Originally, this was a Italian song composed by Pino Donnagio  called “Io Che Non Vivo (Senza Te)”, which translates to “I Do Not Live Without You”.

Donnagio is an Italian musician, singer, and film composer. A classically-trained violinist, Donaggio is known for his collaborations with director Brian De Palma, and for his work in both European and American genre cinema.

Springfield heard Donnagio perform it at the San Remo festival (and despite having no awareness of the lyrics’ meaning the song moved Springfield to tears) and asked her friend Vicki Wickham, who produced the British TV show Ready Steady Go, to write some English lyrics for it. With the help of Yardbirds manager, and later her manager, Simon Napier-Bell, she did. Simon Napier-Bell is quoted as saying:

Vicki and I used to eat together, and she told me that Dusty wanted a lyric for this song. We went back to her flat and started working on it. We wanted to go to a trendy disco so we had about an hour to write it. We wrote the chorus and then we wrote the verse in a taxi to wherever we were going. It was the first pop lyric I’d written, although I’ve always been interested in poetry and good literature. We’d no idea what the English [Italian] lyric said. That seemed to be irrelevant and besides, it is much easier to write a new lyric completely.

Springfield recorded her vocal the next day: unhappy with the acoustics in the recording booth she eventually moved into a stairwell to record. Springfield was not satisfied with her vocal until she had recorded 47 takes.

Simon Napier-Bell further added in another interview:

There, standing on the staircase at Philips studio, singing into the stairwell, Dusty gave her greatest ever performance – perfection from first breath to last, as great as anything by Aretha Franklin or Sinatra or Pavarotti. Great singers can take mundane lyrics and fill them with their own meaning. This can help a listener’s own ill-defined feelings come clearly into focus. Vicki [Wickham] and I had thought our lyric was about avoiding emotional commitment. Dusty stood it on its head and made it a passionate lament of loneliness and love.

Dusty Springfield was born Mary Isabel Catherine Bernadette O’Brien on April 16, 1939, in London, England. Born into a family that enjoyed music, Springfield learned to sing at home. In 1958 she joined her first professional group, The Lana Sisters, and two years later formed a pop-folk vocal trio, The Springfields, with her brother Tom Springfield and Tim Field. Both her and her brother took their stage names from this group name. They became the UK’s top selling act. Her solo career began in 1963 with the upbeat pop hit, “I Only Want to Be with You”. Among the hits that followed were “Wishin’ and Hopin’ ” (1964), “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself” (1964), “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” (1966), and “Son of a Preacher Man” (1968).

The pinnacle of her success came in 1968 with her album Dusty in Memphis, on which the singer, who’d long adored singers like Mavis Staples and Aretha Franklin, worked with legendary music producer Jerry Wexler, the man behind albums by Franklin and Ray Charles.

I was deeply influenced by black singers from the early 1960s,” she once said. “I liked everybody at Motown and most of the Stax artists. I really wanted to be Mavis Staples. What they shared in common was a kind of strength I didn’t hear on English radio.

In November during the Memphis sessions Springfield suggested to Jerry Wexler (one of the heads of Atlantic Records) that he should sign the newly formed UK band, Led Zeppelin. She knew their bass guitarist, John Paul Jones, from his session work on her earlier albums. Without ever having seen them and partly on her advice, Wexler signed Led Zeppelin to a $200,000 deal with Atlantic, which, at the time, was the biggest contract for a new band.

With her distinctive sensual mezzo-soprano sound, she was an important singer of blue-eyed soul and at her peak was one of the most successful British female performers, with six top 20 singles on the US Billboard Hot 100 and sixteen on the UK Singles Chart from 1963 to 1989.

Springfield’s career following Dusty in Memphis proved inconsistent. Long fascinated by the United States and a bit of a Civil War geek, she moved to America in 1970. But her life only took on more struggles in her new home. Beset by drug issues and other personal problems, Springfield failed to capture the run of stardom she’d once enjoyed.

