The Four Seasons became internationally successful in the 1960s and 1970s. Since 1970, they have also been known at times as Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. In 1960, the band known as The Four Lovers evolved into the Four Seasons, with Frankie Valli as the lead singer, Bob Gaudio (formerly of the Royal Teens) on keyboards and tenor vocals, Tommy DeVito on lead guitar and baritone vocals, and Nick Massi on electric bass and bass vocals.
The legal name of the organization is the Four Seasons Partnership, formed by Gaudio and Valli taken after a failed audition in 1960. While singers, producers, and musicians have come and gone, Gaudio and Valli remain the band’s constant (with each owning fifty percent of the act and its assets, including virtually all of its recording catalog) Gaudio no longer plays live, leaving Valli as the only member of the band from its inception who is touring as of 2019.
The Four Seasons were one of only two American bands (the other being the Beach Boys) to enjoy major chart success before, during, and after the British Invasion. The band’s original line-up was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990, and joined the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 1999. They are one of the best-selling musical groups of all time, having sold an estimated 100 million records worldwide.
According to Gaudio, this song took about 15 minutes to write and was originally titled “Jackie Baby” (in honor of then-First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy). In a 1968 interview, Gaudio said that the song was inspired by the 1961 Bruce Channel hit “Hey! Baby”.
At the studio, the name was changed to “Terri Baby”, and eventually to “Sherry”, the name of the daughter of Gaudio’s best friend, New York DJ Jack Spector. One of the names that Gaudio pondered for the song was “Peri Baby,” which was the name of the record label for which Bob Crewe worked, named after the label owner’s daughter.
According to Rolling Stone magazine’s Top 500 Songs, “Mustang Sally” nearly ended up on the studio floor -- literally. After Pickett finished his final take at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, the tape suddenly flew off the reel and broke into pieces. But the session engineer, the legendary Tom Dowd, calmly cleared the room and told everyone to come back in half an hour. Dowd pieced the tape back together and saved what became one of the funkiest soul anthems of the ’60s.”
Spooner Oldham, who is one of the top Muscle Shoals musicians, played the keyboard on this song. The keyboards are one of the most distinctive parts of the song, but they weren’t on the demo -- Spooner had to create the part so he could play on the record (and get paid).
I was sitting on a stool, and we listened to a demo of Sir Mack Rice who wrote the song, and the first thing I noticed was there was no keyboard on that record. But I’m here, I want the job -- what am I going to do that will work within that song? And I just closed eyes for a second, daydreaming, and said, ‘I wonder what it would sound like if I pretended I was a Harley Davidson motorcycle and was driving through the studio, what would that sound like?’ There’s a little pause in that record where there’s not much going on, and I do rorp-rorp-rorp kind of revving engine thing. And Jerry Wexler liked it, because he later tried to get me to do it again when I was in New York. Of course, I didn’t, it was specific for that song.
Although Wilson Pickett’s version might be the most famous, he did not write the song. “Sir” Mack Rice wrote and recorded the song in 1965, a year before Pickett rode it up the charts. Born Bonnie Rice in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1933, Sir Mack Rice emerged as an R&B/blues vocalist and songwriter in Detroit during the 1950’s, first as a member of the Five Scalders and then as a member of the Falcons from 1957-63, a group whose members included Eddie Floyd, Joe Stubbs, and Wilson Pickett.
In 1963, The Falcons broke up, and in 1965, Rice wrote a song called “Mustang Mama” after visiting his friend, the actress/singer Della Reese, in New York City. Reese told him that she was thinking about buying her drummer Calvin Shields a new Lincoln for his birthday, which Rice, being from Detroit, thought was a great idea. When he mentioned this to Shields, the drummer replied, “I don’t want a Lincoln, I want a Mustang.”
As Rice explained on the 2007 Rhythm & Blues Cruise, he had never heard of a Mustang before, but Shields filled him in. They went for a drive and saw a billboard for a Mustang -- Rice couldn’t believe Shields wanted such a small car instead of a big ol’ Lincoln. When he returned to Detroit, Rice started writing the song as “Mustang Mama,” with the chorus “ride, Sally, ride.” His publisher knew Aretha Franklin well, and brought Rice by her house, and he sang some of the song for her. Aretha suggested he change the title to “Mustang Sally” to better suit the chorus.
