Covered: Jackie DeShannon: 1961-2017

Here's another entry in my Covered series highlighting the careers of great songwriters. This time, it's Jackie DeShannon.

DeShannon is more famous as a performer than a songwriter. But she's in a rather strange position, because she had some big hits as a performer that she didn't write, especially "What the World Needs Now Is Love," and some big hits as a songwriter for other musical acts, especially "When You Walk in the Room" and "Betty Davis Eyes." The one big hit she both wrote and had the hit performance was "Put a Little Love in Your Heart."

DeShannon was born in rural Kentucky to parents who were farmers but also very musically inclined. So her music career began remarkably early. She was singing songs on local radio stations by the time she was six years old, and hosting her own radio show and making occasional local TV appearances by the time she was eleven! She signed her first record contract at the age of 16, and began putting out singles, but without much success at first. 

At the time, successful female songwriters were very few and far between. But in 1960 she had enough success to get connected to another female songwriter, Sharon Sheeley. Together, they co-wrote DeShannon's first hit song, "Dum Dum" by Brenda Lee. They also wrote some other hit songs over the next couple of years, like "Heart in Hand" and "Breakaway."

In 1963, she co-wrote the song "Needles and Pins" with Jack Nitzsche and Sonny Bono. She didn't get songwriting credit on it, but she claims she was a full participant in its creation. I believe her. It was common for aspiring musicians to get screwed out of songwriting credits in those days (and probably still today), and I'll bet that went double for women. At any rate, her version of the song was the first one released. It barely made the U.S. singles charts, but went all the way to Number One in Canada. Instead, the Searchers had a Number One hit with it some months later. That suggested there was a problem with her record company, not with her version. Later in 1963, she wrote "When You Walk in the Room" by herself. Again, her version went nowhere and the Searchers had a bit hit with it.

In 1965, she finally had a big hit as a performer, with "What the World Needs Now Is Love," written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. From that point on, she almost had two music careers at once. She put out many albums and singles, often with her singing cover songs. At the same time though, she wrote successful songs for other musical acts that she usually never released herself. Examples would be "Come and Stay with Me," a hit she wrote for Marianne Faithfull, and "Don't Doubt Yourself, Babe," which she wrote for the Byrds. 

She wrote hundreds of songs in many musical genres, and made professional sounding demos of them to give to other musicians. Decades later, several albums of these demos have been released. I think if she would have focused on putting on these songs she wrote herself, she would have had a much more successful performing career. It seems to me though that her record company was more interested in her songwriting, so they didn't encourage that.

In 1969, she had another huge hit with "Put a Little Love in Your Heart," which she co-wrote. It reached the Top Five in the U.S. singles chart. After that, musical trends were changing. There was much more of a focus on singers writing their own songs. For instance, Carole King made the transition from writing hits for others to performing her own hit songs. DeShannon made a similar transition, putting out many albums in the 1970s which mostly consisted of her own songs. Again though, in my opinion, her record companies badly bungled her career. Archival releases decades later show dozens of really good songs she wrote and recorded that weren't released at the time. 

Her performing career slowly wound down. In 1978, she stopped putting out albums. She would only release two more much later, in 2000 and 2011. She also never really toured much. She probably didn't need to, with all the money she made from songwriting. In 1974, one of her albums contained a song she co-wrote, "Betty Davis Eyes." It didn't get any attention at the time, and wasn't released as a single. But in 1981, Kim Carnes had a massive hit with it. It went to Number One in the U.S., and was the best selling song of the year.

For this album, I've concentrated entirely on cover versions, with not even a single song performed by DeShannon. I've already posted a couple of albums by her at this blog, and I'll probably post more in the future, so this isn't the place for more of that. Most of these are the original versions, often the hit versions. But I made some exceptions, especially when I had to choose versions other than the DeShannon ones, for instance with "Put a Little Love in Your Heart." 

Here's her Wikipedia page if you want to know more:

Jackie DeShannon - Wikipedia 

An interesting fact I just saw on that page is that the Led Zeppelin song "Tangerine" was actually written by Jimmy Page about DeShannon. The two of them dated around 1965 when Page was a session guitarist. 

This album is 49 minutes long.  

01 Dum Dum (Brenda Lee)
02 Woe Is Me (Helen Shapiro)
03 Heart in Hand (Brenda Lee)
04 I Shook the World (Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans)
05 Needles and Pins (Searchers)
06 Breakaway (Irma Thomas)
07 When You Walk in the Room (Searchers)
08 Come and Stay with Me (Marianne Faithfull)
09 Don't Doubt Yourself, Babe (Byrds)
10 With You in Mind (Marianne Faithfull)
11 Put a Little Love in Your Heart (Dorothy Morrison)
12 Bad Water (Doris Duke)
13 Boat to Sail (Carpenters)
14 Santa Fe (Van Morrison)
15 Bette Davis Eyes (Kim Carnes)
16 Splendor in the Grass (Ladybug Transistor)
17 He Did It (Samantha Fish)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/e2eqJ5kb

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/Nf8kBkKT8PbNtQ1/file

The cover photo is from 1967. 

Covered: Don Covay: 1961-1994

Here's another lesser known songwriter celebrated in my Covered series. This time, it's Don Covay.

Covay was born in South Carolina in 1936, but spent the latter half of his childhood in Washington, D.C. In 1957, he started out as a chauffeur and opening act for Little Richard. He had dreams of being a famous soul singer, but for years he drifted from record label to record label with poor sales.

His first success came into 1961, writing the song "Pony Time." He own version only reached the lower part of the singles charts. But then Chubby Checker covered it later that year and it went all the way to Number One. That established a pattern: while he kept his own solo career going for decades, other singers usually had much more success with his songs. 

In the mid-1965, he was signed to Atlantic Records and associated labels. Atlantic had a relationship with Stax Records, so Covay was able to co-write songs with Steve Cropper and other soul music greats there, like David Porter and Booker T. Jones. For instance, "See-Saw" and "Sookie Sookie" were co-written with Cropper. (I have different versions of both of those songs in my Covered albums for Cropper.) 

Probably Covay's most celebrated song is "Chain of Fools." Aretha Franklin had a big hit with it in 1967, but he'd actually written it about 15 years earlier after seeing a chain gang of prisoners working by the side of a road. Rolling Stone Magazine put it on their list of the top 500 songs of all time. 

He was the instigator being the brief soul supergroup "Soul Clan," consisting of himself, Solomon Burke, Joe Tex, Ben E. King & Arthur Conley. He wrote the band's one hit single. However, that was just a one-off. After that, his career declined for a few years. But he had a minor revival with a few hits in the early 1970s. I've included one of those as the only song here credited just to him, "I Was Checkin' Out, She Was Checkin' In."

But musical tastes were quickly changing in the late 1970s, with the rise of disco, punk, and new wave. After a few years of declining sales, Covay quit the music business altogether. But he had some later revivals. For instance, in 2000, he put out his first new album in over 20 years, "Adlib," filled with famous guest star appearances. He died of a stroke in 2015 at the age of 78.

I tried when I could to use the original hit versions. But some of these were never hits, just songs that I thought were worthy of inclusion. And I did occasionally avoid the hit versions for various reasons. For instance, I only wanted one song mainly sung by Covay, so I used the Rolling Stones version of "Mercy, Mercy" when in fact Covay had a hit with it in 1964.  

Here's his Wikipedia entry:

Don Covay - Wikipedia 

This album is an hour and 16 minutes long. 

01 Letter Full of Tears (Gladys Knight & the Pips)
02 There's a Party Goin' On (Wanda Jackson)
03 Pony Time (Chubby Checker)
04 Long Tall Shorty (Kinks)
05 Mercy, Mercy (Rolling Stones)
06 Don't Drive Me Away (Ben E. King)
07 Tonight's the Night (Solomon Burke)
08 I Don't Know What You've Got but It's Got Me (Little Richard)
09 Three Time Loser (Wilson Pickett)
10 Love Bug (Lena Horne)
11 Chain of Fools (Aretha Franklin)
12 See Saw (Cliff Bennett & the Rebel Rousers)
13 Soul Meeting (Soul Clan [Don Covay, Solomon Burke, Joe Tex, Ben E. King & Arthur Conley])
14 I'm Gonna Take What He's Got (Etta James)
15 Demonstration (Otis Redding)
16 Sookie Sookie (Tina Britt)
17 She Said Yeah (Joe Tex)
18 This Old Town [People in This Town] (Staple Singers)
19 The Usual Place (J. Geils Band)
20 I Was Checkin' Out, She Was Checkin' In (Don Covay)
21 Watch the One Who Brings You the News (Millie Jackson)
22 Thunder (Jimmy Witherspoon)
23 Back to the Streets (Soul Summit)
24 It's Better to Have [And Not Need] (Huey Lewis & the News)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/Bte4uSCp

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/PiuCVec2exVUilI/file

I don't know any details about the cover image, but it looks to date from the early 1960s. The original was in black and white, but I colorized it using the Kolorize program. 

