Tag: Eydie Gorme
Music, The arts, Uncategorized
The Songwriters – Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil
The way this series is eating up the hits it almost seems like there'll be none left soon, and here we go again with a sizeable chunk of the 60s treasure trove in one fell swoop.
Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil were another of those early 60s partnerships that spawned great songs seemingly at the drop of a hat. Both New Yorkers, they formed a writing partnership, fell in love and got married.
They started at the tail end of the 50s, when rock'n'roll had lost its way and the square world thought it had ridden out the storm. It would take The Beatles to drive the stake right through the heart of sensible-sweatered adulthood, but American pop writers were doing their bit to decorate the present and point to the future.
One of the "squares", if you like, was Eydie Gorme, a croony sort of conventional type your mother would have liked as much as you did and who worked with her husband, Steve Lawrence.
With Brazilian music jamming its foot in the post-Elvis door, Eydie had a solo hit with Mann and Weil's Blame it on the Bossa Nova, issued around the same time as the team's Don't Be Afraid Little Darlin' with Lawrence.
This was Drifters time, too, and they loved a nice Mann/Weil song, with a list including On Broadway (with help from fellow songwriting legends Leiber & Stoller) and Saturday Night At The Movies.
The Ronettes were the lucky recipients of Walking In The Rain, and then M&W came up with one of the real titans of the era, You've Lost That Loving Feeling, with the Righteous Brothers giving it some serious lung and Phil Spector pumping it full of steroids.
Cilla Black and Dionne Warwicke covered it in the same era, and it's one of those songs that people keep fancying as the years go by, with notable versions by Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway and Hall & Oates. Elvis had a go in 1970 during a period when he was hard-up for good material, and as recently as 2003 it was tackled by British synth-pop duo Erasure.
And of course it's a karaoke favourite for any guy who thinks he's got a Bill Medley-style boom in his chest and can find a higher-singing sidekick.
Back on planet Earth in 1964, Mann and Weil provided Looking Through the Eyes Of Love for Gene Pitney and, in a slightly odd collaboration, We Gotta Get Out Of This Place for the Animals. It is easy to think of Eric Burdon and co. singing about wanting to leave the grim (at the time) industrial north-east of England, but the song was about Mann and Weil's neck of the woods. It was originally intended for the Righteous Brothers, before Mann began his own singing career and his record company wanted it for him. In the meantime, Animals producer Mickie Most was on the case, somehow snapped it up and released it before he could be gazumped.
Monkees fans will be grateful to Mann and Weil for Shades of Grey, and Cass Elliott brought her own touch of class to Make Your Own Kind Of Music in 1968.
Mann and Weil have never stopped writing and although their time in the spotlight ended with the passing of the writer-hungry 60s, they did resurface in 1977 with Here You Come Again, a hit for both B. J. Thomas and Dolly Parton.
Mann and Weil, ladies and gentlemen: man and wife. And not only are they still working – by gum, they're still married.
August 4, 2017 August 7, 2017 Barry Mann, Cass Elliott, Cilla Black, Cynthia Weil, Dionne Warwick, Eric Burdon, Eydie Gorme, Phil Spector, Righteous Brothers, Ronettes, Steve Lawrence, The Animals, The MonkeesLeave a comment
Men, Music, The arts, Women
The wisdom of pop songs – Duets part 1
The human condition explained in three-minute bursts
She was a fruit, he was a flavouring and together they made a beautiful taste
Why do people do duets? For the sheer joy of combining our talents with someone else's. It's why team games are so popular: it's not all about the individual, but the pleasure of seeing someone else adding to what we do.
That is how duets are supposed to work, anyway, and in the early part of the pop era there were some gems. We've got to start somewhere, so how about Deep Purple, the song that started life in 1933 as a piano instrumental by Peter DeRose before Mitchell Parish added lyrics five years later. Various people recorded it in the coming years, but the version we're concerned with here is the 1963 incarnation by Nino Tempo and April Stevens, a brother and sister act whose casual enjoyment of their craft gave the dreamy melody a poignant tone somewhere between happy and wistful.
