Quarantined? Put on your red dress, baby.
Paralysed by existential angst? Take a lesson from Robert Higginbotham.
Rock and Roll
196: Ray Charles, ‘You Don’t Know Me’
Ray pretty much invented soul and then cornered the market. Instead of leaving well enough alone, he went and invaded Nashville, dressing a string of Country and Western classics in his jazz/pop/soul style, but with fiercely personal interpretations. Something new under the sun. Something indelibly beautiful.
Continue reading...186: The Everly Brothers, ‘All I Have to Do Is Dream’
Boudreaux and Felice Bryant wrote 23 hit songs for The Everly Brothers. The couple met when Felice was 19. She saw Boudreaux in a hotel lobby, told him she’d seen him in a dream when she was 8, and had been looking for him ever since. ‘All I Have to Do Is Dream’ was true autobiography.
Continue reading...182: The Shirelles, ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’
When seventeen-year old Carole King found herself pregnant, she wrote ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’ for The Shirelles. Girls (and now also guys) have been singing it ever since.
Continue reading...155: Buddy Holly, ‘It Doesn’t Matter Anymore’
When the weather’s right, this song can still make me cry.
Continue reading...152: Sam Cooke, ‘A Change is Gonna Come’
Sam Cooke wrote ‘A Change is Gonna Come’ as a black response to ‘Blowing in the Wind’. It was only released a week after he was killed by a motel manager, and has become the unofficial anthem of the Civil Rights movement. Second in a series of three death-premonition songs.
Continue reading...137: Patience and Prudence, ‘Gonna Get Along Without You Now’
I first learned the song ‘Gonna Get Along Without You Now’ when I was knee-high to a lawn-mower, and I still hum it on occasion. Patience and Prudence McIntyre were 12 and 9 when they recorded it in 1956. Today they’d probably be renamed Sistas Lust and Greed.
Continue reading...122: George Harrison, ‘You Know What to Do’ b/w Buddy Holly, ‘You’re the One’
Do you know these obscure gems?
Can you tell them apart?