Covered: Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart: 1959-1987

Next up for my Covered series highlighting the careers of great songwriters is the duo of Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, usually just known as Boyce and Hart. These guys definitely knew how to write catchy songs. They were sometimes successful performing their own music, including having one big hit, but mostly they wrote songs for others.

Boyce was the first to have songwriting success. In 1959, when he was about 20 years old, he wrote the song "Be My Guest," and wanted rock star Fats Domino to sing it. He waited hours outside of Domino's hotel room, and got him to promise to listen to a demo of the song, which Domino actually did. It was a big hit later that year, selling over a million copies. 

Boyce and Hart first met later in 1959. Hart was the same age and was trying to make it as a singer, without much success. Not much happened for a few years, except for Boyce writing another big hit, "Pretty Little Angel Eyes" by Curtis Lee, in 1961. Gradually, Boyce and Hart started writing songs together. Their first big success as a duo was "Come a Little Bit Closer" by Jay & the Americans, which may or may not have reached Number One in the U.S. in 1964, depending on the chart. 

In late 1965, things really got cooking for Boyce and Hart when they got involved with the very start of the Monkees TV show. In fact, at first the duo practically was the Monkees! For the first season of the TV show, and the band's first album, they produced and recorded nearly all of the songs, using their own backing band, and wrote many of the songs as well. The actual Monkees starring in the show only replaced the guide vocals sung by the duo with their own for the final product. However, after the debut album came out, the band's musical supervisor Don Kirshner fired the duo, after claiming they were secretly using studio time for their own projects. That may well have been true. But they continued to write songs for the Monkees, despite no longer being involved with the production and recording. Every Monkees album released in the 1960s had at least one song by them, except for "Head."

Their success with the Monkees, including writing many of their biggest hits, gave them the prominence to have success as a recording duo. Their biggest hit on their own was "I Wonder What She's Doing Tonight," which was released at the end of 1967. It didn't have a big chart peak, only reaching Number Eight in the U.S., but it sold a million copies, which was typical of songs at or near the very top. They also had two more songs make the U.S. Top Forty, "Out and About" and "Alice Long [You're Still My Favorite Girlfriend]." I've included all three of those, as well as one more song they performed together that I like, "We're All Going to the Same Place."

Commercially, the duo peaked in the late 1960s, when they were writing hit after hit for the Monkees, themselves, and other musical acts. But musical trends were changing fast, and their style didn't fit in so well with the 1970s and after. They still did have occasional successes - the last five songs here are from after 1970 - but not so many. And some of those songs I chose at the end were actually written much earlier but not hits until later. "Hurt So Bad," written by Teddy Randazzo, Bobby Weinstein, and Bobby Hart, was a hit for Little Anthony and the Imperials in 1965. But I chose a 1980 version that was a hit for Linda Ronstadt in 1980. Similarly, "Under the Moon of Love," written by Tommy Boyce and Curtis Lee, was a minor hit for Curtis Lee in 1961. But in 1976, the band Showaddywaddy had a Number One hit with it in Britain.

In the mid-1970s, Boyce and Hart joined Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz for a reunion of the Monkees, essentially replacing the two missing original Monkees members. They put out a new album in 1975, but for legal reasons they weren't allowed to call themselves the Monkees, so they went by the name "Dolenz, Jones, Boyce and Hart." But the earlier magic was gone, and their album didn't have much success. I chose not to include any songs from that album. In the 1970s, both Boyce and Hart tried releasing their own solo albums, but to even less success.

Hart is still alive as I write this in 2025. However, Boyce died in 1994. He was suffering from depression, and then had a brain aneurysm, which put him in a lot of pain. So he shot himself with a gun.

Here's a Wikipedia entry about the duo, if you want to know more: 

Boyce and Hart - Wikipedia 

Strangely, Boyce has his own Wikipedia entry, here, but Hart does not:

Tommy Boyce - Wikipedia 

This album is an hour and one minute long. 

01 Be My Guest (Fats Domino)
02 Pretty Little Angel Eyes (Curtis Lee)
03 Come a Little Bit Closer (Jay & the Americans)
04 Peaches 'N' Cream (Ikettes)
05 [Theme From] The Monkees (Monkees)
06 Action, Action, Action (Keith Allison)
07 [I'm Not Your] Stepping Stone (Paul Revere & the Raiders)
08 The Last Train to Clarksville (Monkees)
09 I Wonder What She's Doing Tonight (Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart)
10 She (Del Shannon)
11 Out and About (Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart)
12 Words (Monkees)
13 I Wanna Be Free (Keith Allison)
14 Alice Long [You're Still My Favorite Girlfriend] (Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart)
15 Valleri (Monkees)
16 We're All Going to the Same Place (Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart)
17 Tear Drop City (Monkees)
18 Something's Wrong with Me (Austin Roberts)
19 Keep On Singing (Helen Reddy)
20 Under the Moon of Love (Showaddywaddy)
21 Hurt So Bad (Linda Ronstadt)
22 Dominoes (Robbie Nevil)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/YWEcVX4i

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/q01I8u3QJF4SfvS/file

I don't know the details of the cover photo, but based on the clothes, I'd guess it's from around 1967. That's Boyce on the left and Hart on the right (with the red jacket).

Covered: Henry Mancini: 1959-1998

I have so much material for Covered series albums that I'm going to try to make another concerted effort to post a lot more of them. So here's another, focusing on the songwriting of Henry Mancini.

Mancini is a bit of a left field choice for the Covered series, since he mostly composed instrumental music for movies, and is far removed from rock and roll. But he was responsible for so many classic songs that I feel I can't leave him out. The intro to his Wikipedia article sums him up well, stating that Mancini "was an American composer, conductor, arranger, pianist and flutist. Often cited as one of the greatest composers in the history of film, he won four Academy Awards, a Golden Globe, and twenty Grammy Awards, plus a posthumous Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995."

Mancini was born in 1924 and grew up in rural Pennsylvania. After graduating from high school, he studied at the prestigious Julliard School of Music in New York City for two years. But then he was drafted in the U.S. Army and fought in World War II from 1943 to 1945. After the war, he became a pianist and arranger for the Glenn Miller Orchestra (which continued despite the fact Miller died in World War II). In 1952, he got a job writing music for movies for Universal Pictures, a major movie studio in Hollywood. 

However, he didn't really become famous until after he left that company in 1958 to become an independent composer and arranger. One of his first jobs was writing the theme for a new TV show called "Peter Gunn." His song, the "Peter Gunn Theme," was a big hit for Duane Eddy, and has since become an often covered classic. It won an Emmy award and two Grammys, and put Mancini in high demand writing for more TV and movie projects.

Mancini typically only wrote music, usually instrumentals. But sometimes he would work with another songwriter who would write the lyrics. His next major hit, "Moon River," was such a case, with the lyrics written by famed songwriter Johnny Mercer. The version sung by actress Audrey Hepburn in the movie of the same name in 1961 went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song, as well as Grammys for Song of the Year and Record of the Year.

After that, Mancini kept steadily releasing music for decades, including scores for dozens of movies. He recorded over 90 albums on his own, from big band to jazz to light classical. He became, and remains, one of the biggest names in the "easy listening" genre. 

For this album, I tried to boil the selections down to just his very best known songs, so that even people who aren't typically into can easy listening style can enjoy this. For instance, I find it hard to believe there's anyone out there who doesn't enjoy hearing the highly creative "Pink Panther Theme." Like that song, the vast majority of songs here are instrumentals. "Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet" wasn't actually written by him, but his arrangement changed the song so drastically that I've included it here anyway.

Most of Mancini's best known songs date from the 1960s. After that decade, he switched more to arranging songs written by other people, though he did sometimes write his own material. Some of the songs near the end of this album are covers of songs from much earlier in his career. I generally tried to avoid Mancini's own versions, as I usually do with these Covered albums. But I have two songs by him here since I couldn't find good versions of those ones otherwise.

He was still composing and arranging, though less prolifically, when he died of pancreatic cancer in 1994 at the age of 70 years old. His music made such a cultural impact that in 2004 he was the subject of a U.S. postage stamp. 

This album is 42 minutes long.

01 Peter Gunn Theme (Ray Anthony & His Orchestra)
02 Moon River (Audrey Hepburn)
03 Baby Elephant Walk (Lawrence Welk & His Orchestra)
04 Theme from Hatari (Henry Mancini & His Orchestra)
05 A Shot in the Dark (Shirley Scott)
06 The Shadows of Paris (Elsie Bianchi)
07 Pink Panther Theme (Those Fantabulous Strings)
08 Slow Hot Wind (Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66)
09 Two for the Road (Peggy Lee)
10 Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet [A Time for Us] (Johnny Mathis)
11 Send a Little Love My Way (Anne Murray)
12 Newhart (Henry Mancini)
13 Days of Wine and Roses (Ella Fitzgerald & Joe Pass)
14 Dreamsville (Dave Grusin with Diana Krall)
15 Charade (Monica Mancini)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/YcfTBdHW

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/nDvHfXT0X64bFSQ/file

The cover photo dates from 1985. I don't know any other details.