Rice got part of the chorus from the children’s game song (recorded by various artists) “Little Sally Walker,” versions of which include the lyrics “Ride Sally ride, wipe your weepin’ eyes”, with variations. His variation goes, “All you wanna do is ride around, Sally/Ride, Sally, ride/One of these early mornings/You’re gonna be wipin’ your weepin’ eyes.”
In May of 1965 Bonny Rice released his original version of this song as Sir Mack Rice, and it hit the R&B charts, peaking at #15.
Sir Mack Rice - Mustang Sally (single version) (HQ)
Wilson Pickett came across the song when Rice was booked to play at The Apollo theater, and the headliner Clyde McPhatter didn’t show. Rice called his old bandmate Pickett, who performed in McPhatter’s place. When Pickett heard Rice perform “Mustang Sally,” he decided to record it himself. His version hit the R&B and Pop charts a year and a half after Rice originally recorded the song.
Before Pickett had a chance to do so, The Young Rascals (Good Lovin, Groovin’) released their version on March 28, 1966 on their album “The Young Rascals”.
In the liner notes for The Rascals Anthology, Felix Cavaliere states that The Young Rascals recorded “Mustang Sally” and “Land of a Thousand Dances” before Pickett and that Atlantic Records “copped those two songs from them and gave them to Pickett” to record.
In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked Wilson Pickett’s recording of the song at #434 on a list of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
Originally written/recorded by John Fogerty and Creedence Clearwater Revival who released it in 1969. In the beginning, “Proud Mary” had nothing to do with a riverboat. Instead, John Fogerty envisioned it as the story of a woman who works as a maid for rich people. “She gets off the bus every morning and goes to work and holds their lives together,” he explained. “Then she has to go home.”
It was bassist Stu Cook who first introduced the riverboat aspect of the song. The idea came to him as the group watched the television show “Maverick” and Stu made the statement, “Hey riverboat, blow your bell.” John agreed that the boat seemed to have something to do with the song that had been brewing in his mind for quite some time, waiting to take conscious shape. When he wrote the music, he made the first few chords evoke a riverboat paddlewheel going around. Thus, “Proud Mary” went from being a cleanup lady to a boat.
Fogerty wrote the lyrics based on three song title ideas: “Proud Mary,” “Riverboat,” and “Rolling On A River.” He carried around a notebook with titles that he thought would make good songs, and “Proud Mary” was at the top of the list. The song came together on the day that John Fogerty got his discharge papers from the US Army. Fogerty had been drafted in 1966 and was part of a Reserve unit, serving at Fort Bragg, Fort Knox, and Fort Lee. His discharge papers came in 1967.
Fogerty recalls in Bad Moon Rising: The Unofficial History of Creedence Clearwater Revival by Hank Bordowitz:
The Army and Creedence overlapped, so I was ‘that hippie with a record on the radio.’ I’d been trying to get out of the Army, and on the steps of my apartment house sat a diploma-sized letter from the government. It sat there for a couple of days, right next to my door.
One day, I saw the envelope and bent down to look at it, noticing it said ‘John Fogerty.’ I went into the house, opened the thing up, and saw that it was my honorable discharge from the Army. I was finally out! This was 1968 and people were still dying. I was so happy, I ran out into my little patch of lawn and turned cartwheels.
Then I went into my house, picked up my guitar and started strumming. ‘Left a good job in the city’ and then several good lines came out of me immediately. I had the chord changes, the minor chord where it says, ‘Big wheel keep on turnin’/Proud Mary keep on burnin” (or ‘boinin’,’ using my funky pronunciation I got from Howling’ Wolf).
By the time I hit ‘Rolling, rolling, rolling on the river,’ I knew I had written my best song. It vibrated inside me. When we rehearsed it, I felt like Cole Porter.
When CCR recorded this song, John Fogerty wasn’t happy with the harmony vocals, so he recorded them himself and overdubbed them onto the track. This caused further tension in his already-tenuous relationship with his bandmates.
When we recorded the tracks at RCA Studios in Hollywood in October ’68, I channeled Wilson Pickett and Howlin’ Wolf with my lead vocal. Listening to the playback, I wasn’t happy. The band’s background vocals sounded abrasive—like punk rock, not harmonious. I wanted a gospel feel. When I told the guys I was going to overdub the vocal harmony tracks myself, we had a big fight. Bruce Young, our road manager, took them to dinner. I stayed behind and overdubbed all the background vocal parts. I also overdubbed a guitar solo using a Gibson ES-175—a big jazz guitar that I bought for the recording session. I recorded my solo line twice so it sounded more pronounced.
