I leave it to readers to decide whether this week's Song of the Week was selected as a plea for healing in a divided land or merely because sixty years ago - January 1960 - it was on the Billboard Number One album. The latter is verifiable, although to be precise one should clarify that it was on the Billboard Number One stereo album; the Number One mono album was the soundtrack to the Elvis film GI Blues. As to the healing balm, you'll have to hang on till our closing paragraph.
The stereo album in question was Frank Sinatra's Nice 'n' Easy. The track list included one new number and ballad treatments of songs of which Frank was fond - and, in the case of this week's song, very fond.
Introducing her old friend at the Royal Festival Hall in 1970, Princess Grace of Monaco marveled: "How many of us have a favorite Sinatra song! And how many of them are different songs!" Quite so: There are Sinatra fans who love just the hits, and Sinatra fans who loathe the hits - "My Way", "Strangers In The Night", "New York, New York". There are Sinatra fans who love the swingers but are bored by the ballads - and vice-versa. I once heard the BBC's venerable Hubert Gregg host a show on the unparalleled genius of Sinatra: He lingered lovingly over every aspect of the Harry James and Tommy Dorsey and Columbia days and then, just as I was looking forward to hearing what he had to say about Nelson Riddle and Billy May, the show ended. As Hubert saw it, Sinatra's voice began to deteriorate in 1953, and nothing thereafter was worth bothering with.
But what songs did Frank himself like? On stage, screen, radio and record, he sang thousands of them, but on June 13th 1971, for what was supposed to be his farewell concert, he had to distill that mountain of music into just eleven numbers. At the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles that night, what were intended to be the last songs he would ever sing in public included the ones you'd expect: "All Or Nothing At All", "I've Got You Under My Skin", "Fly Me To The Moon", "My Way", "The Lady Is A Tramp"... There was his first Number One, with the Dorsey band - "I'll Never Smile Again" - and his biggest recent hit - "That's Life". There were songs for people he cared about - "Nancy" - and big-picture themes he cared about - "Ol' Man River". There was room for just one saloon song: "Angel Eyes".
But the unexpected moment came exactly halfway through, when his longtime guitarist Al Viola (whose sudden departure from Frank's band Vincent Falcone recounts on part two of our audio special) stepped forward to accompany the singer in:
She may be weary
Women do get weary
Wearing the same shabby dress
But when she's weary
Try A Little Tenderness...
It was the only song that night performed not in a big Nelson Riddle/Quincy Jones/Don Costa orchestral arrangement, but just with guitar. I can't find the video of that 1971 version, but this comes close - Sinatra with Al Viola at the Egyptian pyramids in 1979 serenading First Lady Jehan Sadat (granddaughter of a Sheffield police superintendent):
If you knew Sinatra's two studio records of the ballad, you liked one or other of them, but in no sense was it a "Sinatra song" - not the way "Skin", "Tramp", "My Way", "Angel Eyes", "Nancy" and the rest were. Indeed, by 1971, the singer most associated with "Try A Little Tenderness" was the late Otis Redding, whose reinvention of the number moved it permanently into the soul-gospel category:
And, with that, Redding's interpretation became the song: Even by 1969, a mere three years after the above, the all-American rockers Three Dog Night took it back into the Billboard charts with what's essentially a karaoke version of Otis. Two decades later, in the film The Commitments, about a white Irish soul band that wants to sound black, they sing "Try A Little Tenderness" precisely because it's a "black" song:
And that's what it's been for half-a-century now: Otis Redding karaoke. But the song itself had a rich life going back well before Otis was even born. Its co-author Harry Woods wrote some of the peppiest songs of the Twenties, including "Side By Side", "Paddlin' Madeleine Home", "I'm Looking Over A Four-Leaf Clover" and "When The Red Red Robin Comes Bob-Bob-Bobbin' Along": Nobody writes those kinds of songs any more, and I kinda wish they did. But there was less call for buoyant cheeriness by the early Thirties, and Woods moved on to "River, Stay 'Way From My Door". He has an impressive catalogue considering he had to write with only half the tools of his fellow composers: Harry was born with no fingers on his left hand.
He wrote "Try a Little Tenderness" with a couple of Londoners, Jimmy Campbell and Reg Connelly, who were quite a force in Denmark Street, Britain's Tin Pan Alley (as Don Black discusses here). They wrote "If I Had You", which Sinatra liked enough to record on three separate occasions, in contrasting treatments. But at a certain point Campbell & Connelly decided to focus mostly on writing lyrics, which is how they came to team up with Harry Woods. Ray Noble's orchestra was the first to record this song, with vocal by Val Rosing, in London, on December 8th 1932:
Not sure about all that martial vigor in the arrangement, but Noble's record drifted across the Atlantic, and within a year Ruth Etting, Bing Crosby and Eddy Duchin had all released versions.
After which, nothing much happened until Sinatra, three years into his solo career, recorded it with Axel Stordhal almost 13 years to the day after Ray Noble introduced it - December 7th 1945. It wasn't a single, but a track for his first album, The Voice of Frank Sinatra. There were no "long-playing records" back then, so an album was exactly that - an album of four double-sided 78s. The Voice can plausibly stake a claim to being the first real pop album, as the term would become understood in the Fifties and beyond: a collection of songs on a particular theme or mood. Sinatra and Stordahl had a nine piece band: a string quartet and a rhythm section plus (for half the tracks) flautist John Mayhew and (for the other half) oboist and future Frank bête noire Mitch Miller. They also had a unifying mood: Try a little tenderness. These eight tracks are male vocalizing of a tenderness rarely tried before or since, and on songs for which Sinatra had a tender affection that would endure across the decades: "You Go To My Head", "These Foolish Things", "Someone To Watch Over Me"... For the unofficial theme song, he began with the verse:
In the hustle of the day
We're all inclined to miss
Little things that mean so much
A word, a smile, a kiss
When a woman loves a man
He's a hero in her eyes
And a hero he can always be
If he'll just realize...She may be weary
Women do get weary
Wearing the same shabby dress...