Covered: John D. Loudermilk: 1956-2002

Here's another album for my "Covered" series, highlighting the talents of songwriters who got covered a lot. This one is for John D. Loudermilk.

Loudermilk is probably best known for three big hits: "Indian Reservation," a Number One hit in the U.S. for Paul Revere and the Raiders in 1971, "Ebony Eyes," a Number One hit in Britain for the Everly Brothers in 1961, and "Tobacco Road." That last one wasn't as big of a hit, although the Nashville Teens did have a hit with it in 1964. But its one of those songs lots of musical acts love to cover. Wikipedia says it "has since become a standard across several musical genres." 

However, he wrote many more hits than just those three, and his songs have been widely covered. He had a reputation for writing songs that were a little bit quirky and different from the usual.

Loudermilk was born in 1934, and grew up in a musical environment in North Carolina. In fact, two of his cousins made up the Louvin Brothers, a very famous country music duo. The first big hit of one of his songs, "A Rose and a Baby Ruth," happened in 1956, while he was 21 years old and still going to college. After that, he tried having his own career as a performing musician, and he ended up releasing many singles and albums. However, he only saw modest success that way. He had two songs that barely made it into the Top Forty in the U.S., "Sittin' in the Balcony" in 1957, and "Language of Love" in 1961, and some smaller hits. He found much more success having other musical acts record his songs. 

Most of his successes came in the late 1950s and all through the 1960s. He wrote many hits for many different musical acts. This album includes most of his best known songs, but there are plenty more that I didn't include. For instance, he wrote lots of country hits, and I was more selective with those since I'm not such a big country fan. 

Most of the songs here are the original hit versions, if they were hits. I've included a couple of lesser known songs performed by Loudermilk himself, "Road Hog" and "The Jones'," to show some of the diversity of his songwriting talent. The last really big hit he had was "Indian Reservation" in 1971. The four songs that come after than on this album are covers of songs that generally were first released a lot earlier.

It seems he retired from songwriting in the 1970s, and apparently was able to live on royalty checks. That freed him up to pursue passion projects, and he had many. For instance, in the 1990s, he devoted himself to traveling, studying ethnomusicology, chasing hurricanes, and doing research on Native American burial mounds! 

Here's the Wikipedia entry about him, if you want to know more:

John D. Loudermilk - Wikipedia 

But here's a better article that sums up his career:

LifeNotes: Songwriting Great John D. Loudermilk Passes - MusicRow.com 

This album is 50 minutes long.

01 A Rose and a Baby Ruth (George Hamilton IV)
02 Angela Jones (Johnny Ferguson)
03 Ebony Eyes (Everly Brothers)
04 Road Hog (John D. Loudermilk)
05 [He's My] Dreamboat (Connie Francis)
06 Norman (Sue Thompson)
07 Watch Your Step (Brooks O'Dell)
08 Windy and Warm (Ventures)
09 Abilene (George Hamilton IV)
10 Tobacco Road (Nashville Teens)
11 Bad News (Johnny Cash)
12 This Little Bird (Marianne Faithfull)
13 I Wanna Live (Glen Campbell)
14 The Jones' (John D. Loudermilk)
15 Indian Reservation [The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian] (Paul Revere & the Raiders)
16 Break My Mind (Wreckless Eric)
17 You Call It Joggin' [I Call It Runnin' Around] (Mose Allison)
18 Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye (Maria McKee)
19 Turn Me On (Norah Jones)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/h2wgDDB2

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/Y1UEO9WQYOuk47p/file

There are very few color photos of Loudermilk from when he was young. So I had to resort to using the cover photo from the album "Blue Train." I don't know when the photo was taken because it's an archival album.

Covered: Neil Sedaka & Howard Greenfield, Volume 1: 1958-1970

I have to admit that, until very recently, I hadn't given much thought to the musical career of Neil Sedaka. I just assumed he was one of many pop stars that had hits mostly or entirely written by others from the 1960s, like Bobby Darin or Bobby Dee. But it turns out that he not only wrote most of his hits, but he wrote plenty of hits for others. Most of his songwriting was done with Howard Greenfield, who avoided the spotlight and didn't have a recording career of his own. I found enough for two volumes. Here's the first one.

Neil Sedaka grew up in a middle class Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York. From a young age, he developed a talent for playing classical music on the piano. He even won a piano scholarship for the prestigious Julliard's School of Music as a teenager, and he's retrained an interest in playing classical music his entire life. While only 13 years old, he met another teenager living in the same apartment building, Howard Greenfield, who already was an aspiring lyricist and poet. 

The two started writing show tunes, but they soon got turned on to pop music. In 1958, they got hired to be professional songwriters for a company that eventually moved their offices to the Brill Building, a building in New York City where as tremendous number of hit songs were written. But Sedaka also got signed by a record company as a recording artist. He began having hits almost immediately. Eventually, he would sell over 25 million records on his own. Soon, much of Sedaka's time was taken up with promoting and touring to support his recordings. His songwriting with Greenfield continued. But Greenfield had more free time, so Sedaka was okay with Greenfield cowriting with others when Sedaka was too busy. In particular, Greenfield often wrote songs with another professional songwriter named Jack Keller.

The point of my "Covered" series is to focus on songwriting careers. So I've tried hard to avoid having lots of songs here performed by Sedaka. I managed to include only one in this volume, "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do." But I didn't have that self-imposed rule, probably more than half of the songs here would have been performed by him. Sometimes I had to look hard to find good versions of songs that he had a hit with. But there are plenty of songs here that were first hits for others, such as the four performed by Connie Francis.   

From 1958 to 1963, Sedaka and Greenfield had hit after hit after hit, both recorded by Sedaka and by others. I've only included some of the best and most popular ones here. But then in 1964, their songwriting style fell out of fashion, when the Beatles and Bob Dylan drastically changed things. For much of the rest of the 1960s, they struggled. 

However, they still did find some successes. For instance, Greenfield wrote some popular TV show themes with Jack Keller (who I already mentioned above). That's represented by the inclusion of "Theme from Bewitched" here. They also had some successes with songs recorded by the Fifth Dimension. That includes "Puppet Man," which appears on Volume 2. They also had a quirky minor hit in 1970 with "Rainy Day Bells," which has a throwback sound to an earlier era. It was supposedly recorded by the comedic basketball team the Harlem Globetrotters. But in fact it was recorded by some professional soul singers.

But still, by 1970, it looked like most of the successful years of both Sedaka and Greenfield were behind them, due to changing musical trends. However, they would come back with many successes in the 1970s, which will be dealt with in Volume 2. 

Here are the Wikipedia pages of both:

Neil Sedaka - Wikipedia 

Howard Greenfield - Wikipedia

This album is 42 minutes long.

01 Stupid Cupid (Connie Francis)
02 Since You've Been Gone (Clyde McPhatter)
03 My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own (Connie Francis)
04 Stairway to Heaven (Gary Sherbert)
05 Everybody's Somebody's Fool (Connie Francis)
06 Fallin' (Wanda Jackson)
07 Where the Boys Are (Connie Francis)
08 Oh Carol (Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons)
09 Venus in Blue Jeans (Jimmy Clanton)
10 Breaking Up Is Hard to Do (Neil Sedaka)
11 Foolish Little Girl (Cookies)
12 Calendar Boy (Dee Dee Sharp)
13 Get Rid of Him (Dionne Warwick)
14 It Hurts to Be in Love (Gene Pitney)
15 Theme from Bewitched (Warren Barker)
16 Workin' on a Groovy Thing (5th Dimension)
17 Rainy Day Bells (Globetrotters)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/4jCdUgiy

alternate: 

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

The cover image is a composite that I made. The picture of Sedaka is from 1962. I don't know when the picture of Greenfield was taken, but clearly it's from when he was young. (He's the one with the visible tie.) Both pictures I started with were in black and white. But I converted them to color with the use of the Kolorize program. 

COVERED: Luther Dixon: 1957-1972

I'm trying to use my Covered series to shine a spotlight on some talented songwriters who aren't widely known. Luther Dixon definitely qualifies as little known. I didn't select a lot of songs written or co-written by him. All I came up with was one relatively short album. But he wrote a fair number of classics. For instance, two of his songs, "Tonight's the Night" by the Shirelles and "Big Boss Man" by Jimmy Reed, have been included on a Rolling Stone Magazine list of the 500 greatest songs of all time.

Dixon was born in Florida in 1931, but grew up in New York City. He was probably lucky his family made the move, since there was more economic opportunity for a Black man in a northern city back in that era of segregation. There were very few successful Black professional songwriters in the 1950s. But while Dixon started out as a member of a doo-wop group, he quickly discovered he preferred songwriting and producing to performing. His first big success was "Why Baby Why," a hit for Pat Boone in 1957. 