Around the same time, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, a married couple who had been singing duets since the mid 50s, released I Want to Stay Here, an outwardly innocent piece of love talk which contained the urge for privacy and intimacy that young lovers feel. They don't want to go to the party, they want to stay home and have a party for two.
These two songs reflected the gradual change from young adulthood to teenage self-assertion that was going on at the time. Lawrence and Gorme and Tempo and Stevens came across as fine, upstanding, clean-cut people destined to become responsible adults almost before their youthful flower had blossomed.
A duet of groups. The Supremes only had one lead singer, but The Temptations used to pass it around
Then came Sonny and Cher, a long-haired man and a heavily made up young woman, with I Got You Babe, in which they complained that they weren't being taken seriously as people. While Cher would go on to be a huge star, it was Sonny Bono who was the senior partner at the time, with his links with Phil Spector and a burgeoning career as a songwriter (Needles and Pins, among others).
Billy Eckstine and Sarah Vaughan took the reins back for the old-style crooners with Passing Strangers, a minor hit in the US on its original release in 1957 and a bigger success when reissued in the UK in 1968. The kids who bought it then didn't know Vaughan and Eckstine were respected jazz singers from another generation, the big band era; we just knew it was a great tune and had something classy about it. It was a bit showbiz, and that wasn't a cool thing at the time, but what's good is good.
Hey buddy! Take the G off the end. And on the B side. I don't like Gs on the end of words
Everybody knew who Frank Sinatra was, though, and he wasn't giving up his hard-earned stardom just because the world was full of rock bands. Somethin' Stupid, his duet with daughter Nancy, hit the same spot on the target as Passing Strangers. On a technical note it is interesting that they didn't sing alternate lines, but harmonized throughout, with Frank's part carrying the melody and Nancy's adding light and shade, although what she was given required more discipline to sing. You can hear she wasn't making it up as she went along; she was singing the notes the arranger wanted her to sing.
All the songs we've looked at so far have been fairly serious and romantic, but in 1967 Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood added a bit of fun with their recording of Jackson. Also recorded by Johnny Cash and June Carter, Jackson features a frustrated womanizer threatening to give up his stable relationship and go to the sinful city of Jackson to sow some belated wild oats. His partner just thinks he's pathetic and would make a fool of himself (which, if this weren't just a pop song, might be seen as the root of the problem rather than just the reaction to it).
When Mr Hathaway passed on, one UK music paper ran the headline "Wrong Donny dies"
We're back in romantic territory for Elton John and Kiki Dee's 1976 hit Don't Go Breaking My Heart, which some sources take as an affectionate pastiche of Motown duets by Marvin Gaye and Kim Weston or Tammi Terrell (It Takes Two, The Onion Song, Ain't Nothin Like The Real Thing etc). Whether that is true or not, it was a huge hit that is still popular today.
The brother/sister combination was an obvious choice for the Osmonds, and Donny and Marie duly raked in the cash with Morning Side of the Mountain and Leaving It All Up To You.
Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway had a string of hits including Where Is the Love and The Closer I Get To You, while after Hathaway's premature death Flack enjoyed great solo success and also slotted in a duet with Peabo Bryson, Tonight I Celebrate My Love.
Then there was Too Much Too Little Too Late by Johnny Mathis and Deniece Williams… and the list goes on.
Next week: second golden age and the emergence of the fake duet
May 13, 2016 May 13, 2016 April Stevens, Billy Eckstine, Deniece Williams, Donny Hathaway, Donny Osmond, Elton John, Eydie Gorme, Johnny Mathis, Kiki Dee, Kim Weston, Marie Osmond, Marvin Gaye, Nino Tempo, Pop music, Roberta Flack, rock music, Sarah Vaughan, Sonny and Cher, Steve Lawrence, Tammi TerrellLeave a comment