In 2004,  “You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me” made the Rolling Stone list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time at #491. The album it appeared on, “Dusty In Memphis”, was also awarded a spot in the Grammy Hall of Fame. She is a member of the US Rock and Roll and UK Music Halls of Fame. In January 1999 Springfield went to Buckingham Palace to receive her award as an OBE, which stands for Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. She has been placed among the top 25 female artists of all time by readers of Mojo magazine (May 1999), and in 2008, Dusty appeared at No. 35 on the Rolling Stone‘s “100 Greatest Singers of All Time”.

Allmusic’s Jason Ankeny described her as:

[T]he finest white soul singer of her era, a performer of remarkable emotional resonance whose body of work spans the decades and their attendant musical transformations with a consistency and purity unmatched by any of her contemporaries; though a camp icon of glamorous excess in her towering beehive hairdo and panda-eye black mascara, the sultry intimacy and heartbreaking urgency of [her] voice transcended image and fashion, embracing everything from lushly orchestrated pop to gritty R&B to disco with unparalleled sophistication and depth.

In January 1994, while recording her penultimate album, “A Very Fine Love”, in Nashville, Tennessee, Springfield felt ill. When she returned to England a few months later, her physicians diagnosed breast cancer. She received months of chemotherapy and radiation treatment and the cancer was in remission. By mid-1996, the cancer had returned and in spite of vigorous treatments, she died in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire on 2 March 1999.

Hits: 49

This was a collaboration between John Sebastian, The Lovin Spoonful’s bassist Steve Boone, and the frontman’s brother (and non-group member) Mark Sebastian. John and Zal Yanovsky were part of the Greenwich Village folk scene in New York City; Yanovsky was from a bohemian folk group called The Mugwumps (two other members, Cass Elliot and Denny Doherty, later formed half of the Mamas & the Papas). Steve Boone and drummer Joe Butler were veterans of the Long Island bar scene.

Mark was 15 years old when he wrote a poem that John used as the basis for the song -- John especially liked the part that went, “But at night there’s a different world.” “That song that came from an idea my brother Mike had”. John Sebastian recalled in June 2014:

He had this great chorus, and the release was so big. I had to create some kind of tension at the front end to make it even bigger. That’s where that jagged piano part comes from.

This was recorded over two days: At the first session, they put down the instruments: guitar, bass, autoharp, drums, organ, electric piano and percussion. The second session was for vocals and sound effects. Boone came up with the middle eight, which John thought sounded like the Gershwin composition “An American in Paris,” where the orchestra implies the sound of traffic and city noises. This gave him the idea of incorporating car horns and other city ambiance into the track. The band was rather particular about the traffic sounds. Instead of just using what was available on the sound effects records in the studio, they found an old-school radio engineer -- a guy who used to create the soundscapes for shows, so if a guy was riding a horse, you’d hear the hooves hitting the ground and the wind whistling by. This guy, whom John Sebastian referred to as a “hilarious old Jewish sound man,” came in with a huge library of street sounds, which the band went through for hours. They wanted the scene to build, so it starts softly (the horn at the beginning comes from a Volkswagen Beetle), and grows to a gridlock nightmare. To close the scene, they used a pneumatic hammer pounding away at the pavement.

The band had its roots in the folk music scene based in the Greenwich Village section of lower Manhattan during the early 1960s. John B. Sebastian, the son of classical harmonicist John Sebastian, grew up in the Village in contact with music and musicians, including folk musicians who were involved with the American folk music revival of the 1950s through the early 1960s. The Lovin’ Spoonful was one of the most successful pop/rock groups to have jug band and folk roots, and nearly half the songs on their first album were modernized versions of blues standards. Their popularity revived interest in the form, and many subsequent jug bands cite them as an inspiration.