 

In 1959, he found a ideal job working as a producer for an up-and-coming record label, Scepter Records. What made the job ideal was that he was given great independence to produce and record as he liked. He soon began working with the Shirelles, and largely pioneered the classic "girl group" sound with his song "Tonight's the Night." (That, presumably, is why Rolling Stone put that song in its top 500 list.) He had a lot of success in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Two of his songs, "Boys" and "Baby, It's You," were recorded by the Beatles. That second one was co-written by  Burt Bacharach.

 
However, the Beatles were also largely to blame for a drastic change in musical tastes away from his 1950s style, along with Bob Dylan and others. He did have some hits in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but few compared to what he'd accomplished before. He died in 2009 at the age of 78. Here's his Wikipedia entry if you want to know more about him:

Luther Dixon - Wikipedia

Generally speaking, I included the original hit versions of each song, in rough chronological order. However, "Baby, It's You" was first a big hit for the Shirelles in 1961, but I already included that version on a Burt Bacharach and Hal David "Covered" album. So instead I used the version by Smith, which also was a big hit in 1969.

This album is 43 minutes long. 

01 Why Baby Why (Pat Boone)
02 Sixteen Candles (Crests)
03 So Close (Brook Benton)
04 Lovin' Up a Storm (Jerry Lee Lewis)
05 Tonight's the Night (Shirelles)
06 Big Boss Man (Jimmy Reed)
07 A Hundred Pounds of Clay (Gene McDaniels)
08 Mama Said (Shirelles)
09 Irresistible You (Bobby Darin)
10 Soldier Boy (Shirelles)
11 Boys (Beatles)
12 Sha La La (Manfred Mann)
13 With This Ring (Platters)
14 Soul Serenade (Aretha Franklin)
15 Baby It's You (Smith)
16 I Don't Wanna Cry (Ronnie Dyson)
17 Funk Factory (Wilson Pickett)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/Hzg8N4eA

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/JUCGAftRRNsKQZT/file

I don't know when or where the cover photo is from. I was lucky to find a good photo of Dixon at all. But I'd guess it's from the 1950s or early 1960s. The original was in black and white, but I converted it to color with the use of the Palette program.

Covered: Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier & Eddie Holland, Volume 1: 1961-1963

This has been a long time coming. I consider the songwriting team of Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Eddie Holland - typically just referred to as Holland-Dozier-Holland, one of the greatest songwriting entities of all time, right up there with the likes of Lennon-McCartney and Bob Dylan. They wrote so many worthy songs that I've made eight albums for my Covered songwriter series. I believe that's the most so far, beating out the songwriting duo of Gerry Goffin & Carole King with six albums.

If you think about the dozens and dozens of Motown classic hits from the 1960s, Holland-Dozier-Holland wrote most of them. Unfortunately, they left the Motown company in 1968 due to a disagreement about their role and how much they should be paid. But they formed their own record companies and continued to write many hits well into the 1970s. Their collaboration slowly fell apart that decade, but they still had some individual successes well after the 1970s, even into the 2000s.

It's hard to even fathom just how successful the Holland-Dozier-Holland songwriting team was. They wrote about 400 songs together. About 130 of those were hits on the U.S. pop charts. And that doesn't even include more hits that weren't written by all three of them. About 40 of their hits reached Number One on either the pop or soul charts. Just for the Supremes, they wrote ten Number One pop hits! Also, nine of their songs have made it to Rolling Stone Magazine's list of the top 500 songs of all time. I'm sure that's more than anyone else I've included in my Covered series so far.

Eddie and Brian Holland are brothers, with Eddie being two years older. As I write this in 2024, both of them are still alive and are in their 1980s. Lamont Dozier died in 2022 at the age of 81. All three of them were born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. Brian Holland was the first to start a musical career, putting out a solo single in 1958. He didn't have much success at first, but that single was produced by Barry Gordy, the future owner of Motown Records, and he gradually got more involved with that company, which was founded in 1959. 

Brian brought his brother Eddie into the Motown company. At first, Eddie tried to have success as a performer. He did have a hit in 1961 with the song "Jamie," which reached Number 30 on the U.S. singles chart. He put out a steady stream of singles from 1958 until 1964, with a couple more minor hits. One of them, "Leaving Here," is included here. But he suffered from stage fright and ended his career as a performer in 1964. He and his brother decided they preferred songwriting and producing.

The first really big success any of these three songwriters had was with the song "Please Mr. Postman." There were no less than five songwriters credited for the song, but one of them was Brian Holland. The song was a huge success for the Motown act the Marvelettes, reaching Number One on the U.S. singles chart in 1961. 

Shortly after that, Lamont Dozier started to enter the picture. He had been a member of various bands as far back as 1957. He even released three singles in 1961 under the name "LaMont Anthony." But in 1962, he joined the Motown company and soon started working with the Holland brothers, both writing and producing songs.

I found a 2022 interview with Holland-Dozier-Holland that took place shortly before Dozier died that year. In it, they described how their songwriting partnership worked. Brian Holland explained, "I mainly wrote the melodies and tracks with Lamont, and Eddie wrote the majority of the lyrics. Occasionally, Lamont and I would also come up with lyric ideas." 

Eddie Holland further explained, "Early on, Brian and Lamont were already writing together, and they were very prolific at writing melodies and producing tracks. It was the lyric writing which slowed them down. So I suggested that I join the team as a lyricist, so that their production output would be much higher. With the three of us, we were able to finish many songs and produce more projects."

Here's the Wikipedia entry for the Holland-Dozier-Holland songwriting team. You can also find entries for each of them individually, but those don't say much:

Holland–Dozier–Holland - Wikipedia

Some of the first songs on this album were written by only one or two members of this threesome, often with others. The first song here written by all three was "Come and Get These Memories," a hit for Martha and the Vandellas in 1963. Shortly thereafter, the three of them composed "(Love Is Like A) Heat Wave," which was a massive hit by Martha and the Vandellas later in 1963, and has been a hit multiple times since then.

From that point on, it was like they could do no wrong. They soon became the top songwriting entity for Motown, and were usually assigned to write songs for the biggest stars signed to that label. Lamont Dozier later recalled, "It was just an awesome time (back at Motown). We had a huge amount of success. During this period, whatever we touched seemed to go straight into the Top 10. It was as if we stumbled onto the best door on 'The Price Is Right,' where the prizes just keep on coming and coming!"

Normally with albums in this series, I sort the songs chronologically, but loosely, based on the year of release. But because the Holland-Dozier-Holland team had so many hits one after another, I've strived to order them even more accurately, so you can see the exact order of their hits. I've only made occasional exceptions to that. For instance, I bumped up "Come and Get These Memories" a bit so there wouldn't be four Marvelettes songs in a row.

This album is 40 minutes long.

01 Please Mr. Postman (Marvelettes)
02 Playboy (Marvelettes)
03 Someday, Someway (Marvelettes)
06 Come and Get These Memories (Martha & the Vandellas)
04 Strange I Know (Marvelettes)
07 [Love Is Like A] Heat Wave (Martha & the Vandellas)
05 Locking Up My Heart (Marvelettes)
08 Mickey's Monkey (Smokey Robinson & the Miracles)
09 You Lost the Sweetest Boy (Mary Wells)
10 Can I Get a Witness (Marvin Gaye)
11 I Gotta Dance to Keep from Crying (Smokey Robinson & the Miracles)
12 Quicksand (Martha & the Vandellas)
13 When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes (Supremes)
14 A Love like Yours [Don't Come Knocking Everyday] (Martha & the Vandellas)
15 Leaving Here (Eddie Holland)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17402265/COVRDHOLLNDDZRHLLND1961-1963Vlum1_atse.zip.html

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/cDyiGUhr

One reason I didn't post Holland-Dozier-Holland albums in my Covered series prior to this is I didn't think I could make worthy album covers. But recently with my discovery of the Krea AI program, I can finally make the covers I wanted. The problem is there simply aren't that many photos of these three songwriters, either solo or together, until they started appearing at awards ceremonies when they had reached old age. For this cover, I couldn't find any good photos of them from 1961 to 1963. Instead, I used a photo of Brian Holland and Lamont Dozier together in 1965, plus another photo of Eddie Holland from that time period. Both photos were in black and white, so I used the Palette program to convert them to color. Then, using Photoshop, I rearranged their bodies so their heads were closer and at the same height level. Finally, I used the Krea AI program to increase the image detail and quality.

From right to left, that's Eddie Holland, Brian Holland, and Lamont Dozier.

Covered: Smokey Robinson, Volume 1: 1961-1966

I want to get back to posting more albums from the best songwriters of the Motown Record company in the 1960s and 1970s. The time has come to post an album from a musical giant, Smokey Robinson. This is the first of three about him.

