Various Artists - Covered: Burt Bacharach & Hal David, Volume 1: 1957-1963

Here's a big project. Continuing my "Covered" series, this is the first of five albums dealing with songs written by Burt Bacharach and/or Hal David.

I'd like to think that Burt Bacharach is a household name. If he isn't anymore, he should be. If you don't know him, you must know many of his songs. Hal David is much less known, because he avoided publicity while Bacharach has been a public performer and a hobnobbing celebrity. But, generally speaking, Bacharach created the melodies and David wrote the lyrics. Together, they were one of the greatest songwriting teams of all time.

As usual with this series, I don't want to go into great detail about their life stories. Instead, here are their Wikipedia pages if you want to know more:

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

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

I feel obliged to say some more, to make clear who wrote what. David was seven years older than Bacharach, and got started with songwriting much earlier. He began writing songs professionally in the early 1940s. I only listened to a few of those early efforts, and I didn't judge any of them worthy of inclusion. He didn't really get on a winning streak until he met up with Bacharach in 1957 and they began collaborating.

Thus, most of the songs on this album were co-written by the two of them. But not all, because sometimes they would collaborate with others. For instance, "Sea of Heartbreak," Broken-Hearted Melody" and "Johnny Get Angry" were all written by David with someone other than Bacharach.

There's a very important point I want to make clear: for all five albums in this series, I have not included any songs performed by Dionne Warwick, unless I simply couldn't find any other versions of a particular song. The reason for that is because Bacharach-David songs are so closely linked to Warwick that her 1960s greatest hits albums are like 90 percent songs by them. She did many albums where virtually every song was written by them. I figure that anyone who is even remotely a fan of Bacharach-David songs has a Warwick's greatest hits at the very least, so I wanted to try something different here and see how their music fared with other singers. (If you don't have that, then please get one now! She really was the best singer for their style of music.)

Generally speaking, I've tried to include the hit versions, unless I deem those not very good. Bacharach and/or David were such successful songwriters that almost all the songs here were hits.

That said, I didn't include all their hits. Sometimes, they could get dangerously close to "easy listening" or Muzak-styled music. I generally don't like that kind of music, and I make these albums mainly for my own listening enjoyment, so if there was something I didn't like, I didn't include it. One example for the time period of this album is "American Beauty Rose," a song co-written by David that was a hit for Frank Sinatra in 1961. It just seemed generic for that kind of music, and not worthy of making the cut.

Each album in this series is about 45 to 50 minutes long.

01 The Story of My Life (Michael Holliday)
02 Magic Moments (Perry Como)
03 Broken-Hearted Melody (Sarah Vaughan)
04 Mexican Divorce (Drifters)
05 Sea of Heartbreak (Don Gibson)
06 I Wake Up Crying (Chuck Jackson)
07 Baby, It's You (Shirelles)
08 Tower of Strength (Gene McDaniels)
09 Please Stay (Drifters)
10 [The Man Who Shot] Liberty Valance (Gene Pitney)
11 Only Love Can Break a Heart (Gene Pitney)
12 It's Love that Really Counts [In the Long Run] (Shirelles)
13 Any Day Now [My Wild Beautiful Bird] (Chuck Jackson)
14 Johnny Get Angry (Joanie Sommers)
16 Blue Guitar (Richard Chamberlain)
18 Twenty Four Hours from Tulsa (Gene Pitney)
19 Don't Make Me Over (Dee Dee Sharp)

https://www.imagenetz.de/kXEDu

Photographs of Bacharach are easy to find, because he was a prominent public figure. But photos of Bacharach and David are very hard to find, because David was so low profile. I don't know when or where this photo is from, but I think it's from the early 1960s, judging by the way David's hairline receded over the years. David is standing and Bacharach is sitting at a piano.