Covered: Jesse Stone: 1942-1985

Until a few days ago (writing this in May 2025), I had never heard of Jesse Stone. But I found out about him while research possible additional subjects for my Covered series on well-covered songwriters. What really caught my eye was that he was the one who wrote the song "Shake, Rattle and Roll." That was one of the most pivotal songs that launched the popularity of rock and roll music. Rolling Stone Magazine has rated it as 127 on their list of the 500 greatest songs of all time.

But while Stone is best known for that song, he wasn't a songwriting one-hit wonder. Ahmet Ertegun, the head of Atlantic Records, the most important R&B record company in that era, once stated that "Jesse Stone did more to develop the basic rock and roll sound than anybody else."

Stone's music career went way back. He actually came from a family who put on minstrel shows, and began performing at the age of four! His first big success as a songwriter came with the song "Idaho," which sold over a million copies in 1942. That's not really a style of song I like, but I've included it since it was a pivotal song in his career. Things got more interesting as the rock and rock era dawned in the early 1950s. Another big success for him was "Money Honey" by the Drifters, which Rolling Stone Magazine also put on their list of the top 500 greatest songs of all time. "Flip, Flop and Fly" by Big Joe Turner and "Don't Let Go" by Roy Hamilton were also especially big hits.

Stone had his own career as a singer, as well as a producer and arranger. He had a fine voice, but never had any hits of his own. He certainly stood out for being a successful Black songwriter in the 1950s when there were very few others. (Although Otis Blackwell comes to mind as another key exception.) His success as a songwriter petered out in the early 1960s as musical styles change. Most of these songs are the original versions, except for the last three, which came significantly later. He died in 1999 at the age of 97.

Here's the Wikipedia entry on him:

Jesse Stone (musician) - Wikipedia

This album is 47 minutes long. 

01 Idaho (Benny Goodman with Dick Haymes)
02 Cole Slaw [Sorghum Switch] (Louis Jordan)
03 Losing Hand (Ray Charles)
04 Money Honey (Drifters)
05 Shake, Rattle and Roll (Bill Haley & His Comets)
06 As Long as I'm Moving (Ruth Brown)
07 Razzle-Dazzle (Bill Haley & His Comets)
08 Flip, Flop and Fly (Big Joe Turner)
09 Crazy, Crazy Party (Cues)
10 Don't Let Go (Roy Hamilton)
11 Love Is A-Breakin' Out (Roberta Sherwood)
12 Red Hot Love (Billy Williams)
13 Private Eye (Buddy Wilkins)
14 Like a Baby (Elvis Presley)
15 Smack Dab in the Middle (Ray Charles)
16 Your Cash Ain't Nothing but Trash (Steve Miller Band)
17 Liptstick, Powder and Paint (Shakin' Stevens)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/AhbgKxJs

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/BtYyaOvcEyjyV9q/file

I don't know much about the cover photo except that it looks to be a promotional photo from the 1950s. It was originally in black and white, but I colorized it using the Krea AI program.

Covered: Norman Gimbel: 1953-1986

It occurred to me the other day that I have dozens of albums in my Covered series ready to go, but I rarely seem to get around to posting them. So I'm going to make more of an effort to post these. I haven't gotten that much feedback on them, but I think they're pretty unique and interesting. So here's an especially interesting and unique songwriter: Norman Gimbel.

Who would have ever imagined that the same person involved in writing "The Girl from Ipanema" also helped write "Killing Me Softly with His Song" and the theme to the "Happy Days" TV show? That's range. I just found his obituary in the New York Times (he died in 2019 at the age of 94), and that called him "wildly versatile," adding that "Any attempt to categorize [his] musical leanings would be complicated." 

Gimbel was first and foremost a lyricist. He rarely wrote songs on his own. Typically, someone else would write the music while he would write the lyrics. But he also had a specialty of taking interesting songs in foreign languages and coming up with English lyrics for them. 

A typical case was "The Girl from Ipanema." It was written in 1962, with music by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Portuguese lyrics by Vinicius de Moraes. In early 1963, Jobim was recording the song in New York City with Joao Gilberto and Stan Getz when they came up with the idea of doing an English version. Gimbel was rushed in to come up with English lyrics on the spot. Gilberto's wife Astrid Gilberto happened to be the only Brazilian there who could speak English well, so she was drafted to sing the song, even though she had no professional singing background whatsoever. The result was a classic that shall be played in elevators until the end of time.

