseph Morneaux this morning:
“Sweetheart Flute has shut down and Musique Morneaux has taken its place here in the shop… Scrambling to put up a viable website and change the letterhead and moving things about in the workshop… Daunting! Happened a bit more quickly than we had prepared for.”
I wish him well.
The Sweetheart Flute Company website http://www.sweetheartflute.com/ is still up and taking orders, are we talking about another business here?
Might be worth clarifying which we’re talking about here …
So far as I know, Joe has taken over Mr. Sweet’s business, and he is working on changing the name, etc. Joe has worked for Mr. Sweet for some time, and I would imagine that Mr. Sweet has retired - since he’s well along in years. Until all these things are changed, the Sweetheart website will remain the same.
I don’t know any of this for sure, it’s just speculation on my part. It makes sense, however.
Look at the home page more closely Steve, notification of the change is there.
Ah, my mistake, sorry. Carry on
Very interesting.
One wonders why they didn’t continue using the Sweetheart name.
I also wonder why a family member didn’t continue the company.
BTW my first flute was a Sweet flute, bought around 1976. It had a very low serial number (can’t remember now but it was around 100). Amazing to see Sweet flutes with serial numbers over 2,000.
Shouldn’t this be moved to the flute forum? Well he made whistles too, but flutes were always the main thing.
His son is in business at wdsweetflutes.com.
I’ll duplicate it over there. 
Duplicate from the Flute Forum:
Hello C&F! It’s been a while since I’ve been here, but I wanted to clarify what’s happening on this, Ralph’s 88th birthday! WOOT!!!
Jos Morneault has indeed gone from being the foreman of the shop, chief woodworker and all around neat guy, to being my boss. Another WOOT!!! For the past many years he has been maintaining the high quality of Sweetheart Flute’s products, and is now taking the shop forward. Same shop, equipment, materials and skills, and hands making the instruments, but a different signature at the bottom of my paycheck, and a different person taking the risks and financial burdens.
I am proud of the shop I work in, the people I work with, and the long history of Sweetheart Flute as it segues to Musique Morneaux.
With all best wishes to everyone who remembers This Cat,
Amy
Question one: Legal messiness of dissolving a company – finances, risks and such – as well as Jos’s well deserved (IMHO) professional credit.
Item three: we stopped putting hand etched numbers on certain instruments years ago. But we have all numbered instruments hand itemized in notebooks!
Item 4: Musique Morneaux is deeply involved in historically accurate reproductions of fifes, as well as whistles (an incredible 10-hole chromatic whistle in both D and C styled for both whistlers and fifers!), and of course flutes. Jos has brought back the walking stick flute (YAYAYAYAY!) and is considering resurrecting the G Tabor Pipe (I am particularly thrilled with this one).
Having slid precariously toward commercial post, I hereby sign out. . .
The Cat
Howdy, stranger.
Does that mean you can tell who made a particular (numbered) instrument and when?
It would be pretty cool to find out that kind of thing!
I still have a couple Sweetheart catalogues from the 1970s.
As mentioned above, they have more variety that one normally sees in a maker of Irish flutes, because they offered
-Irish flutes
-wood whistles
-tabor pipes
-Baroque flutes
-walking-stick flutes
-and of course fifes.
In college I was briefly a Music Major and my instrument was Baroque flute, a Sweetheart Baroque flute, which played beautifully.
I can tell you the wood, and the rough date. Any given instrument usually passes through a few hands, so I couldn’t tell you a single person that made it. But if its a keyed flute I can tell you that indeed passed through Ralph’s hands. If it shipped during my tenure, I can tell you I played at least two full scales on it before it got packed and shipped. Except fifes. I’m not great on fifes. Yet.
Tygh
I can’t find the catalog(ue) from the 1970s, but I found one from 1982.
It’s a Legal size piece of paper that is folded in four.
Here’s the one from 1985. A different format, a larger sheet of paper folded in 6.
Note the keyed flute, on the cover of the 1982 catalog, no longer appears.
What’s new is walking stick flutes and more fifes.
'85 would be around when I got my first Sweet D piccolo (‘fife for folk music’); the head joint of that one unfortunately stayed in France after a wedding gig (the body made it home, the head didn’t). My later D piccolo is still going strong, but I am tempted by one of the Professional D fifes …
Pancelticpiper, that was a MAJOR walk down memory lane!! My second whistle was one of the old flageolets in blackwood. Back when I was collecting.
Tygh
Yes for me too!
As I had said my first Irish flute was a Sweetheart one in the late 1970s.
By the early 1980s I had a rosewood D whistle, a Baroque flute, and mezzo flutes in F, G, and A.
I used the small F flute in the band quite a bit- the string players would capo up 3 frets and we could all play as usual but get a quite different sound, it was terrific.
Among the old stuff I have is a typed letter from Ralph (there was no internet in 1980, believe it or not).
Also among the old stuff was a small stack of Xerox copies of the Irish Flute page of the Sweetheart catalog. In the 80s I was going around to festivals teaching Irish Flute workshops and I’d hand out those sheets, advocating beginners get Sweetheart flutes. At one festival a shop would stock up beforehand and show up with several Sweetheart maple D flutes. I’d stop by the shop on the way to my workshop, pick up a few, and let people try them. The shop would sell several each weekend to people who had taken my workshops.
A great-playing wood Irish flute for $125? You just couldn’t do better.