A jug band is a band employing a jug player and a mix of conventional and homemade instruments. These homemade instruments are ordinary objects adapted to or modified for making sound, like the washtub bass, washboard, spoons, bones, stovepipe, and comb and tissue paper (kazoo). In the early days of jug band music, homemade guitars and mandolins were sometimes made from the necks of discarded manufactured guitars fastened to large gourds that were flattened on one side, with a sound-hole cut into the flat side, before drying. Banjos were sometimes made from a discarded guitar neck and a metal pie plate.

The Lovin’ Spoonful worked with producer Erik Jacobsen to release their first single on July 20, 1965, “Do You Believe in Magic”, written by Sebastian.

“Do You Believe in Magic” reached #9 on the Hot 100, and the band followed it up with a series of hit singles and albums throughout 1965 and 1966, all produced by Jacobsen. The Lovin’ Spoonful became known for such folk-flavored pop hits as “You Didn’t Have to Be So Nice”, which reached #10, and “Daydream”, which went to #2.

Here they are on Hullabaloo, a musical variety series in 1965 -1966. That’s Peter Noone (Herman) of Herman’s Hermits introducing them.

Paul McCartney has stated that “Good Day Sunshine” was “really very much a nod to The Lovin’ Spoonful’s ‘Daydream,’ the same traditional, almost trad-jazz feel.

That was our favorite record of theirs. ‘Good Day Sunshine’ was me trying to write something similar to ‘Daydream.’

The band’s name was inspired by some lines in a song of Mississippi John Hurt called the “Coffee Blues”. John Sebastian and others in the jug-folk scene of the time such as Geoff Muldaur credit Fritz Richmond for suggesting the name.

The song is a tribute to Maxwell House Coffee, in which Hurt describes he only needs one spoonful to make him feel all right, what he describes as “my lovin’ spoonful” in the song.

At the peak of the band’s success, the producers of the television series that later became The Monkees initially planned to build their series around the Lovin’ Spoonful, but dropped the band from the project due to conflicts over song publishing rights.

Although the original members only produced their hits for two years (from 1965 to 1967), they made their mark. Different members would come and go for years afterward, and in some form still touring using the name, but never regained their initial popularity. John Sebastian would go on to a fairly successful solo career, appearing at Woodstock in 1969.

The original four members of the Lovin’ Spoonful were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on March 6, 2000.

Hits: 48

“Who Do You Love” was written by American rock and roll pioneer Bo Diddley. Recorded in 1956, it is one of his most popular and enduring works. The song represents one of Bo Diddley’s strongest lyrical efforts and uses a combination of hoodoo-type imagery and boasting. It is an upbeat rocker, but the original did not use the signature Bo Diddley beat rhythm.

“Who Do You Love” was recorded in Chicago on March 24, 1956, one year after recording the self-titled “Bo Diddley”, his debut single. Bo Diddley uses his characteristic sound processing effects, including echoey vocal and tremolo-laden rhythm electric guitar. Jody Williams (Joseph Leon Williams) answers the vocal lines with prominent, distinctive overdriven guitar fills and a solo. In naming Jody Williams to its list of “35 Blues Guitarists Who Definitely Started It All”, Spin magazine adds, “His solo on Diddley’s ‘Who Do You Love’ is a lesson in evil”. Clifton James plays the drums and percussionist Jerome Green adds maracas.

The idea came to him in Kansas City, where he heard a group of children trying to out-brag one another using a particular rhythm. “It was like an African chant, and I wanted words that would suit it”, Bo Diddley recalled.

Inspired by Muddy Waters 1954 hit “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man”, as was his hit “I’m A Man” the next year, he wanted to outdo songwriter Willie Dixon’s lyrical swagger:

I’m telling this chick … how bad I am, so she can go tell the cat she’s hanging with, “this dude is something else.” That’s what it kinda meant, cat ridin’ rattlesnakes and kissin’ boa constrictors and stuff.

