Covered: Roger Cook & Roger Greenaway, Volume 2: 1971-1998

Here's the second of two "Covered" albums featuring the songwriting talents of Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway.

This album starts in the early 1970s, with Cook and Greenaway continuing their successful songwriting partnership begun around 1965. They did very well in the early 1970s, as more pop groups made the charts with songs written by professional songwriters like them. One particular highlight was "Long Cool Woman (In a Black Dress)" by the Hollies, mainly written by Hollies vocalist Allan Clarke with Cook, although Greenaway got credited too. Although it didn't reach Number One in the U.S. or Britain, it ended up being one of the best selling songs of the year.

Their partnership was shook up in 1975. Apparently, Cook really got into country music, so much so that he decided to move from Britain to Nashville, Tennessee, the capital of the country music business. He has apparently lived there ever since. (Both Cook and Greenaway are still alive as I write this in 2025.) Cook's move really hurt their songwriting partnership, due to sheer communication difficulties, as well as Cook's new focus on country music. I believe they still wrote some songs together, but a lot less than before. Greenaway wrote with some other professional songwriters, like Geoff Stevens and Barry Mason. But he had less success after the 1970s, and switched mostly to business administration in music companies. 

Meanwhile, Greenaway also had less success than before after the 1970s, but he still had some hits through the end of the 1990s, mostly on the country charts. In 1997, he was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, the first person from Britain to do so.

As I mentioned in Volume 1, there are many more hit songs I could have included, but didn't. I wanted to keep this to the best of the best. But here's a list of all the hit songs Cook and/or Greenaway was involved in:

List of songs written by Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway - Wikipedia

This album is 46 minutes long.

01 Something Tells Me [Something's Gonna Happen Tonight] (Cilla Black)
02 Long Cool Woman [In a Black Dress] (Hollies)
03 Softly Whispering I Love You (English Congregation)
04 Like Sister and Brother (Drifters)
05 Blame It on the Pony Express (Peter Noone)
06 Kissin' in the Back Row of the Movies (Drifters)
07 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 [Blow Your Whistle] (Gary Toms Empire)
08 Jeans On (David Dundas)
09 You're More than a Number in My Little Red Book (Drifters)
10 I Believe in You (Don Williams)
11 Talking in Your Sleep (Crystal Gayle)
12 Love Is on a Roll (Don Williams)
13 One Night at a Time (George Strait)
14 I Just Want to Dance with You (George Strait)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/ifx4TE6M

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/mxGCD6UKB776Skt/file

The cover photo shows Cook and Greenaway in 1972. That's Greenaway on the left and Cook on the right. This originally was a black and white photo. But I colorized it using the Palette program.

Covered: Roger Cook & Roger Greenaway, Volume 1: 1965-1971

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a "Songwriters' Circle" album that included Roger Cook performing some of the hit songs he wrote. I thought that would be a good occasion to post the two Covered series albums I've made of the many hits songs written by Cook and his frequent songwriting partner Roger Greenaway. Here's the first volume.

Both Cook and Greenaway were British. They first met while members of an obscure vocal group. They had a short but successful career of their own from 1965 to 1967 as "David and Jonathan," scoring hits with a cover of "Michelle" by the Beatles and their own "Lovers of the World Unite." In 1968, they decided to focus solely on songwriting. However, Cook was one of the two lead vocalists for the band Blue Mink from 1969 to 1974, and had some big hits with them. Greenaway also was briefly a member of the bands the Pipkins and Brotherhood of Man around that same time period.

However, despite such musical projects, their main attention and greatest success was with songwriting. They generally wrote all their songs together until 1975, when Cook moved to the U.S., and still wrote some together after that. But sometimes a third or fourth writer would get credited too. They had a big success right out the gate, when "You've Got Your Troubles" by the Fortunes reached the Top Ten in both the U.S. and Britain. After that, it was a rare year when they didn't have at least one big hit. I could have included many more hits, but their songs could get quite poppy and even cheesy at times, with the likes of Engelbert Humperdinck and Andy Williams having hits with their songs. So I tried to limit this collection to songs with a wider appeal, though often still very poppy.

Probably the most famous, even notorious, song here is "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing." The song was originally written by Cook and Greenaway as "True Love and Apple Pie." It was released in 1971 by someone called Susan Shirley and went nowhere. Then Bill Backer, an advertising executive, happened to run into Cook and Billy Davis at an airport in Ireland. Davis was another songwriter who had written many soul hits, but by this time was mainly writing jingles for advertisements. Backer came up with the line "I'd like to buy the world a Coke," and suggested the others write a song with that line for a TV commercial. So Cook, Greenaway, and Davis reworked "True Love and Apple Pie" into "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing."

The resulting Coca Cola commercial, featuring a crowd of young people singing the song on a hilltop, went on to become of the most popular and well known commercials of all time. The TV show "Mad Men" even kind of had a finale that promptly featured it, decades later. Coca Cola made variations of the commercial for decades. But in 1971, it proved so popular as a song that people kept calling radio stations, asking just to play the music of the commercial! So the songwriters quickly rewrote the song, adding three verses and removing the Coke references. Two groups had huge hits with it, the Hillside Singers, and the New Seekers. The New Seekers version in particular hit Number One in many countries, and went on to sell 12 million copies, making it one of the most popular songs of all time.    