At the restaurant later, the guys were still angry and threatened to quit. I convinced them to hear the results. Back at the studio, I played them the song with my vocals. Nobody said anything. Then Bruce said, “Wow.” The single came out in January ’69 and topped out at No. 2 on Billboard’s pop chart in March for three weeks. The band eventually broke up in ’72.
Fogerty came up with the famous chord riff on guitar when he was playing around with Beethoven’s “5th Symphony.” That one goes “dun dun dun duuunnnnn…,” but Fogerty thought it would sound better with the emphasis on the first note, which is how he arrived at “do do do do.” This part reminded him of the paddle wheel that impels a riverboat. “‘Proud Mary’ is not a side-wheeler, it’s a stern-wheeler,” he explained.
When I added rhythm to the chords, the song had the motion of a boat. I had always loved Mark Twain’s writing and the music of Stephen Foster, so I wrote lyrics about a riverboat. The line “rollin’ on the river” was influenced by a movie I once saw about two riverboats racing. I finished most of it in two hours. Then I opened my notebook for a song title. There was “Proud Mary.”
John Fogerty and his brother Tom, both singer-guitarists, joined forces in 1959 with bassist Cook and drummer Clifford, their junior-high-school classmates in El Cerrito, California, a suburb in the San Francisco Bay area. After achieving marginal success under names such as the Blue Velvets and the Golliwogs, they emerged as Creedence Clearwater Revival in 1967, with John Fogerty as their lead singer, lead guitarist, and sole songwriter.
This was a #4 hit in the US for Ike & Tina Turner in 1971, and a highlight of their live shows. “Proud Mary” attracted 35 covers in the year 1969 alone. Over 100 have been made since.
While on tour with the Bar-Kays in August 1967, Redding wrote the first verse of the song, under the abbreviated title “Dock of the Bay,” on rock impresario Bill Graham’s houseboat at Waldo Point in Sausalito, California. He had completed his famed performance at the Monterey Pop Festival just weeks earlier. While touring he continued to scribble lines of the song on napkins and hotel paper. In November of that year, he joined Steve Cropper, producer and guitarist for Booker T. & the M.G.’s (Stax’s house band), at the Stax recording studio in Memphis, Tennessee, to record the song.
In a September 1990 interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, Cropper explained the origins of the song:
Otis was one of those the kind of guy who had 100 ideas. […] He had been in San Francisco doing The Fillmore. And the story that I got he was renting boathouse or stayed at a boathouse or something and that’s where he got the idea of the ships coming in the bay there. And that’s about all he had: “I watch the ships come in and I watch them roll away again.” I just took that… and I finished the lyrics. If you listen to the songs I collaborated with Otis, most of the lyrics are about him. […] Otis didn’t really write about himself but I did. “Dock of the Bay” was exactly that: “I left my home in Georgia, headed for the Frisco Bay” was all about him going out to San Francisco to perform.
When Redding first sang Steve Cropper the lines “Watching the ships roll in/And then I watch ’em roll away again,” Cropper says he “always envisioned a ship going under the Golden Gate Bridge.”
“Me being a purist kind of guy I said, ‘Otis, did you ever think that if a ship rolls it’s going to take on water and sink,’” Cropper recalls, “and he said about the lyric, ‘Hell, Crop, that’s what I want,’ and Otis always got his way.”
Actually, the Golden Gate Bridge isn’t even visible from where Redding was, but Cropper never saw that spot until years later when he was on tour with Robert Cray; he got a bite to eat overlooking the water and saw ferries going back and forth and realized that “when a ferry goes to park it pushes up a big wake and comes in sideways and looks like it is rolling in. So a ferry was a ship in his mind.”
Together, they completed the music and melancholy lyrics of “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.” From those sessions emerged Redding’s final recorded work, including “Dock of the Bay”. Redding’s restrained yet emotive delivery is backed by Cropper’s memorably succinct guitar playing. The song is somewhat different in style from most of Redding’s other recordings.
While discussing the song with his wife, Redding stated that he had wanted to “be a little different” with “The Dock of the Bay” and “change his style”. There were concerns that “The Dock of the Bay” had too much of a pop feel for an Otis Redding record, and contracting the Stax gospel act the Staple Singers to record backing vocals was discussed but never carried out.