He also sings about a skull, a tombstone, a graveyard, and a scream in the night to convey a sense of foreboding. The use of the homonym “who do” is an allusion to “hoodoo”, a Louisiana/Mississippi folk magic belief that events can be influenced by its use. However, Bo Diddley uses imagery more common to the American Southwest, combined with exaggerated bravado. He explained that the first line,

I got forty-seven miles of barbed wire”, came quickly, “but I couldn’t get a rhyme for it. I thought of car tires and mule trains, and I couldn’t get anything to fit. Then one day I said ‘use a cobra snake,’ and my drummer, Clifton James, added ‘for a necktie'”. These are directed at a female he is trying to woo – “who do you love, me or him”. The lyrics confirm the effect: “Arlene took me by my hand, she said ‘oo-ee daddy I understand’, who do you love?

Musically, “Who Do You Love” is an uptempo song centered on one chord (A♭) with guitar flourishes that complement the vocals. It has a strong rhythm, but unlike later interpretations, it does not use the typical Bo Diddley beat. Instead, the song uses a “modified cut shuffle beat” or 2/4 time, giving it an almost rockabilly feel, similar to Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene”.

Bo Diddley revolutionized the texture of pop music. He put the rhythm in the foreground, stripping away the rest, and customized the space with tremolo, distortion, echo and reverb, to say nothing of maracas. The way he chunked on the lower strings was a primary model for what was later known as rhythm guitar. He had lots of space to fill up with his guitar, because his records had no piano and no bass. Which also meant no harmonic complications. Hanging on a single tone, never changing chords — the writer Robert Palmer called that the “deep blues,” something that reached from Chicago back to the front-porch style of Mississippi and Louisiana. Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters recorded one-chord songs before Bo Diddley did, but he made them central to his repertoire.

“Who Do You Love” is listed at 132 on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. A member of both the Blues and Rock and Roll Halls of Fame, Diddley received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Rhythm & Blues Foundation and the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, as well as a Mississippi Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.

The song has been interpreted and recorded by numerous musicians in different styles, often adding a Bo Diddley beat. Popular renditions include those by Ronnie Hawkins and George Thorogood, with charting singles by the Woolies, Tom Rush, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Juicy Lucy.

Hits: 45

“Eight Miles High” was written by Gene Clark, Jim McGuinn (a.k.a. Roger McGuinn), and David Crosby and first released as a single on March 14, 1966. The original five-piece lineup of the Byrds consisted of Jim “Roger” McGuinn (lead guitar, vocals), Gene Clark (tambourine, vocals), David Crosby (rhythm guitar, vocals), Chris Hillman (bass guitar, vocals), and Michael Clarke (drums).

The song was subject to a U.S. radio ban shortly after its release, following allegations published in the broadcasting trade journal the Gavin Report regarding perceived drug connotations in its lyrics. The band strenuously denied these allegations at the time, but in later years both Clark and Crosby admitted that the song was at least partly inspired by their own drug use. The failure of “Eight Miles High” to reach the Billboard Top 10 is usually attributed to the broadcasting ban, but some commentators have suggested that the song’s complexity and uncommercial nature were greater factors.

The song’s lyrics are, for the most part, about the group’s flight to London in August 1965 and their accompanying English tour, as hinted at by the opening couplet: “Eight miles high and when you touch down, you’ll find that it’s stranger than known.” Although commercial airliners fly at an altitude of six to seven miles, it was felt that “eight miles high” sounded more poetic than six and also recalled the title of the Beatles’ song “Eight Days a Week”.

According to Clark, the lyrics were primarily his creation, with a minor contribution being David Crosby’s line, “Rain grey town, known for its sound”, a reference to London as home to the British Invasion, which was then dominating the U.S. music charts. Other lyrics in the song that explicitly refer to the Byrds’ stay in England include the couplet: “Nowhere is there warmth to be found/Among those afraid of losing their ground”, which is a reference to the hostile reaction of the UK music press and to the English group The Birds serving the band with a copyright infringement writ, due to the similarities in name. In addition, “Round the squares, huddled in storms/Some laughing, some just shapeless forms” describes fans waiting for the band outside hotels, while the line “Sidewalk scenes and black limousines” refers to the excited crowds that jostled the band as they exited their chauffeur-driven cars.