The odds are very good you're familiar with Robinson, because he sang many hits, both with his band the Miracles in the 1960s and as a solo artist after that. But this series isn't about Robinson as a performer, it's about Robinson as a songwriter. I have included no performances of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles here, and only one of Robinson solo on a later volume. That means there are lots of songs that were first hits by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles done by other musical acts. Plus, many songs are the ones wrote that were first hits for other acts, almost always other Motown acts.

Robinson, who is alive at the age of 84 as I write this in 2024, was basically one of the founders of the Motown Record company, and one of its most important employees for many years. 

Here is the Wikipedia entry about him:

Smokey Robinson - Wikipedia

He started his band the Miracle in 1955, but they struggled at first. Then he met Berry Gordy, the future head of Motown Records, in 1957, after a failed audition for another record company. Gordy was impressed by Robinson's vocal talent. But he was even more impressed that Robinson had brought a notebook with over a hundred original songs in it. Gordy had already written a few hits, and became a mentor, teaching Robinson the art of songwriting.

Robinson's music career with the Miracles started to take off. They had their first hit in 1958 (with a song Robinson didn't write). But they really hit it big in 1960 with the song "Shop Around," which was co-written by Robinson, along with Gordy. It hit Number One on one of the U.S. singles charts at the time, and was the first million seller for Motown. Rolling Stone Magazine would later put it on their list of the top 500 songs of all time.

From that time forward, Robinson went from success to success. At first, he was THE main hit songwriter. He wrote lots of hits for other musical acts on the Motown label, especially Mary Wells and the Temptations. But in a few years the Holland-Dozier-Holland team because the most successful songwriters for the company. Robinson still wrote lots of hits every year, but focused more on hits for his own group, the Miracles. By the way, "My Girl," "Ooh Baby Baby," and "Tracks of My Tears" also all made it to the Rolling Stone Magazine top 500 songs list. That's pretty incredible, to write four such songs in a five-year time span! 

As I mentioned above, I had to go out of my way to find versions of many Smokey Robinson and the Miracles hits, or this could have looked a lot like a greatest hits album from them, and that's less interesting, in my opinion. So, for instance, I went with a non-hit version of "Shop Around" by Mary Wells from 1961 rather than the big hit version mentioned above from 1960. But note that Robinson wrote many songs with others (though he didn't really have a long-lasting songwriting partner), so some of the Miracles versions show up on Covered albums for other songwriters. For instance, the Miracles version of "Shop Around" appears on the Covered album for Berry Gordy.

I'm too lazy to make a list of exactly which of these songs were hits for the Miracles and which were first hits for others. But there's a paragraph in his Wikipedia entry that lists most of the big hits for others from this time period. So I'm posting it here:

Between 1962 and 1966, Robinson was also one of the major songwriters and producers for Motown, penning many hit singles such as "Two Lovers", "The One Who Really Loves You", "You Beat Me to the Punch" and "My Guy" for Mary Wells; "The Way You Do The Things You Do", "My Girl", "Since I Lost My Baby", "It's Growing", and "Get Ready" for the Temptations; "Still Water (Love)" for the Four Tops; "When I'm Gone" and "Operator" for Brenda Holloway; "Don't Mess With Bill", "The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game" and "My Baby Must Be a Magician" for the Marvelettes; and "I'll Be Doggone" and "Ain't That Peculiar" for Marvin Gaye.

Note that some of the songs mentioned there aren't included here because I chose versions with release dates after 1966. So they'll be on the later two volumes.

This album is 53 minutes long.

01 Shop Around (Mary Wells)
02 The One Who Really Loves You (Mary Wells)
03 Two Lovers (Mary Wells)
04 I Want a Love I Can See (Temptations)
05 You Beat Me to the Punch (Mary Wells)
06 Better Un-Said (LaBrenda Ben)
07 You've Really Got a Hold on Me (Beatles)
08 The Way You Do the Things You Do (Temptations)
09 Lucky Lucky Me (Marvin Gaye)
10 My Guy (Mary Wells)
11 My Girl (Temptations)
12 My Smile Is Just a Frown [Turned Upside Down] (Caroline Crawford)
13 When I'm Gone (Brenda Holloway)
14 My Baby (Temptations)
15 Ain't that Peculiar (Marvin Gaye)
16 Don't Mess with Bill (Marvelettes)
17 Operator (Brenda Holloway)
18 It's Growing (Temptations)
19 One More Heartache (Marvin Gaye)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17350552/COVRDSMOKYRBNSN1961-1966Vlum1_atse.zip.html

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/KDd8E5FS

The cover photo was taken on the set of the "Ready Steady Go" TV show in 1964. It was in color already, so I didn't have to do much to it.

Covered: Berry Gordy: 1957-1982

As I move forward with my Covered series highlighting great songwriters, it's time I start to unravel the big ball of wax that is the Motown Records hit making machine. Although there were some key exceptions, the hits at the Motown record company were generally written by professional songwriters. It turns out a relatively small number of them wrote nearly all the hits, so they are ideal subjects for my Covered series.

When it comes to dealing with the Motown Records company, it's fitting to start with Berry Gordy, who is practically Motown Records personified. He started the company in 1959 and it was a massive success nearly from the start. Being Black, he turned Motown into the most successful Black-run private business in the U.S. for decades. Gordy became a household name, thanks to Motown's distinctive sound and his innovative business practices. 

That said, I don't think a lot of people appreciate that, on top of all of his business success, he was actually a very talented songwriter! He was a songwriter first, and he had a lot of success writing or co-writing hits for Jackie Wilson, Etta James, and others before Motown Records even existed. The reason he formed the company was because he was frustrated at how little money he was getting writing hit songs. He correctly realized that he was getting ripped off by very ruthless music companies.

A challenging question here though is just how much he actually participated in the writing of the songs presented here. Gordy wasn't above being ruthless himself sometimes. For instance, I haven't included any version of the song "You've Got What It Takes," even though it was a big hit multiple times by different artists, and Berry is typically considered one of the co-writers. That's because soul guitarist Bobby Parker wrote it and released it in 1958. Then, in 1959, Marv Johnson put out a version on Motown Records and simply ignored the songwriting credits of the earlier version, giving the songwriting credit to Gordy, his wife, and two others instead.

So if Gordy did that once, he could have done it other times. That said, it seems he generally played it straight while running Motown. I've read a bunch about Motown, and other people like Motown star Smokey Robinson have said that Gordy's songs were treated the same as those of any other songwriter at the time. Motown was run much like an assembly line, with strict rules about every aspect of the business. As part of that, over a dozen company leaders had weekly meetings to decide which songs would get released as singles. Majority vote ruled, and songs written or co-written by Gordy got rejected just like everyone else. 

Furthermore, there's plenty of evidence that Gordy was a talented songwriter, even putting aside his songwriting success prior to Motown. He usually co-wrote songs with others, but not always. For instance, the Contours song "Do You Love Me," reached Number Three on the U.S. single chart in 1962, and it was written solely by him. Some other songs here were also credited just to him. In fact, songwriting legend Smokey Robinson says that in the late 1950s, Gordy was actually his songwriting mentor, since Robinson was just starting out at the time and Gordy already had multiple hits he'd been involved with. Robinson seemed very impressed with Gordy's songwriting talent.

What seems to have happened is that, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Gordy wrote a lot of songs. But as the 1960s progressed, he was increasingly preoccupied by running the Motown company, and he realized he could delegate most of the songwriting to other very capable people. So his songwriting credits steadily declined as the decade went on.

Then something curious happened around 1969. Motown's top songwriters, the Holland-Dozier-Holland team, left the company in 1968 due to a dispute over not getting enough royalties. By that time, Holland-Dozier-Holland had gotten very famous due to writing so many hit songs. Gordy wanted to make sure this didn't happen again. So he created something called "The Corporation." This was a group of four songwriters who wrote most of the songs for Motown's hot new act, the Jackson 5. Their records were credited simply to "The Corporation" so the individuals wouldn't get too famous and thus later make big demands on him. The four main songwriters involved were Freddie Perren, Alphonso Mizell, Deke Richards, and... Gordy himself. 

But was he actually involved in co-writing the songs, or was this a new scheme to take some of the profits by a new songwriting team? I suspect it was a bit of both. The first big hit by the Corporation, which turned out to be one of the greatest songs of all time, was "I Want You Back" by the Jackson 5. Since it's such a famous, classic song, I was able to find out some about how it came to be. It turns out it was originally written by the other three in the team. (Perren, in particular, would go on to great songwriting success. I plan on having an album of his songs in this series.) However, when the song was first presented to Gordy, it was a very different song, including having the title "I Want to Be Free." Gordy made numerous improvements to it, so he definitely deserves songwriting credit for that one.

I suspect that was the case for the other big hits by the Jackson Five. Gordy promised the band that their first three songs at least would all be Number Ones, and that surprisingly turned out to be the case. He really, really wanted this band to succeed, and it seems he pulled out all the stops to make them a success, including getting directly involved in the songwriting. But the Corporation is credited with writing dozens of songs around the early 1970s, and I'm making the guess that Gordy was too busy running Motown to be involved with most of those. 