That collaboration worked so well that Gimbel ended up writing English lyrics to many of the biggest bossa nova classics from Brazil, like "How Insensitive (Insensatez)," "Meditation (Meditacao)," "So Nice (Summer Samba)," and "Drinking Water (Agua de Beber)." "Sway" is another classic that was originally in Spanish. "Bluesette" is a case where he wrote lyrics to an instrumental hit by Toots Thielemans.

But Gimbel just didn't have the skill of writing new lyrics for already existing songs. He often worked with other songwriters to create songs from scratch. His first song here is from 1953, and he stayed active songwriting well into the 2000s. He often co-wrote songs for TV shows, movies, and plays. Five of his songs were nominated for Academy Awards or Golden Globes or both. He won an Academy Award in 1979 for "It Goes like It Goes," the theme to the movie "Norma Rae."

In the 1970s, Gimbel often collaborated with Charles Fox on songs (though not exclusively). This led to the writing of "Killing Me Softly with His Song," which Rolling Stone Magazine has put on a list of the top 500 songs of all time. In the early 1970s, Gimbel and Fox signed an aspiring female musician, Lori Lieberman, to a management contract, promising to write songs for her. Lieberman went to see Don McLean in concert. She was so inspired by one of his songs ("Empty Chair," not "American Pie," though he played that too), that she wrote lots of notes for a potential. Excited, she immediately called Gimbel on the phone and shared her ideas. Gimbel honed them into lyrics, including coming up with the "Killing me softly with his song" line. He later said, "Her conversation fed me, inspired me, gave me some language and a choice of words." He then passed the lyrics to Fox, who wrote the music. 

So far, so good. But the controversy is that Gimbel and Fox took full songwriting credit, even though clearly Lieberman had an essential role in creating the song. Lieberman released a version of the song as a single in 1972 (produced by Gimbel and Fox), but it went nowhere. When Roberta Flack released her version in 1973, it went to Number One on the singles chart in the U.S., and Lieberman got nothing for it. (Flack's version was probably much more successful because she came up with a very different arrangement, even changing some of the melody and the chords.) Adding insult to injury, in later decades, both Gimbel and Fox denied that Lieberman had a role in writing the song, and also denied that it was inspired by a Don McLean concert, even though they'd already been quoted many times admitting both things. Presumably they got scared about being sued by Lieberman for a cut of the profits, but it turned out she never sued them.

You can read the whole story here. It paints Gimbel and Fox in a pretty bad light, especially since Gimbel was married yet having a secret affair with the much younger Lieberman at the time:

Killing Me Softly with His Song - Wikipedia

Also, here's his Wikipedia entry, if you want to read more about him in general:

Norman Gimbel - Wikipedia

Anyway, Gimbel may have done some ethically dubious things, but there's no doubt he was a great lyricist. Fox later said of him, "Norman had the extraordinary ability with his lyrics to capture the human condition with never an excessive word to describe a feeling or an action." He then pointed out how Gimbel could often conjure an entire song with its first line, and he offered examples: "Tall and tan and young and lovely," "Strumming my pain with his fingers," and "If it takes forever, I will wait for you."

This album is an hour and seven minutes long.

01 Ricochet [Rick-O-Shay] (Teresa Brewer)
02 Canadian Sunset (Sam Cooke)
03 The Girl from Ipanema (Astrud Gilberto, Stan Getz & Joao Gilberto)
04 I Will Follow Him (Peggy March)
05 How Insensitive [Insensatez] (Astrud Gilberto)
06 Bluesette (Vikki Carr)
07 Meditation [Meditacao] (Doris Day)
08 I Will Wait for You (Connie Francis)
09 So Nice [Summer Samba] (Astrud Gilberto & Walter Wanderley)
10 Watch What Happens (Lena Horne & Gabor Szabo)
11 Drinking Water [Agua de Beber] (Frank Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim)
12 I Got a Name (Jim Croce)
13 Killing Me Softly with His Song (Roberta Flack)
14 Wonder Woman (John Bahler)
15 Happy Days (Pratt & McClain)
16 Sway (Bobby Rydell)
17 Making Our Dreams Come True (Cyndi Grecco)
18 Ready to Take a Chance Again (Barry Manilow)
19 Different Worlds (Maureen McGovern)
20 It Goes like It Goes (Jennifer Warnes)
21 Only Love (Nana Mouskouri)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/P2BYQLtv

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/MpTyosybz70Db69/file

Gimbel was very private and rarely photographed. The best I could find was a black and white photo from a 1984 awards ceremony. I colorized it using the Palette program, then improved it with the Krea AI program.

