Carl Jularbo was a virtuoso accordionist and one of the most famous Swedish musicians of the 20th century. This article examines how two of his melodies, "Drömmen om Elin" and "Flickan från Finnskogarna" express sentimentality in different ways, through melody and harmony, phonotext, and the production of the recordings as "works of phonography". The female figures Elin and Aino appear as projection surfaces for sentimental dreams of past youth and a different past Sweden. Jularbo's biography is used to show how the melodies and their message are both connected to his own life in mythologized form and to the development of contemporary Sweden from a poor to a rich country, where sentimental representations of the past gained importance in the present. The article also tells about the emergence of Swedish popular music, where the accordion was of great importance, before it achieved significant international success and the sentimentality of music gained a new meaning.