Although the basic idea for the song had been discussed during the band’s flight to England, it didn’t actually begin to take shape until the Byrds’ November 1965 tour of the U.S. To alleviate the boredom of traveling from show to show during the tour, Crosby had brought along cassette recordings of Master sitarist Ravi Shankar’s music and the jazz saxophone legend John Coltrane albums Impressions and Africa/Brass, which were on constant rotation on the tour bus. The influence of these recordings on the band would manifest itself in the music of “Eight Miles High”.

This is John Coltrane’s “India” from the album “Impressions” featuring Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet.

In 1967, Ravi Shankar performed a well-received set at the Monterey Pop Festival. While complimentary of the talents of several of the rock artists at the festival, he said he was “horrified” to see Jimi Hendrix set fire to his guitar on stage:

That was too much for me. In our culture, we have such respect for musical instruments, they are like part of God.

He performed at the Woodstock Festival in August 1969, and found he disliked the venue. In the late 1960s Shankar distanced himself from the hippie movement and drug culture: He explained during an interview:

It makes me feel rather hurt when I see the association of drugs with our music. The music to us is religion. The quickest way to reach godliness is through music. I don’t like the association of one bad thing with the music.

Clark began writing the song’s lyrics on November 24, 1965, when he scribbled down some rough ideas for later development, following a discussion with guitarist Brian Jones, before the Byrds made a concert appearance supporting the Rolling Stones. Over the following days, Clark expanded this fragment into a full poem, eventually setting the words to music and giving them a melody. Clark then showed the song to McGuinn and Crosby, with the former suggesting that the song be arranged to incorporate Coltrane’s influence. Since Clark’s death, however, McGuinn has contended that it was he who conceived the initial idea of writing a song about an airplane ride and that he and Crosby both contributed lyrics to Clark’s unfinished draft. In his book, Mr. Tambourine Man: The Life and Legacy of the Byrds’ Gene Clark, author John Einarson disputes this claim and ponders whether McGuinn’s story would be the same were Clark still alive.

The master recording of “Eight Miles High” was recorded on January 24 and 25, 1966, at Columbia Studios in Hollywood, with record producer Allen Stanton guiding the band through the recording process. John Einarson has noted that the influence of Coltrane’s saxophone playing and, in particular, his song “India” from the Impressions album, can be clearly heard in “Eight Miles High”—most noticeably in McGuinn’s recurring twelve-string guitar solo. In addition to this striking guitar motif, the song is also highlighted by Chris Hillman’s driving and hypnotic bass line, Crosby’s chunky rhythm guitar playing and the band’s ethereal harmonies.

“Eight Miles High” also exhibits the influence of sitarist Ravi Shankar, particularly in the droning quality of the song’s vocal melody and in McGuinn’s guitar playing. However, the song does not actually feature the sound of the sitar, despite the Byrds having appeared brandishing the instrument at a contemporary press conference held to promote the single. In a 1966 promotional interview, which was added to the expanded CD reissue of the Fifth Dimension album, Crosby said that the song’s ending made him “feel like a plane landing.”

Here is a clip from 1967 of a television version.

Hits: 80

“Walk On By” was composed by Burt Bacharach, with lyrics by Hal David. The song was originally recorded in 1964 by Dionne Warwick on her album “Make Way for Dionne Warwick”. Warwick’s version peaked at number 6 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and was nominated for a 1965 Grammy Award for the Best Rhythm and Blues Recording. The song was ranked number 70 on the Rolling Stone list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, the second highest song by a solo female on the list after “Respect” by Aretha Franklin.