Redding had considered the song to be unfinished and planned to record what he considered a final version, but never got the chance. On December 10, his charter plane crashed into Lake Monona, outside Madison, Wisconsin. Redding and six others were killed.
The song features a whistled tune heard before the song’s fade. It was originally performed by Redding, who (according to Cropper) had “this little fadeout rap he was gonna do, an ad-lib. He forgot what it was so he started whistling.
Later, a rumor began swirling that Redding’s whistling wasn’t good enough and that Cropper used musician Sam “Bluzman” Taylor to dub in a stronger take. Cropper vehemently denies that. “I don’t even know where that story came from,” he says.
The whistling has been the subject of much debate. Cropper says that he always left space at the end of a song for Redding to add extra vocals, frequently ad-libbed on the spot. On this day, Cropper says, Redding simply forgot what he wanted to sing and whistled instead, merely as a placeholder to be fixed at a later date. “That was no placeholder,” says producer Al Bell. “That was Otis – the very essence coming out of him.”
At the end of the first take, Redding started whistling, poorly enough that engineer Ron Capone joked that he wasn’t “going to make it as a whistler.” Redding nailed it on the third take. “If he had come back that Monday, it would definitely have been different,” Cropper says.
While Redding and Cropper planned more work on the song, the fact that Redding whistled on all three takes gave many the impression that this was an intentional touch that perfectly suited the song’s mood.
After Redding’s death, Cropper mixed “Dock of the Bay” at Stax Studios. He added the sound of seagulls and waves crashing to the background, as Redding had requested, recalling the sounds he heard when he was staying on the houseboat. Cropper says he hadn’t yet even conceived of adding the sound of birds and waves that now feel so intrinsic to the song. Instead, he says, he and Redding felt the track was missing some special something and had a plan to give “Dock of the Bay” a more traditional soul feel. Cropper suggested background vocals and told Redding that the Staple Singers were coming in shortly, adding that “I know if I asked them they’d be more than happy to sing on the song. Otis said it was a great idea. He planned on being there.” There was no time for background vocals but Cropper knew the song “really needed something.”
“One of the hardest things I ever had to do was mix that song”. “I got to thinking about Otis clowning around on some of the outtakes. He was trying to make seagull sounds but he sounded like a dying crow.”
As homage to his friend and partner, Cropper went to a local jingle company and recorded an extended loop of seagulls and ocean waves on separate tracks. He then used trial-and-error to figure out where to bring the sounds up in the song.
“I stayed up 24 hours mixing the song. The next morning I went out to the airport, went out on the tarmac and a stewardess came down to the bottom of the steps and I handed her that master,” Cropper recalls. The tape was flown to New York and disc jockeys had preview copies in their hands by Christmas.
In 1999, BMI named the song as the sixth-most performed song of the twentieth century, with about six million performances. “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” was ranked twenty-eighth on Rolling Stone‘s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, the second-highest of four Redding songs on the list.
I distinctly remember one Saturday watching American Bandstand when Dick Clark introduced the new hit “Magic Carpet Ride” by Steppenwolf with “a short movie to go along with it”. It was one of the first “music videos” broadcast on national TV. Steppenwolf’s “Born To Be Wild” tour was the second concert I went to, January 31, 1969. Ticket price was $4.50. I can still remember Goldie McJohn with his huge afro rockin’ his Lowery organ. Here is an interview from American Bandstand:
The group wrote this based on the bass line their bass player, Rushton Moreve, came up with. The only words he had written for it were, “I like my job, I like my baby.” Lead singer John Kay wrote the rest of the lyrics.
Months earlier, as royalties from the success of our first album started to come in, Jutta [his girlfriend] and I replaced our lousy stereo with a top-notch system from a high-end audio store in Beverly Hills. As soon as I put in the cassette and heard the electronic sound effects in the opening, the song’s lyrics popped into my head: “I like to dream/ Yes-yes, right between my sound machine/ On a cloud of sound, I drift in the night/ Any place it goes is right.”
In an interview, Kay disputed a common rumor about the song:
I didn’t drop acid before writing the lyrics, as many people later assumed. And the lyrics weren’t about an acid trip. I may have smoked a joint that night, but that was it. Since birth, I’ve had achromatopsia—complete color blindness. If I had dropped acid, I would have been hallucinating in vivid black and white. I doubt that would have helped me or the song much.