If anyone has a better idea about this, please let me know. Gordy's songwriting is rarely discussed, since his success running Motown totally dominates any discussion about his life. (Remarkably, as I write this in 2024, he is still alive at the age of 94.) 

Anyway, it seems after this final flurry of songwriting activity for the Jackson 5, Gordy essentially gave up songwriting altogether. The songs here are presented in rough chronological order (check the mp3 tags for details). The last two songs, "Good Thing Going" and "I'll Be Satisfied," were hits by Sugar Minott in 1981 and Shakin' Stevens in 1982 respectively. However, both songs were actually written and first released by others in the 1960s. The last new song Gordy was involved with that's included here is "Get It Together" by the Jackson 5 in 1973.

Here's Gordy's Wikipedia entry if you want to know more:

Berry Gordy - Wikipedia

This album is an hour and 15 minutes long.

01 Reet Petite (Jackie Wilson)
02 To Be Loved (Jackie Wilson)
03 It's So Fine (LaVern Baker)
04 Lonely Teardrops (Jackie Wilson)
05 Come to Me (Marv Johnson)
06 That's Why [I Love You So] (Jackie Wilson)
07 I'll Be Satisfied (Jackie Wilson)
08 All I Could Do Was Cry (Etta James)
09 Shop Around (Smokey Robinson & the Miracles)
10 Seven Day Fool (Etta James)
11 Do You Love Me (Contours)
12 Shake Sherrie (Contours)
13 Money [That's What I Want] (Beatles)
14 Try It Baby (Marvin Gaye)
15 Do Right Baby, Do Right (Chris Clark)
16 I Want to Go Back There Again (Chris Clark)
17 I Want You Back (Jackson 5)
18 I'm Livin' in Shame (Supremes)
19 ABC (Jackson 5)
20 You've Made Me So Very Happy (Blood, Sweat & Tears)
21 I'll Be There (Jackson 5)
22 Mama's Pearl (Jackson 5)
23 The Love You Save (Jackson 5)
24 Get It Together (Jackson 5)
25 Good Thing Going [We've Got a Good Thing Going] (Sugar Minott)
26 I'll Be Satisfied (Shakin' Stevens)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17282873/COVRDBRRYGRDY19571982_atse.zip.html

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/ZN5vFGt8

The cover photo is a very early publicity photo of Berry Gordy. (It might be hard to tell from just this much, but he has a black jacket slung over one shoulder.) I'm guessing this is from around 1960. The photo was in black and white, but I colorized it using the Palette program.

Cliff Richard - BBC Sessions, Volume 2: 1961-1966

This is the second of six albums of Cliff Richard at the BBC that I plan to post.  

This one was tricky to make because Richard was a big star in Britain all through this time period, with many hits, but it seems that there are very few BBC recordings. That's not surprising, since not many BBC recordings from 1964 or earlier have surprised, with a few exceptions, such as recordings by the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. The only ones here that are BBC studio sessions are tracks 9, and 13 through 17. 

So I've added in some TV performances I found on YouTube. These help fill in the missing gaps somewhat, although there are many more hits from the time period not included here. Note that all the performances here are officially unreleased. I could have included others, but I wanted to keep the sound quality level high.

Richard was such a big star in 1961 that he hosted his own TV show, simply called "Cliff!" The first seven tracks are taken from that show. Some of the songs were never released by him in any form, such as "Fever," "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening," and "Goodness Gracious Me." 

"Do You Want to Dance" is taken from an appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. Tracks 10 through 12 come from an unknown TV show in Belgium in 1964. There are a few other songs from that show that I didn't include (you can watch the whole thing on YouTube) because I have them in other versions in this series.

Note that two of the actual BBC sessions songs have "[Edit]" in their names. This is due to the usual problem of BBC DJs talking over the music. I applied the usual solution, using the X-Minus audio editing program to wipe out the talking but keep the music.

This album is 39 minutes long.

01 King Creole (Cliff Richard)
02 Almost like Being in Love (Cliff Richard)
03 Travellin' Light (Cliff Richard)
04 I Wish I Were in Love Again (Cliff Richard & Petula Clark)
05 Fever (Cliff Richard)
06 In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening (Cliff Richard)
07 Goodness Gracious Me (Cliff Richard & Jill Browne)
08 Do You Want to Dance (Cliff Richard)
09 Living Doll (Cliff Richard)
10 Constantly (Cliff Richard)
11 I Got a Woman (Cliff Richard)
12 I'm the Lonely One (Cliff Richard)
13 I Could Easily Fall (Cliff Richard)
14 Wind Me Up [Let Me Go] (Cliff Richard)
15 Angel [Edit] (Cliff Richard)
16 Blue Turns to Grey (Cliff Richard)
17 Bachelor Boy [Edit] (Cliff Richard)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16373095/CLIFFR1961-1966BBSssonsVlum2_atse.zip.html

The cover photo dates to 1960.

Bob Dylan - The Hotel Tape - Bonnie Beecher's Appartment, Minneapolis, MN, 12-22-1961

As I continue to be going through a Bob Dylan phase, I'm going to post more of his stuff. For now, I'm focusing on his early 1960s material before moving to later in his long music career.

And speaking of early, this is really early! I posted his first real concert from October 1961 a few days ago. This took place just one month later. Those two recordings sound way better than you'd expect for anything recorded in 1961 outside of a professional recording studio. This one was good enough for three of the songs to get official release. "Hard Times in New York Town" was released on "The Bootleg Series, Volumes 1-3: Rare and Unreleased." "Dink's Song (Fare Thee Well)" and "I Was Young When I Left Home (900 Miles)" were released on "The Bootleg Series, Volume 7: No Direction Home." But the whole thing is of the same quality, and the whole thing deserves an official release someday.

Here's the quick story behind this recording. By December 1961, Dylan had just won a recording contract, but he hadn't released anything yet. He had connections in the art community back in Minneapolis, Minnesota, near his home town of Hibbing, from people he met while going to college for a year. When he went home for Christmas vacation, he reconnected with people in that community. One was Bonnie Beecher, a minor actress and singer (she'd have roles in episodes of The Twilight Zone and Star Trek). He'd dated her briefly in college, and she would go on to marry the comedian Wavy Gravy. Around this time, her Minnesota apartment was so frequently used as a crash pad for artists coming through town that people joked it was like a hotel. Thus, this recording has been known as "The Hotel Tape," including by Dylan at the time.

Beecher can be heard singing a bit on an earlier tape made that summer (which has poorer sound quality), but it seems she wasn't around when this tape was recorded. Instead, a musician named Tony Glover helped Dylan make the recording, and he can be heard making a comment or two at the very end of it. Glover was a blues musician, and part of the trio Koerner, Ray and Glover. (I have their albums in my collection - very good stuff.)  That's about all I know, except I've heard Dylan and Glover started drinking heavily while the recording went on, to the point that Dylan's performance started to decline just a little bit towards the end, with him asking to stop the recording right at the very end.

That said, if he got drunk you can't tell, since the performance is solid. Plus, the sound quality is outstanding, just as good as a studio recording of the time period, in my opinion. Dylan apparently liked it enough to give copies to friends and family at the time, since it was the best recording he'd done prior to the release of his first album in 1962. 

I cleaned up the recording a bit, but I didn't have to do much. I deleted a few seconds here and there, for instance when there was the sound of the tape recorder getting turned on or off. But I didn't cut out any music or talking. By the way, there's almost no talking, except for the track "Tale of East Orange, New Jersey," which is a spoken joke-story instead of a song. Oh, the one important change I did is that there seems to be no silent pauses between songs in the versions I've heard. I added the typical two seconds of silence after each song. Plus, some songs got cut off a couple of seconds too soon, so I helped them fade out better.

At this time, Dylan had written very few originals, so this consists almost entirely of covers. "Hard Times in New York Town" is an original. "I Was Young When I Left Home" kind of is, but it's so heavily based on the traditional folk song "900 Miles" that that's debatable. Similarly, in one of his rare comments, Dylan claimed "It's Hard to Be Blind" was an original (which he called "It's Hard to Be Poor"), but it's another traditional folk song with some slightly changed lyrics. (That was a common and acceptable thing to do in the folk world at the time.)

I feel like addressing the fact that there are four songs in a row near the end all about V. D. - venereal disease. Surprisingly, these are all written by Woody Guthrie. The reason for that is that in 1949, the government had a national health drive to educate people about venereal disease. As part of that, they had some radio programs with songs on the subject to help break the taboo about discussing it. Major musical figures of the day were recruited to sing on this topic, including Hank Williams, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Merle Travis, Roy Acuff, and Guthrie. Guthrie actually wrote nine songs on the subject, and Dylan was such a Guthrie fan at the time that he learned them all.

And if you think that's weird, consider that in the 1930s, the government commissioned Guthrie to write an entire album of songs praising dams! That was to drum up public support for the public works projects being done at the time, such as the massive Hoover Dam. Dylan actually covered one of those in 1968, "Grand Coulee Dam." I included it on the stray tracks album I made called "I Ain't Got No Home."