Burt Bacharach (from Record Collector magazine):

“Walk On By” was the first time that I tried putting two grand pianos on a record in the studio. I can’t remember if I played and Artie Butler played or if Paul Griffin and Artie Butler played but here were two grand pianos going on. I knew the song had something. It was a great date. I walked out of that studio and we had done two tunes in a three-hour session, ‘Walk On By’ and ‘Anyone Who Had A Heart.’ I felt very good leaving knowing that I had two monster hits on my hands. You never know for sure but you feel a great satisfaction.

This was released as the B-side to Warwick’s single “Any Old Time Of The Day.” She’d had several releases that went nowhere, and her latest tune was, in the opinion of her label, her manager, and herself, her last shot at making the Top 40. Murray the K, whose show on radio station WINS was the top-rated program in New York, wouldn’t play the A-side. No matter how many people called and pleaded with him, he played the B-side instead because he knew that was the tune with potential. Warwick’s record company wasn’t happy with this, but listeners agreed with Murray and “Walk On By” became the hit.

Marie Dionne Warwick was born December 12, 1940. Her mother was manager of the Drinkard Singers, a renowned family gospel group and recording artists who frequently performed throughout the New York metropolitan area. Also in the group was Cissy Houston, Dionne’s aunt and mother of Whitney Houston.

After some personnel changes and group names (Gospelaires, Sweet Inspirations), they became in demand as background session singers for artists such as The Drifters, Elvis Presley, Aretha Franklin, Ben E. King, and Dinah Washington. While she was performing background on the Drifters’ recording of “Mexican Divorce,” Warwick’s voice and star presence were noticed by the song’s composer, Burt Bacharach, a Brill Building songwriter who was writing songs with many other songwriters, including lyricist Hal David. Together, Warwick and her songwriting team of Burt Bacharach & Hal David, accumulated more than 30 hit singles, and close to 20 best-selling albums, during their first decade together.

In November 1962, Scepter Records released her first solo single, “Don’t Make Me Over”, the title of which (according to the A&E Biography of Dionne Warwick) Warwick supplied herself when she snapped the phrase at producers Burt Bacharach and Hal David in anger.

Dionne Warwick ranks second to Aretha Franklin as the most charted female vocalist with 69 singles making the Billboard Hot 100 during the rock era (1955–1999). Warwick has sold over 75 million singles and 25 million albums worldwide.

Over the span of her career, from 1965 to 2014, she has been nominated for 9 Grammy awards and won an additional 5. She became the first African-American solo female artist of her generation to win the prestigious award for Best Contemporary Female Vocalist Performance. This award was only presented to one other legend, Ella Fitzgerald. The list of other major industry awards is extensive, such as the Grammy Hall of Fame, Billboard Music Awards, American Music Awards, RIAA, Rhythm & Blues Foundation, and ASCAP Awards, and many more.

In addition to her music career she has been an accomplished actress, appearing in 21 movie and television parts.

Hits: 30

This is just one example of one of the greatest Jazz singers to have ever performed and recorded. In her autobiography “Lady Sings the Blues” Holiday indicated an argument with her mother over money led to the song. She states that during the argument her mother said “God bless the child that’s got his own.” The anger over the incident led her to turn that line into a starting point for a song.

In his 1990 book Jazz Singing, Will Friedwald indicates it as “sacred and profane” as it references the Bible while indicating that religion seems to have no effect in making people treat each other better. The lyrics refer to an unspecified Biblical verse: “Them that’s got shall have, them that’s not shall lose, so the Bible says, and it still is news. . . . “.

There are volumes of information about Billie Holiday, and it would be a disservice for me to try and give any more than a very brief overview of one of the most respected jazz singers who ever performed. It would be well worth one’s time to explore all the available information about her to discover what a truly rare talent she had.

