Friday, February 14, 2025

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/P6caTDW1

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/bj7Lp4sTmivzyoy/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.

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