Anyway, this recording is about an hour and twenty minutes long. In my opinion, this one plus the October 1961 Carnegie Chapter Hall concert I posted a few days ago are heads and shoulders above all the other Dylan recordings from 1961 or earlier, which generally sound pretty dodgy. The vast majority of songs here have never been officially released by him in any form, and most of them don't even show up on any other decent sounding bootlegs, since his repertoire changed rapidly during this time.

01 Candy Man (Bob Dylan)
02 Baby, Please Don't Go (Bob Dylan)
03 Hard Times in New York Town (Bob Dylan)
04 Stealin' (Bob Dylan)
05 Poor Lazarus (Bob Dylan)
06 I Ain't Got No Home (Bob Dylan)
07 talk (Bob Dylan)
08 It's Hard to Be Blind (Bob Dylan)
09 Dink's Song [Fare Thee Well] (Bob Dylan)
10 talk (Bob Dylan)
11 Man of Constant Sorrow (Bob Dylan)
12 Omie Wise [Naomi Wise] (Bob Dylan)
13 Tale of East Orange, New Jersey (Bob Dylan)
14 Wade in the Water (Bob Dylan)
15 I Was Young When I Left Home [Nine Hundred Miles] (Bob Dylan)
16 In the Evening (Bob Dylan)
17 Baby, Let Me Follow You Down (Bob Dylan)
18 Sally Gal (Bob Dylan)
19 Gospel Plow (Bob Dylan)
20 Roll On, John (Bob Dylan)
21 Cocaine Blues (Bob Dylan)
22 V. D. Blues (Bob Dylan)
23 V. D. Waltz (Bob Dylan)
24 V. D. City (Bob Dylan)
25 V. D. Gunner's Blues [Landlady] (Bob Dylan)
26 Ramblin' Round (Bob Dylan)
27 talk (Bob Dylan)
28 Black Cross [Hezikiah Jones] (Bob Dylan)
29 talk (Bob Dylan)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/whxUZWzD

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/cOMePmh5iOWknur/file

Not surprisingly, I couldn't find any color photos of Dylan from 1961. However, I found a nice black and white one of him from November 1961, just a month before this recording took place. This was taken during the recording of his first album, simply called "Bob Dylan." I colorized it. Later, I sharpened the image with the Krea AI program.

Bob Dylan - Carnegie Chapter Hall, New York City, 11-4-1961

I'm making an effort to post some more Bob Dylan concerts, since I haven't posted many so far. He's got a zillion recorded concerts that one can find on the Internet, so one can easily get overwhelmed by the choices. I want to help by offering only the best of the best. I didn't know about this particular concert until a few days ago, when I stumbled across a list by Rolling Stone Magazine of what some writer considered the 10 best Dylan concert recordings of all time. I gave it a listen, and I was stunned by the sound quality, performance, and historical importance. How the heck is this concert not better known?!

This appears to be Dylan's first real concert as a headliner. Prior to this, he'd played in clubs in New York City for about ten months, but those generally were low-key affairs, with different artists on the bill, and a hat passed around for tips. This was different. To boost his profile, Izzy Young, a Dylan supporter who owned the local folk club The Folklore Center, helped him rent a venue that was part of the prestigious Carnegie Hall. Note though, this wasn't held in THE main Carnegie Hall venue, which seats thousands. This was in the same complex, but a much smaller room, basically a rehearsal room on the sixth floor that seated only a maximum of about 200 people. Still, Dylan was trying to make a statement with this show.

Unfortunately, only about 50 people showed up, and nearly all of them were friends either of Dylan or of his long-time girlfriend, Suze Rotolo. (She's pictured with him on the cover of his album "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.") Apparently, Young spent about $100 to make the show happen, and lost most of that due to the poor attendance. (Yet he was still nice enough to give Dylan $20 of the supposed profit.) But luckily, the show was recorded in fantastic sound quality. I am amazed this is from 1961! Since this was Dylan's first concert, he and/or his friends must have gone to great lengths to record it properly, probably so he could analyze his performance to help him make improvements.

Strangely, only one song from this concert has been officially released: the Woody Guthrie classic "This Land Is Your Land" came out on the "Bootleg Series, Volume 7: No Direction Home." So that suggests the record company has the full show, but apparently they continue to just sit on it. Over time, bits and pieces of the concert have leaked onto bootlegs, but six songs remain missing: "San Francisco Bay Blues," "Car Song," "Sally Gal," "Pretty Polly," "The House of the Rising Sun," and "The Cuckoo (Is a Pretty Bird)." Hopefully, those will appear someday.

I don't mind the missing songs that much though, because the concert is still a hefty hour and 18 minutes long without them. At the time, Dylan was mostly doing covers. But four of the songs here are originals: "Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues," "Man on the Street," "Song to Woody," and "Talking New York." He must have been very nervous, but it doesn't show much. One nice aspect of this concert is that he talked before most of the songs. Six of the songs (including two of the originals) would appear on his first album, 1962's "Bob Dylan," but many of the others have never been officially released and often only appear on bootleg in excellent quality in this show.

The one key snag with the recording has to do with the first song, "Pretty Peggy-O." The sound quality was fine, but the volume went up and down in waves. I was able to fix that though by making careful volume adjustments throughout the song. That's why it has "[Edit]" in the title. Also, at times, the guitar sound overloads the microphone a bit, but that's a minor quibble considering how primitive concert recording equipment was in the early 1960s. Oh, also, I occasionally cut out some excess guitar tuning between songs, but never any of his banter.

If you're a Dylan fan, this concert is a must have. I have to agree with Rolling Stone Magazine that this is one of his top ten concert recordings, period. True, it's mostly covers, and the originals aren't famous ones, but is probably the best document of very early Dylan, over all the other recording that exist from 1961 or earlier, and even over most of the stuff from 1962.

With this show, Dylan's music career was on its way. He would return to play a sold out show in the main Carnegie Hall venue in October 1963, a little less than two years later.

UPDATE: On November 18, 2021, I updated the mp3 download file. Alert commenter Charles Fontaine found an article talking about the opening of the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, scheduled to take place in May 2022. The article talked about some rarities that will be available at the center, and included an mp3 of the previously unbootlegged "He Was a Friend of Mine" from this show as an example. So I've added it in where it belongs in the set list. It only had a second of cheering when the song ended, so I used the cheering of another song from earlier in the concert to make up for that.

Up above, I had listed the seven songs that were still missing from this concert. I was able to edit that down to six. Hopefully, the others will become available once the Bob Dylan Center opens to the public.

01 Pretty Peggy-O [Edit] (Bob Dylan)
02 talk (Bob Dylan)
03 In the Pines (Bob Dylan)
04 Gospel Plow (Bob Dylan)
05 talk (Bob Dylan)
06 1913 Massacre (Bob Dylan)
07 talk (Bob Dylan)
08 Backwater Blues (Bob Dylan)
09 talk (Bob Dylan)
10 A Long Time A-Growin' (Bob Dylan)
11 Fixin' to Die (Bob Dylan)
12 talk (Bob Dylan)
13 Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues (Bob Dylan)
14 talk (Bob Dylan)
15 Man on the Street (Bob Dylan)
16 This Land Is Your Land (Bob Dylan)
17 talk (Bob Dylan)
18 Talking Merchant Marine (Bob Dylan)
19 talk (Bob Dylan)
20 Black Cross [Hezikiah Jones] (Bob Dylan)
21 He Was a Friend of Mine (Bob Dylan)
22 talk (Bob Dylan)
23 Freight Train Blues (Bob Dylan)
24 talk (Bob Dylan)
25 Song to Woody (Bob Dylan)
26 talk (Bob Dylan)
27 Talking New York (Bob Dylan)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15106974/BobD_1961a_Carnegie_Chapter_Hall__New_York_City__11-4-1961_atse.zip.html

In an attempt to get more people to the concert, Izzy Young made a handbill and distributed it around town. Apparently, it didn't get many people to attend, but copies of it still exist, so I was able to use that to make the cover art. I had to crop the rectangular shape to get a square shape, but I didn't leave out anything important. I kept the picture of Dylan unchanged, but to get the important text to fit, I squeezed that part vertically. Oh, and since I hate black and white album covers, I tinted it yellow.

Various Artists - Covered: Willie Dixon, Volume 1: 1954-1966

Next up for the "Covered" series is Willie Dixon. You may not be familiar with him unless you're a blues fan, but he's a musical legend. I would guess that maybe half of all classic blues songs were written by him. And since blues has had such a massive impact on rock and soul music, he's a towering figure for those genres too. Chuck Berry has said of him, "He made me what I am, so far as the basics of my music." And Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones has said, "He is the backbone of post-war blues writing... the absolute." His nickname is "the poet laureate of the blues."