The single version differs noticeably from the album version with a different vocal take by Kay used for the first verse of the song and differing instrumental balances, most notably the introduction feedback. The single version is also much shorter than the album version, with a running time of 2 minutes and 55 seconds. (The album version is 4 minutes and 25 seconds long.)
In the interview, Kay and guitarist Michael Monarch discussed the making of the song:
Kay: One day, Jerry’s brother Dennis, who had changed his name to Mars Bonfire, came in to show us a new song he had written. At some point, Rushton started playing this bouncy riff on his bass that he had played during sound checks on our first tour. Mars liked the riff and started playing chords against it on his Fender Jazzmaster guitar.
The guys in the booth went nuts. They came on the speaker and said, “Hey, keep doing that. That’s really good.” So we kept at it. But all we had was this cool riff. Mars suggested we add an instrumental interlude. He played these chords that led into the jam, for which I later wrote the lyrics, “Close your eyes girl/ Look inside girl/ Let the sound take you away.”
Michael, our lead guitarist, loved thick distorted guitar notes and had a Fuzz Face guitar-effects pedal. I said to Michael, “Let’s go into the studio—you do your feedback routine, the really nasty, growly animal, monster sounds. Whenever I hear something approaching a note, I’ll contrast that with a high-pitched single note slide on my guitar.”
Michael Monarch: I cranked my Fender Concert amp full open. Then I took my Fender Esquire and leaned into the amp, to overload it and create midrange-to-bottom feedback. I was being real physical with the instrument, bending notes and hitting the strings hard with the bottom of my fist so the strings would touch the pickup underneath.
Normally, they never touch, so when they did, it made a chugging sound, like a space ship landing. I gave the guys in the booth about 30 seconds of that. Then they asked me to do it all again. I did, but it came out different, of course. What you hear on the record’s opening are the two takes I recorded overlapping.
The first part is my distortion and bending the guitar strings while playing. The second part is me hitting the strings rapidly against the pickup to get that chugging sound before John’s vocal comes in and the song starts.
John Kay (born Joachim Fritz Krauledat) was born 12 April 1944 in Tilsit, East Prussia, Germany, now Sovetsk, Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia. His father Fritz was killed a month before he was born. When Kay was a baby in early 1945, his mother fled with him from the advancing Soviet troops during the Evacuation of East Prussia in harsh winter conditions. What a way to start a life.
In 1948, when I was 4, my mother and I escaped from East Germany. We eventually made our way to Toronto in 1958, where I listened to rock ’n’ roll on the radio and began playing guitar. When I was 20, I moved to Los Angeles, and from 1964 to ’65 played folk-blues guitar at coffee houses. I played my way back to Toronto in 1965 and joined a rock group called the Sparrows.
“Hush” was written by American composer and musician Joe South, for recording artist Billy Joe Royal.
The chorus begins “Hush, hush, I thought I heard her calling my name”, which is a takeoff from the traditional gospel song lyrics “Hush, hush, somebody’s calling my name”. Session musician Barry Bailey, who later became the lead guitarist for the Atlanta Rhythm Section, plays guitar on the track.
The song was subsequently recorded by Deep Purple for their 1968 debut album “Shades of Deep Purple”.
Originally named “The Roundabout” (a “supergroup” where the band members would get on and off, like a musical roundabout), the start of the group who would later rename to Deep Purple, from Ritchie Blackmore suggesting a new name: “Deep Purple”, named after his grandmother’s favourite song (written by pianist Peter DeRose in 1933 as a piano composition.) The Deep Purple version was included on their first album and recorded with the band’s original lineup – Ian Paice, Jon Lord, Ritchie Blackmore, Nick Simper, Rod Evans. Shortly after the successful release of this song, Deep Purple was booked to support Cream on their Goodbye tour.
In December 2015, the band were announced as 2016 inductees into the Hall of Fame, with the Hall stating: “Deep Purple’s non-inclusion in the Hall is a gaping hole which must now be filled”, adding that along with fellow inductees Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, the band make up “the Holy Trinity of hard rock and metal bands.” The band was officially inducted on 8 April 2016.