Born Eleanora Fagan on April 7, 1915 to an unwed young mother, they were abandoned by her father shortly after her birth. By 9 years old she was in juvenile court because of truancy, and sent to a Catholic reform school. Raised by several different family members for most of her childhood, she was frequently in and out of terrible experiences. But fate would intervene and, at 17 years old in 1932, she began singing in clubs. Becoming noticed for her vibrant and passionate singing voice, she found her way to working with some of the biggest names in Swing and Jazz over the years: Benny Goodman,  Teddy Wilson, Count Basie, Artie Shaw, Ella Fitzgerald.

She made her last appearances and recordings in early 1959. Having made well over 100 recordings, she died on July 17 the same year. She left the world a legacy unrivalled and influenced artists ever since.

I’ll leave you with one more example of her immense talent, a song which is still covered by many.

Hits: 38

“Born Under a Bad Sign” was recorded by blues singer and guitarist Albert King in 1967. Called “a timeless staple of the blues”, the song also had strong crossover appeal to the rock audience with its bass and guitar harmony line and topical astrology reference. “Born Under a Bad Sign” became an R&B chart hit for King and numerous blues and other musicians have made it perhaps the most recorded Albert King song.

The lyrics to “Born Under a Bad Sign” were written by rhythm and blues singer William Bell with music by bandleader Booker T. Jones. When Albert King signed with Stax Records in Memphis, Booker T. Jones, who was a member of the Stax house band Booker T. & The MGs, was assigned his producer. Albert King provided his signature guitar fills around his vocals and solos during the break and outro, with backing by Booker T. & the M.G.’s and the Memphis Horns.

In an interview Jones explained:

At that time, my writing partner was William Bell. He came over to my house the night before the session. William wrote the words and I wrote the music in my den that night. That was one of my greatest moments in the studio as far as being thrilled with a piece of music. The feeling of it, it’s the real blues done by the real people. It was Albert King from East St. Louis, the left-handed guitar player who was just one of a kind and so electric and so intense and so serious about his music. He just lost himself in the music. He’s such a one of a kind character. I was there in the middle of it and it was exhilarating. He was coming to town and it was the last opportunity we had to write a song. But you know, now that I think of it, the fact that the song was in D flat, there is definitely an Indiana influence because, you know, a blues song in d flat? I tell you, I learned the value of flat keys and sharp keys and how to use them for emotional value so I could have more range and capacity for touching the human heart. I think that was one of the reasons that song became as huge as it did. Because it was in D flat.

Bell recalled

We needed a blues song for Albert King … I had this idea in the back of my mind that I was gonna do myself. Astrology and all that stuff was pretty big then. I got this idea that [it] might work.

The lyrics describe “hard luck and trouble” tempered by “wine and women”, with wordplay in the chorus in the turnaround:

“Born under a bad sign, been down since I began to crawl
If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all”

The words to ‘Born Under A Bad Sign’ are similar to Lightnin’ Slim’s “Bad Luck”, from 1954, and the truth is the blues are riddled with similar phrases and riffs popping up all over the place. It’s a sort of living library, and Lightnin’ Slim’s words may have lodged in Bell’s subconscious, ready to be “borrowed” at the right moment in time.

“Lord if it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all
You know bad luck has been followin’ poor Lightnin’, ever since I began to crawl
Now folks I was born in the last month of the year”

“Born Under A Bad Sign” has been recorded by many artists, including Jimi Hendrix, Paul Butterfield, Etta James, Big Mama Thornton, Buddy Guy with Koko Taylor, Robben Ford, and Rita Coolidge. Jimi Hendrix and Buddy Miles, recorded an instrumental cover in 1969 as a tribute to King. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band played this at Woodstock in 1969 when they went onstage Monday morning 2 sets ahead of Jimi Hendrix.

Probably the best known version of later generations is by Cream in 1968. Cream’s rendition follows Albert King’s, except for bassist and singer Jack Bruce combining two verses into “I’ve been down ever since I was ten” and an extended guitar solo by Clapton. It marked a change of guitar style for Clapton, who adopted a harder, attacking style on this song in place of the sweeter, sustaining notes he called “woman tone”. Musicologist Robert Palmer described Clapton’s playing as “practically Albert King parodies”. They played this when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on January 12, 1993 in tribute to Albert King, who died the previous year. In 2005, they played a version at the Royal Albert Hall.