But despite his influence, he isn't as well known as he should be because he wasn't much of a performer. He did play bass on a lot of records, but he didn't sing much, or put out many albums under his own names. Instead, he was mainly content to write for others, most especially blues legends Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf.

If you want to know more about him, here's the link to his Wikipedia entry:

Willie Dixon - Wikipedia

I've found enough great songs from him for three albums. I could fill those albums mostly with performances by Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and other blues greats. But since I want to introduce people to his musical legacy who aren't already big blues fans, I've tried to pick versions done by rock artists. In order to help with that, I'm limited myself to only one song for each musical artist for all three of his albums in this series. You'll still find some blues artists on this volume, but less so on the other two. The songs are sorted chronologically, and rock artists began covering him around 1964, which is in the later half of this album, when the Rolling Stones took his "Little Red Rooster" all the way to number one on the British charts.

This album is slightly longer than 45 minutes, and the other two volumes have similar lengths.

01 I'm Ready (Muddy Waters)
02 My Babe (Little Walter)
03 Pretty Thing (Bo Diddley)
04 I Don't Care Who Knows (Harrold Burrage)
05 I Cry and Sing the Blues (Buddy Guy)
06 Lovin' Up a Storm (Jerry Lee Lewis)
07 I Can't Hold Out (Elmore James)
08 For My Baby (Brook Benton)
09 Three Hundred Pounds of Joy (Howlin' Wolf)
10 Little Red Rooster (Rolling Stones)
11 Just like I Treat You (Rod Stewart & Long John Baldry & the Hoochie Coochie Men)
12 Meet Me in the Bottom (Everly Brothers)
13 Seventh Son (Johnny Rivers)
14 You Need Love [You Need Loving] (Small Faces)
15 Spoonful (Cream)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17180205/COVRDWilliDxon1954-1966Volum1_atse.zip.html

alternate link:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/9CESsGd6

I have no idea what year this photo of Willie Dixon is from. But pretty much all of the other photos I've found him show him at least partially bald, so I figure he's fairly young here. The original of this photo was in black and white, but I colorized it. His skin is fairly dark in the (actual color) photo I've chosen for the third volume in this series, so I darkened his skin some on this one to better match that one. 

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

Various Artists - Covered: Boudleaux Bryant & Felice Bryant: 1955-2004

The "Covered" series is back again. I thought I was done with all the great songwriters with careers that began before the 1960s, but boy was I wrong. Recently, I stumbled across a Rolling Stone Magazine list of who they consider the top 100 songwriters of all time. I disagree with some of their choices, but the list made me recall some songwriters I'd overlooked.

Here's one: Boudleaux Bryant & Felice Bryant. They were a husband and wife team all the way. They met in 1945, when they were young, and married right away. They stayed married Boudleaux passed away in 1987. Felice Bryant lived until 2003. There are some occasional examples where one of them wrote a song without crediting the other, but those are rare.

Here's the Wikipedia entry on them. I find it interesting that they're so closely linked to each other that there's just one entry for their partnership:

Felice and Boudleaux Bryant - Wikipedia

The Bryants didn't write as many songs I deemed worthy of inclusion as some others. For instance, I've posted six albums of songs by Bacharach and David, and seven albums of Goffin and King. But some of the songs they wrote are all time classics. For instance, Rolling Stone Magazine includes three of their songs in their list of the 500 greatest songs of all time: "Bye Bye Love," "Wake Up, Little Susie," and "All I Have to Do Is Dream."

Many of the songs they wrote were country songs. I can only take country in limited doses, and I'm sure others feel the same. So in deciding which songs to include, and which versions, I've focused on their more widely accessible material, often done by non-country artists. 

At first, I wasn't going to make a Covered album for them, because they're so closely associated with the Everly Brothers. One could make an excellent album just of the hits the Everly Brothers had that were written by the Bryants. But I decided there were a good number of their songs done for others, plus I could select alternate versions so this didn't basically turn into an Everly Brothers greatest hits of sorts. I tried hard not to have more than one song by any one artist. I mostly succeeded, although in the end I went with two by the Everly Brothers. I included their version of "Bye Bye Love" because it's so iconic, and there isn't a really famous version done by someone else. I also included their version of "Problems" because there were almost no cover versions of it I could find.

This album is 56 minutes long.

01 Nightmare (Jack Turner)
02 How's the World Treating You (Elvis Presley)
03 Bye Bye Love (Everly Brothers)
04 Problems (Everly Brothers)
05 Raining in My Heart (Buddy Holly & the Crickets)
06 Let's Think about Living (Bob Luman)
07 Mexico (Bob Moore & His Orchestra)
08 So How Come [No One Loves Me] (Beatles)
09 Some Sweet Day (Fairport Convention)
10 All I Have to Do is Dream (Bobbie Gentry & Glen Campbell)
11 Rocky Top (Laurie Anderson)
12 Take a Message to Mary (Bob Dylan)
13 Brand New Heartache (Gram Parsons & Emmylou Harris)
14 Love Hurts (Nazareth)
15 Devoted to You (James Taylor & Carly Simon)
16 Poor Jenny (Rockpile)
17 Wake Up Little Susie (Simon & Garfunkel)
18 Bird Dog (Joan Jett & the Blackhearts)
19 Like Strangers (Emmylou Harris)
20 Living with the Shades Pulled Down (George Thorogood & the Destroyers)
21 Sleepless Nights (Norah Jones) 

https://www.upload.ee/files/17180160/COVERDBoudlxBryntFelceBrynt_atse.zip.html

alternate link:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/MtwpaKtJ

For the album cover, I couldn't find a really good color photo of the Bryants together, so I took a black and white one and colorized it. I don't know what year it's from, but based on their appearance it has to be when they were young. In the original photo, Boudleaux was considerably higher up than Felice - he must have been a tall guy. I moved her up and closer to him so I could prominently feature their faces.

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

Various Artists - Covered: Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Volume 1: 1960-1963

It's time for more of the Covered series, looking at the best songs from the greatest songwriters of all time. Here, I'm starting to post my albums on Gerry Goffin and Carole King, one of the greatest songwriting teams ever, if not the best and most commercially successful.

This should probably be called "Carole King and Gerry Goffin," because King was especially successful, having a big career as a songwriter with Goffin and then having a huge solo career of her own. But I'm going with "Goffin and King" because that's how they're commonly referred to, just as it's always the "Lennon and McCartney" songwriting team in the Beatles, never "McCartney and Lennon." Anyway, King has had 116 Top 100 hits in the US, making her the most successful female songwriter of the 20th century. Goffin though was very successful after the songwriting partnership with King ended, and has has 114 Top 100 hits in the US.

Goffin and King met in college in the late 1950s and immediately began writing songs together. They married in 1959. In 1960, they wrote "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," one of the biggest and most covered songs of all time, and went from success to success after that. Every now and then, they would have hits writing songs without the other one, but in the 1960s the last majority of their songs were written together.

Because these two songwriters have been so exceptional, I've dug especially deep. Sure, I've included virtually all of their hit songs, but I've also included songs that weren't hits at all but I think are very good. I found so many songs that I like that this series on them totals six albums, with each album being about 45 to 55 minutes long.

One important caveat. As I mentioned above, King has been hugely successful on her own, especially with her 1971 album "Tapestry," which sold 25 million copies worldwide. I've deliberately avoided including any performances by King. I have three albums I've posted her of her demos, so there's no need to repeat that. And I figure any fan of this would have "Tapestry" and her big solo hits. So, for instance, she had a rare early solo hit in 1963 with "It Might as Well Rain until September." But I didn't include that here. Instead, I'll include a cover of it from 1964 in the next album in this series.

By the way, here are Wikipedia links if you want to know more about them

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

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

01 Will You Love Me Tomorrow (Shirelles)
02 Some Kind of Wonderful (Drifters)
03 Don't Ever Change (Crickets)
04 Take Good Care of My Baby (Bobby Vee)
05 Every Breath I Take (Gene Pitney)
06 Halfway to Paradise (Billy Fury)
07 Crying in the Rain (Everly Brothers)
08 The Locomotion (Little Eva)
09 Go Away Little Girl (Steve Lawrence)
10 Chains (Cookies)
11 Up on the Roof (Drifters)
12 Make the Night a Little Longer (Shirelles)
13 How Can I Meet Her (Everly Brothers)
14 Keep Your Hands Off My Baby (Little Eva)
15 Point of No Return (Louis Jordan)
16 Hey Girl (Freddie Scott)
17 I Can't Stay Mad at You (Skeeter Davis)
18 One Fine Day (Chiffons)
19 Don't Say Nothin' Bad [About My Baby] (Cookies)
20 Poor Little Rich Girl (Steve Lawrence)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/ewa37qCw

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/CsadqP2DyswCECm/file

I'm not sure what year the photo for the cover art was taken. But both Goffin and King look very young, so I'm using it first. Unfortunately, there seem to be virtually no color photos of them from the 1960s. So I've had to use a black and white one, but I colorized it to make it more interesting.

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