Written and produced by The Miracles members Smokey Robinson and Ronald White, the song became the Temptations’ first U.S. number-one single, and is today their signature song. Robinson’s inspiration for writing this song was his wife, Miracles member Claudette Rogers Robinson (they were wed from 1957-1986), but Smokey said that the song is not about a specific girl, but “written with all the women in the world in mind”. It was also a response to Mary Wells song, which he wrote and produced, “My Guy”.
This was written in the Apollo Theater when The Temptations were playing as part of a package tour with The Miracles. According to Robinson, he was working out the song on a piano at the theater when his bandmate Ronald White joined him and they hashed out the song. When The Temptations heard it, they convinced Robinson to let them record it instead of The Miracles. Robinson, who was Berry Gordy’s right-hand man at Motown agreed, and rehearsed the song with The Temptations over the next week. When they returned to Detroit, Robinson and White produced the session on December 21, 1964 when they recorded this song.
In a 2006 NPR interview, Robinson explained that he wrote this with David Ruffin’s voice in mind. It was the first Temptations single to feature Ruffin on lead vocals (Eddie Kendricks and Paul Williams sang lead on previous Temptations singles), and it led to a greater role for Ruffin, as he became their primary lead singer. Ruffin had joined the group as a replacement for former Temptation Elbridge Bryant. While on tour as part of the Motortown Revue, a collective tour for most of the Motown roster, Smokey Robinson caught the Temptations’ part of the show. The group had included a medley of soul standards in the show, one of which, the Drifters’ “Under the Boardwalk”, was a solo spot for Ruffin.
Impressed, Robinson decided to produce a single with Ruffin singing lead. Robinson saw Ruffin as a “sleeping giant” in the group with a unique voice that was “mellow” yet “gruff”. Robinson thought that if he could write just the perfect song for Ruffin’s voice, then he could have a smash hit. The song was to be something that Ruffin could “belt out” yet something that was also “melodic and sweet”.
Robinson went on to write many more hits for The Temptations, who were considered the most talented vocal group at Motown. Members of the Motown house band The Funk Brothers played on the track. The song has a very simple but effective arrangement, which was charted by Paul Riser. It opens with James Jamerson’s bassline, then goes into the ascending guitar figure played by the song’s writer/producer Ronald White. Finger snaps come in, then drums played by Benny Benjamin and strings provided by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.
The arrangement accentuates the vocals, making the words very easy to understand. This served as a template for future Temptations recordings and helped make them stars, as attention was always focused on stage on the singers.
This was written by Vincent Rose, Al Lewis and Larry Stock for the 1940 Western The Singing Hill before they decided it was good enough to be released commercially. The song was used in the movie, where it was heard for the first time performed by Gene Autry.
Larry Stock, who wrote the lyrics, recalled that
One important publisher turned down ‘Blueberry Hill’ because he claimed blueberries don’t grow on hills. I assured him I had picked them on hills as a boy, but nothing doing. So Chappell And Company bought the song and another hit was born.
Fats Domino, who knew the song through Louis Armstrong’s 1949 version, recorded this at Master Recorders in Los Angeles at a session in which he ran out of material to tape.
Domino insisted on recording the song over the vehement objections of producer-arranger Dave Bartholomew, who felt the song been done too many times already. Domino came up with the definitive version though, featuring his famous piano triplets and sly Cajun accent. The band couldn’t get a full take of this song they were happy with, so the engineer, Bunny Robyn pieced together the final version from many fragmentary takes.
Many artists recorded this before Domino, mostly orchestras. In 1940, it was a #2 US hit for Glenn Miller.
That same year, Russ Morgan, Gene Krupa and Kay Kyser all recorded it with their orchestras. Louis Armstrong did the song with Gordon Jenkins and his orchestra in 1949; this version was re-released in 1956, going to #29 in America. Other artists to cover the song include Elvis Presley (on his 1957 album Loving You), The Beach Boys, Andy Williams, Kiki, Cliff Richard, Bruce Cockburn.
An international hit in 1956 for Fats Domino and has become a rock and roll standard. It reached #2 for three weeks on the Billboard Top 40 charts, becoming his biggest pop hit, and spent eight non-consecutive weeks at #1 on the R&B Best Sellers chart. The version by Fats Domino was also ranked #82 in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. The song was Domino’s greatest hit and remains the song most associated with him.
This is REQUIRED listening for any father, particularly new fathers.