Albert King was a huge influence on so many artists over the years, including Stevie Ray Vaughan. In late 1983, Albert and SRV played and taped a television special called “In Session” and “Born Under A Bad Sign” was one these two legends graced us with on an extended version.

In 1988, Albert King’s “Born Under a Bad Sign” was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame and he himself was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in May 2013. Writing for the Blues Foundation, Jim O’Neal called it “one of the signature hits of Albert King that started to win the left-handed string-bender a crossover following in 1967, as he began to break out of the chittlin circuit to invade rock venues like the Fillmore”. King’s song is also included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s list of the “500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll”. In 2011, he was ranked number 13 on Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.

King’s health problems led him to consider retirement in the 1980s, but he continued regular tours and appearances at blues festivals, using a customized Greyhound tour bus with “I’ll Play The Blues For You” painted on the side. King died of a heart attack on December 21, 1992, in his Memphis home. His final concert had been in Los Angeles two days earlier. He was given a funeral procession with the Memphis Horns playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” and was buried in Paradise Gardens Cemetery in Edmondson, Arkansas, near his childhood home. B.B. King delivered a eulogy, stating, “Albert wasn’t my brother in blood, but he was my brother in blues.”

Hits: 37

This is the first and biggest US hit for Gerry and the Pacemakers, which peaked at No. 4. This was produced by Beatles producer George Martin, another example of his lush, melancholy string arrangements.

The songwriting on this song is credited to Gerry Marsden and the other band members, Freddie Marsden, Les Chadwick and Les Maguire. It was first recorded by Louise Cordet, who had previously toured with the group, as well as with The Beatles and Roy Orbison. Gerry Marsden is said to have initially written the song for Louise, although they released their own version almost simultaneously in April 1964.

Gerry Marsden was a deliveryman for British Rail when he formed Gerry and the Pacemakers in 1959 with his older brother, Freddie, on drums. (Freddie now works for British Telecom); pianist Les Maguire (in the navy); and bassist Les Chadwick (lives in Australia). They are a prime example of a genre known as the Merseybeat scene. The group’s original name was Gerry Marsden and the Mars Bars, but they were forced to change this when the Mars Company, producers of the chocolate Mars Bar, complained.

In common with the Beatles, they came from Liverpool, were managed by Brian Epstein, and were recorded by George Martin. A few other artists from that same scene were Billy J. Kramer (Bad To Me), The Mindbenders (Game Of Love), and The Searchers (Needles and Pins).

Gerry and the Pacemakers are most remembered in England for being the first act to reach number one in the UK Singles Chart with their first three single releases: “How Do You Do It?”, “I Like It” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone”.

Merseybeat, aka Beat music and British Beat, was named after the areas beside the River Mersey which runs alongside Liverpool. It developed in the early 1960s. Beat music is a fusion of rock and roll (mainly Chuck Berry guitar style and the midtempo beat of artists like Buddy Holly), doo-wop, skiffle and R&B. The genre provided many of the bands responsible for the British Invasion of the American pop charts starting in 1964, and provided the model for many important developments in pop and rock music, including the format of the rock group around lead, rhythm and bass guitars with drums.

The band starred in its own feature film, “Ferry Cross the Mersey” (sometimes referred to as “Gerry and the Pacemakers’ version of A Hard Day’s Night”) of their song of the same name, in 1965.

After the hits petered out, Marsden disbanded the Pacemakers in 1969 and headed for London’s West End, where he played a handyman in a long-running romantic comedy, Charlie Girl. He also regularly appeared in comedy sketches on television variety shows. In 1973, he left acting and hit the road again with a new set of Pacemakers.

Hits: 37