“I Will Always Love You” was written by Dolly Parton. She recorded it in 1973 and again in 1982. The song reached #1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart both times.
And then there was Whitney Houston’s version.
Produced by David Foster for the soundtrack to the movie The Bodyguard, Whitney Houston re-arranged the song, broke it down and built it back up with a vocal performance that knocks your socks off. It was almost as if she had something to prove. Houston’s version of the song set records (staying at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart for 14 weeks), sold hundreds of thousands of copies, achieved international success and won many awards including a Grammy Award for Record of the Year.
Our feature today finds Lena Horne making her film debut. Released in 1938 The Duke is Tops is about Duke a stage show promoter in love with the a successful performer. When he realizes that promoters want her to go to big leagues and she refuses to leave, he devises a deception so that she can better her career.
I invite you to take a peek into history… yes the dialogue may come off a little stilted and some things may not make sense out of historical context, but I believe it’s always enlightening to the view the then as if it were as popular as some of the media we watch now.
“Someone to Watch Over Me” is a jazz standard composed by George Gershwin with lyrics by Ira Gershwin from the 1926 musical Oh, Kay!. Several artists have recorded this song, but like her other recordings, Etta James put her soul-stirring stamp on it. The version presented here is not the first version Ms. James recorded of the song in 1962 for the album Etta James Sings For Lovers, but a subsequent version she recorded years later in 1995 for her album Time After Time.
This is a must hear interview for any fan of great music. GFM is proud to bring you Pt.1 of our two-part interview with JoJo McDuffie the former lead singer of The Mary Jane Girls. In Pt. 1 we discuss JoJo’s new album Slightly Dangerous her beginnings in Buffalo, the fateful meeting with Rick James, the real deal behind The Mary Jane Girls and more!
Special thank you to Robert Funderburg for putting this interview together.
In the late ’80s Tracie Spencer was a winner on the talent competition show Star Search and from there became the youngest female artist to sign a record deal with a major label– Capitol Records. The song “Tender Kisses” went to #1 on the R&B chart and also made Spencer the youngest female artist to win the ASCAP Songwriter of the Year Award. “Tender Kisses”, from Tracie Spencer’s second album Make The Difference.
R&B singer Carl Thomas brings the visuals for his latest single “Don’t Kiss Me” featuring Snoop Dogg, from his new album Conquer.
The dapper video pairs the two up in a swanky lounge of sorts with ladies, champagne and two-stepping abound. Thomas returns with his fourth album, where he’s now signed to Verve Music Group, a division of Universal Music (Etta James, Ledisi, Daryl Hall). After the successful release of his 2000 debut Emotional, which garnered hit singles “I Wish” and the title track, Thomas subsequently released Let’s Talk About It (2004) and So Much Better (2007).
Written by the pen of lead vocalist Axl Rose and lead guitarist, Slash, Welcome to the Jungle paints the uninhibited and brazen picture of the Hollywood streets. With a rock and metal aggression, Guns N’ Roses was the group who placed this song on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list. While it’s greatly associated with the rebellious spirit of Axl’s sway, many may wonder, “why did Etta decide to do a song like this?” Well, surprisingly these two may have more in common than you think. From the standpoint of musical approach, Etta interjects the “down home” grit of the blues to this particular cover which is nothing more than the father figure of rock and roll. In diving deeper into the lyrical storyline, Ms. James is no stranger to life on the Hollywood streets. From the streetwalker on Central, the pimp in the back alley or the junkie looking for their next hit, Etta’s life has been a dance with the devil in the trenches of the jungle. So it’s only fitting that she gives pleasantries not as a guest but a certified survivor.
Here is Welcome to the Jungle from her last recorded project, The Dreamer.
Today, which would have been Etta James’ 74th birthday, we celebrate with the song that stands as her most enduring contribution to music: “At Last.”
1960′s At Last! was the album that gave Etta her true identity as a solo artist, and created massive crossover success that made her a household name.
The timeless title track has become a beloved classic known all around the world, from the smallest wedding chapel to the White House, and everywhere between. But many don’t realize just how genius Etta’s recording was.
The song was written for and originated by the Glenn Miller Orchestra in the 1940s, and had been a well-known standard for nearly 20 years before Etta took it on. The sweet, glowing melody, as written, is fairly straightforward and simple…and VERY little like anything that came out of Etta’s mouth in the studio.
Lyricist Mack Gordon and composer Harry Warren, Hollywood’s most prolific hitmaker, had written the number for the 1941 Glenn Miller movie Sun Valley Serenade, but it was held for the following year’s Miller film, Orchestra Wives. Performed as a duet by Lynn Bari (who mouthed the words to Pat Friday’s vocal) and Ray Eberle, the piece has middling-to-good words and a stroke of genius in the opening few bars: Warren flattens “love” (“At last, my love has come along”) from a major to a minor chord. That one note darkens the tone from ecstasy to assonance, from the choir to the blues. [...] James ran with that poignant tone. The emphasis was no longer on I’ve-just-fallen-in-love but on What-took-so-long?, and Will “at last” last?
That approach to the lyrics made it perfect for Gary Ross when he directed the 1998 film Pleasantville, about two teen siblings who find themselves trapped in a 1950s sitcom where everything’s in black and white and the world is claustrophobically limited. As the two outsiders flesh out the lives of the other characters with new knowledge and experiences, things begin to fill in with color. After spending much of the movie in of drab monochrome, Ross builds a key sequence around Etta’s “At Last” as we see, for the first time, the whole screen bloom into vivid color. The result is something pretty special.
“At Last” had never been heard the way Etta did it. Her version was a wild revelation—jazz in its purest definition, a brilliantly original re-interpretation of an existing tune. She’s so sure of what she’s doing that she doesn’t even bother to establish the actual melody before decimating it—she stays true for the first three notes and then flies off into the stratosphere, no longer able to contain herself. Almost everything from there is completely her own, improvising an entirely new melody on the spot, around the chord changes the song was built on—the exact same method behind instrumental solos in every genre from blues to heavy metal to salsa.
Occasionally she touches on one or two of the original notes almost as a reference point more than anything else, but that’s about it. Etta found the heart of that song, crawled in, and rebuilt it from the inside out. And she did it with such confidence and style that now everyone thinks that IS the melody.
Nope.
If Etta or producers Leonard and Phil Chess could’ve had any idea at the time just how enduring her approach would prove, and how many times her version would be covered over the next five decades, they would’ve been smart to give Etta partial songwriting credit along with Warren and Gordon. The arrangement itself is knockout enough—positively regal, even. All these years, and still every heart in the room throbs at the heavenly swell of those strings. And to think that arrangement was written for the simple melody found on the original sheet music. Etta charged into the song like an explorer conquering an uncharted continent and fearlessly claimed it as her own. When you hear people sing “At Last” today, or even just hear people talk about it, they’re not talking about the song Harry Warren wrote in 1941. They’re talking about the melody Etta James invented.
Like turning the wheel of a kaleidoscope and finding whole new colors and images, Etta turned a simple standard over and over in her hands and shook out a spectrum of sound and emotion no one had dreamed was possible, and created something so stunning in its perfection that now, more than 50 years later, the whole world believes that’s how it always was, and there was never another before it. That is how gifted Etta James was not just as a singer, but as a musician.
Etta may not be here with us to celebrate this birthday, but her shining musical legacy will outlive us all.