Various Artists - Covered: Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller, Volume 1: 1952-1958

So far with this blog, I'm been prioritizing posting stray tracks compilation albums for individual artists, since those usually can't be found elsewhere. But there are other things I want to post, and one major category is various artists compilations. So far, I've posted a little bit of that, especially my series of "Nuggets" compilations sorted by country. I still plan on posting the US and Britain compilations in that series, but I have to figure out how to organize it into manageable pieces. In the meantime, I'm going to start this new series, which I call "Covered."

In my opinion, songwriters are drastically underappreciated. I believe that, in the long run, the quality of the song matters more than the performance. But of course the performer gets nearly all the fame and glory, in the same way that movie stars are usually much better known than directors, producers, or screenwriters. In this series, I want to highlight some of the greatest songwriters, or songwriting teams, of all time. Some in this series, such as Carole King or Smokey Robinson, have been major performing stars as well, but I plan on looking exclusively at songs performed by others.

Sometimes, there have been various artists collections along these lines. For instance, there have been a couple of pretty good box sets dealing with the music of Burt Bacharach and Hal David. But even with the best official efforts, there are licensing problems that mean key songs are left out. On the flip side, there usually are many songs included that aren't that good. I'm making exactly what pleases me. I'm trying to include all the big hits, but if there's one I don't like, I'll probably resort to using a version of that song by someone else, or maybe not include it at all. And there usually are rarities that I do like and weren't hits at all.

The first in this series is the team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, because their success goes way back to the early 1950s. I'm not going to recount their story. If you don't know who they are, check out their Wikipedia entry as a starting point to learn more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Leiber_and_Mike_Stoller

In short, they wrote over 70 hits, mostly in the 1950s and 1960s, and are undoubtedly one of the best songwriting teams of all time. They produced a great number of hits as well, and ran their own record company. They especially fed a lot of hits to the Coasters and to Elvis Presley. I've usually selected the original hit, but sometimes I went with an alternate, especially because I didn't want to overload this with Coasters and Elvis performances. So, for instance, I went with Big Mama Thornton's version of "Hound Dog" instead of Presley's. Also, my rule is to only include one version of a particular song, even if two or more artists had big hits with it.

As I mentioned above, I try to include the hits, but not if I don't like them. For this album, probably the only controversial choice is that I don't like "Loving You" by Presley. I find it slow, it a boring and overdone manner. But it was a huge hit. So I found a rare fast version that I like much better, and I've included that instead.

I've broken up this collection into three albums of about 50 minutes of music each. This is the first. For all albums in this "Covered" series, the songs are ordered chronologically by year. But I don't go into enough detail to figure out the release order within each year.

01 Hard Times (Charles Brown)
02 Nosey Joe (Bull Moose Jackson)
03 Hound Dog (Big Mama Thornton)
04 Riot in Cell Block No. 9 (Robins)
05 I Smell a Rat (Big Mama Thornton)
06 Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots (Cheers)
07 Down in Mexico (Coasters)
08 Love Me (Elvis Presley)
09 Jailhouse Rock (Elvis Presley)
10 Fools Fall in Love (Drifters)
11 [You're So Square] Baby I Don't Care (Elvis Presley)
12 Lucky Lips (Ruth Brown)
13 Loving You [Fast Version] (Elvis Presley)
14 Santa Claus Is Back in Town (Elvis Presley)
15 Young Blood (Coasters)
16 Treat Me Nice (Elvis Presley)
17 Framed (Ritchie Valens)
18 Trouble (Elvis Presley)
19 King Creole (Elvis Presley)
20 Yakety Yak (Coasters)
21 Don't (Elvis Presley)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17180184/COVRDLeibStllr1952-1958Volum1_atse.zip.html

alternate link:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/kVpYpkqc

As usual, I don't like using black and white photos for the cover art. But I couldn't find any color photos of Leiber and Stoller from the 1950s, so I colorized this one. I believe it dates from 1959. Leiber is on the left.

UPDATE: On September 29, 2024, I upgraded the photo with the use of the Krea AI program.