The song’s lyrics began as a poem written by Harry’s wife, Sandra “Sandy” Gaston; the poem itself was inspired by the awkward relationship between her first husband, James Cashmore, and his father, John, a politician who served as Brooklyn Borough President. She was also inspired by a country music song she had heard on the radio:
Whenever I was on a long drive I would listen to country music, because words would keep me awake more than just music. And I heard a song… I can remember the story, but I don’t remember who sang it or what the title was, but an old couple were sitting at their breakfast table and looking out the window, and they saw the rusted swing and the sandbox, and they were reminiscing about the good old days when all the children were around and then the grandchildren, and how it passed, and now it’s all gone.
The other part of the idea – this is always a problem, because Harry introduced the song at all his concerts and said, ‘This is a song my wife wrote to zap me because I wasn’t home when our son Josh was born.’ I was always kind of amused by that because of the fact that we learn life’s lessons too late. We don’t learn lessons before the fact. We don’t have a child born and then have all this wisdom. So I always thought it was interesting the way he told the story. But I learned the story because my [first] husband was going to New York to be a lawyer, and I had a teaching job in New York. While we were apartment hunting, we were living with his parents in Brooklyn. His father was the borough president of Brooklyn at the time, which I think was a much more important job than it is today. But every day when he got home from work, he would start talking to his son about, ‘It’d be great if you’d go down to the club on Tuesday night, I’d like to introduce you to some of the people I know,’ and so forth. And he started trying to engineer a career for him which leads to politics. They did not have any relationship or communication because they had been so busy until his son went off to college and was gone. I don’t remember exactly how, but he started talking to me. My father-in-law would say me, even though we were all in the same room, ‘Tell Jimmy I would like to see him down at the clubhouse on Tuesday.’ It was really very strange.
So this is the way the evenings went. The conversation was going through me. So I realized what had happened. You know, relationships and characters and personalities and all those things are formed by two, so I realized that that hadn’t happened. And it was very jerky at that stage. So I observed something that gave me the idea for the song.”
It took the birth of his son for Harry Chapin to decide to turn the poem his wife wrote into a song. Sandy Chapin explained in an interview: “Harry and I would exchange writing of all kinds. We were always working on each other’s writing. Some of my writing at a certain period were 20-page papers for a doctoral program at Columbia. So it wasn’t always that poetic. But we both looked at each other’s stuff. And then one time he came home and he said, ‘What have you been doing?’ I showed him ‘Cat’s In The Cradle,’ and he said, ‘Well, that’s interesting.’ You know, sometimes he’d pick up something and put music to it. And that didn’t really grab him at all. And then after Josh was born, it did. He picked it up and he wrote music to it.”
Harry also said the song was about his own relationship with his son, Josh, admitting, “Frankly, this song scares me to death.”
“In My Room” is a song written by Brian Wilson and Gary Usher. “In My Room” was ranked number 212 on Rolling Stone’s list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
Gary Usher explained that
‘In My Room’ found us taking our craft a little more seriously. Brian and I came back to the house one night after playing ‘over-the-line’ (a baseball game). I played bass and Brian was on organ. The song was written in an hour… Brian’s melody all the way. The sensitivity… the concept meant a lot to him. When we finished, it was late, after our midnight curfew. In fact, Murry [the Wilson brothers’ father] came in a couple of times and wanted me to leave. Anyway, we got Audree [the Wilson brothers’ mother], who was putting her hair up before bed, and we played it for her. She said, ‘That’s the most beautiful song you’ve ever written.’ Murry said, ‘Not bad, Usher, not bad,’ which was the nicest thing he ever said to me.”
Gary Usher (who co-wrote the lyrics with Brian Wilson) further describes that “Brian was always saying that his room was his whole world.” Brian seconds this opinion:
I had a room, and I thought of it as my kingdom. And I wrote that song, very definitely, that you’re not afraid when you’re in your room. It’s absolutely true.” In 1990, Brian wrote, “I also enjoyed producing ‘In My Room’. There is a story behind this song. When Dennis, Carl and I lived in Hawthorne as kids, we all slept in the same room. One night I sang the song ‘Ivory Tower’ to them and they liked it. Then a couple of weeks later, I proceeded to teach them both how to sing the harmony parts to it. It took them a little while, but they finally learned it. We then sang this song night after night. It brought peace to us. When we recorded ‘In My Room’, there was just Dennis, Carl and me on the first verse…and we sounded just like we did in our bedroom all those nights. This story has more meaning than ever since Dennis’ death.”
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.Ok