This album is 45 minutes long.

01 You've Got Your Troubles (Fortunes)
02 Lovers of the World Unite (David & Jonathan)
03 I Was Kaiser Bill's Batman (Whistling Jack Smith)
04 Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart (Gene Pitney)
05 Melting Pot (Blue Mink)
06 Hallelujah (Deep Purple)
07 A Way of Life (Family Dogg)
08 Gasoline Alley Bred (Hollies)
09 My Baby Loves Lovin' (White Plains)
10 Home Lovin' Man (Andy Williams)
11 United We Stand (Brotherhood of Man)
12 Hey Willy (Hollies)
13 Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again (Fortunes)
14 I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing (New Seekers)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/qBHAnA1U

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/pnLdk2jqURYYQuc/file

The cover photo is from 1965. That's Greenaway on the left and Cook on the right. In the original image, Cook was holding a telephone receiver in one hand, on the side close to Greenaway. But I thought that didn't fit. So, with the magic of Photoshop, I erased the phone and the hand holding it.

Donovan, Buffy Sainte-Marie, & Roger Cook - Songwriters' Circle, Porchester Hall, London, Britain, 10-14-2011

I recently got a couple requests to post a BBC album by Buffy Sainte-Marie. I looked, and it seems there's only a couple of songs here and there, not nearly enough for an album. However, I remembered I have this, and I've been trying to make a point of posting more of these interesting "Songwriters' Circle" concerts. So here you are, with Donovan, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Roger Cook.

As usual, this BBC TV program brought together three talented and famous singer-songwriters, and had them take turns performing their own songs in solo acoustic mode. In this case more than most episodes of this show, I feel the three musicians liked each other and the music they made. One can hear this with some of the between-song banter, as well as they way they supported each other on some songs with backing vocals and such. In the case of Donovan and Buffy Sainte-Marie, their musical connection went way back, because Donovan covered Sainte-Marie's song "Universal Soldier" in 1965 and had a hit with it, which was the first big commercial success for both him and Sainte-Marie.

I've posted a lot of Donovan's music at this blog already, with more planned to come, so I don't feel the need to introduce him. Sainte-Marie was one of the most famous female singer-songwriters in the 1960s and 70s. But while she had some success with her own songs, for instance "Soldier Blue" reached the Top Ten in Britain and many other countries in 1971, she's had more success with others covering her songs. The most prominent example of this is "Up Where We Belong." She started it, and it was finished off by two professional songwriters. A duet version by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes reached Number One in the U.S. singles chart in 1982, and was one of the biggest hits of the year.

I'm writing this in 2025. In recent years, Sainte-Marie has faced controversy because she prominently identified as Native American for her entire music career, but a 2023 investigation by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) concluded that this wasn't true, and she is of English and Italian descent. She has since stated, "My mother told me that I was adopted and that I was Native, but there was no documentation as was common for Indigenous children at the time," and "I don't know where I'm from or who my birth parents are, and I will never know." She hasn't attempted to settle the dispute by publicly posting DNA results.

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

Buffy Sainte-Marie - Wikipedia

Roger Cook never had a successful music career of his own. However, he was an extremely successful professional songwriter, writing dozens of hits from the 1960s to the 1980s, often in partnership with Roger Greenaway. I would say more, except I plan on posting his hits in my "Covered" songwriter series. So I'll wait for more of an explanation there.

Here's his Wikipedia page:

Roger Cook (songwriter) - Wikipedia

This unreleased concert has been available as a video on YouTube, but I haven't seen it as an audio bootleg. I found a high quality version of the video and converted that to audio, and broke it into mp3s.

This album is 58 minutes long.

01 Sunshine Superman (Donovan)
02 talk (Buffy Sainte-Marie)
03 Until It's Time for You to Go (Buffy Sainte-Marie)
04 talk (Roger Cook)
05 Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart (Roger Cook)
06 talk (Donovan)
07 Catch the Wind (Donovan)
08 talk (Buffy Sainte-Marie)
09 Codine (Buffy Sainte-Marie)
10 talk (Roger Cook)
11 You've Got Your Troubles (Roger Cook)
12 talk (Donovan)
13 Colours (Donovan)
14 talk (Buffy Sainte-Marie)
15 Little Wheel Spin and Spin (Buffy Sainte-Marie)
16 talk (Roger Cook)
17 Talking in Your Sleep (Roger Cook)
18 talk (Donovan)
19 Lalena (Donovan)
20 talk (Buffy Sainte-Marie)
21 I'm Gonna Be a Country Girl Again (Buffy Sainte-Marie)
22 talk (Roger Cook)
23 I Believe in You (Roger Cook)
24 talk (Donovan)
25 Mellow Yellow (Donovan)
26 talk (Buffy Sainte-Marie)
27 Up Where We Belong (Buffy Sainte-Marie)
28 talk (Buffy Sainte-Marie)
29 Universal Soldier (Buffy Sainte-Marie)
30 talk (Roger Cook)
31 I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing (Roger Cook)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/ZPW7vK93

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/user/files/Anj3vGR3SMp1NMU/file

The cover photo is from this exact concert. It's a screenshot I took from a YouTube video, so the quality isn't the best. I improved it slightly with the Krea AI program.