The definitive version by Fats Domino wasn’t recorded until 1956, but “Blueberry Hill” was written as a country tune in 1940 for the film The Singing Hill, in which it was performed by none other than Gene Autry. Every version since hers-and there have been many-have used her arrangement. She changed the last line of the refrain to “And I’m feelin’ good” and put a grungy horn section behind her, and that made all the difference. Nina Simone quickly rearranged the song into an anthem of self-empowerment, with a slow grind and blues vocals that would have made Anthony Newley blush. Birds flying high, you know how I feelīreeze driftin’ on by, you know how I feel It’s a new dawn Written by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse for the musical The Roar of the Greasepaint-The Smell of the Crowd (sic, 1965), “Feeling Good” was a break song for a character who had found love. Sock it to me, sock it to me “Feeling Good” Ooo, your kissesĪnd only her version has the lyric: sock it to me, sock it to me, And the next lines-where he merely repeats his intention to give her money because she’s sweet as honey-she implies a whole different sort of financial transaction. She turns all his lyrics around on him, almost in answer, but-perhaps without even realizing it (she seemed shocked by the notion in a 60 Minutes interview decades later)-the words “I’m about to give you all my money” take on a whole other meaning sung from the female point of view. The arrangement is only subtly different, but the lyrics and feel-and subsequently the meaning-are completely different. “Respect”Īretha Franklin’s 1967 anthem to the liberated woman started as Otis Redding’s 1965 simple plea for peace after a hard day’s work. Since Darin kind of ruined it for use in productions of The Threepenny Opera, the song has been rewritten multiple times since then, making it at least as gruesome as the original. The whole story was itself lifted from John Gay’s much earlier (1728) The Begger’s Opera, where Macheath is a Robin Hood figure.
Translation:īut in the 1950s, Louis Armstrong and then Bobby Darin made the song famous by swinging it and making “Old Mackie” (courtesy of the cleaned up translation by Marc Blitzstein) seem more like a wayward youth than a killer. The original arrangement was a wry, black-humor German-language waltz (that is, written in 3/4 time). Originally written by Kurt Weil and Bertold Brecht for The Three-Penny Opera (1927), “Mack the Knife” tells the story of remorseless underworld thug Macheath Messer. A rearrangement fundamentally changes the song’s rhythm, tempo, chord structure, and/or lyrics. A cover just remakes the song with the same arrangement and different vocalist and/or instrumentation. These aren’t covers, tho-they’re rearrangements and extreme rearrangements at that. “Mack the Knife” is one of the great songs recycled from lesser songs. And it takes brains and a real feel for music to find a song you don’t like and realize it has potential if it were done differently. It takes guts to find a song you like and change it to make it your own.
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