It's a trickier song than you might think. Frankologist Will Friedwald calls it "patronizingly patriarchal", which it can certainly come out as: "Try A Little Tenderness"? She's weary, women do get weary, give her a pat and say "Good girl" every now and then. Or as Frank and Dean used to do in Rat Pack kibbitzing on stage in the Sixties:
She may be weary
Women do get weary
Wearing the same shabby dress
But when she's weary
Try another shabby dress...
You'd be surprised how easily that works. Even Crosby's 1933 record is at its brisker tempo not wholly immune to a faintly offhand take-a-tip-from-me condescension:
You won't regret it
Women don't forget it
Love is their whole happiness
And it's all so easy
Try A Little Tenderness.
It's so easy. But "tenderness", after all, is supposed to be felt, not something you "try" - like an effective sports move late in the game. I always get a chuckle out of Brook Benton's version:
You won't regret it
Man, women don't forget it...
Which more or less cements the whole locker-room insider-tip vibe: Man, take it from me, the dames'll be eating out of your hand...
Yet Sinatra sings with such tenderness he makes the potentially awkward lyric genuinely tender:
She may be waiting
Just anticipating
Things she may never possess
While she's without them
Try A Little TendernessIt's not just sentimental
She has her grief and her care
But a word that's soft and gentle
Makes it easier to bear...
Tote dat grief, lift dat care. And yet you have the strange sense, which you certainly don't get from Bing's record, that Frank is singing it from the woman's perspective. As Crosby's biographer Garry Giddins wrote:
What women surely identified in this oddly gentle baritone was a degree of tenderness, sympathy, and hurt rare in the daily opera of radio. When he sang "Try a Little Tenderness," was Sinatra merely a wise young man advising the world's husbands to do better? Was he not also perhaps one with the women, someone who knew about brutishness?
"Nobody disliked Frank as a vocalist," said Mitch Miller. "How could you? He was the epitome of phrasing and diction. For instance, the things we did with Axel Stordahl and the string quartets with flute and oboe, like the session where he did 'Try A Little Tenderness'. Frank knew exactly what he wanted to do."
Until this album (with the partial exception of Lee Wiley's songbook collections), the music business offered only singles and potential singles. With this set, Sinatra seems to be staking out a whole new territory for popular music: songs in a pop vernacular but digging a little too deep ever to make the Hit Parade - "album tracks", to coin a phrase.
In 1946 Frank Military, who would later serve as an important hit-picker for Sinatra and others (he brought "What A Wonderful World" to Louis Armstrong, for example), was working in a record store whose regular customers included a young fellow called Dean Martin. "One day the Voice album came in," said Frank Military, "and it sold like hotcakes. I didn't know Frank, and Dean didn't know Frank, but the two of us would just sit there listening to all four 78s over and over."
That was Sinatra's contribution to "Try A Little Tenderness": The tenderness. He sang it so well he made the song special. Because of his record, others picked up on the song: Frankie Laine, Chris Connor, Eddie Heywood, Etta James, Nina Simone... But Frank himself kept returning to the ballad during the late Forties and Fifties. He sang it on the radio in 1946 accompanied only by Skitch Henderson on the piano, and a few years later with a rather more sensitive keyboard accompaniment by Bill Miller. At the low point of the long souring of his Columbia relationship, Sinatra embarked on a British tour. Bill Martin (who would later write "Puppet on a String" for Sandie Shaw and "Saturday Night" for the Bay City Rollers) caught him at that toughest of tough venues, the Glasgow Empire:
I saw Frank Sinatra when he, comparatively speaking, was down and out. He had lost his way as Frankie Laine, Johnnie Ray and Guy Mitchell had taken over, and it was just before he made his big comeback with the war film, From Here to Eternity. He'd committed himself to a tour of Great Britain and the theatre, which seated 2,000, was half-empty. He was as skinny as the microphone. His voice was at its best, but there was a big black crack painted on the floor on the stage. He walked on and jumped over the crack and said, 'You nearly lost me there' but he didn't have the timing for jokes. I especially remember him singing 'Try a Little Tenderness'. Bing Crosby had recorded an excellent version but Frank took the song to another level, and the Empire crowd loved it.
Finally, for Nice 'n' Easy, his last ballad set at Capitol with Nelson Riddle, he re-recorded the song, this time shorn of its somewhat over-explanatory verse. Sinatra's middle-aged pipes were not as tender as that young Columbia voice - few voices before or since have been - but Felix Slatkin's violin is certainly a compensation. With this chart, Sinatra is doubling down on his 1945 interpretation, telling the world: This is a ballad of delicacy and sympathy. Other guys may have a different take on it, but this is mine and I'm sticking with it:
Six years later, someone did have a different take. Otis Redding made his version, died a year later in a plane crash, and claimed the song in posterity. Today, as far as I can tell, half the available sheet music of Woods, Campbell & Connelly's song is, in fact, a sheet of Otis Redding's version of it, painstakingly transcribing all the little grace notes and melismas with which he decorates Woods' tune:
Oh-oh, she may be we-ea-ry
And young girls, they do get weary
Wearing that sa-ame o-old shaggy dress...
Shaggy dress? Scooby-doo-be-doo!
But I doubt Redding would ever have recorded the song had not Sinatra revived it in 1945 and pioneered a new approach to that potentially stodgy lyric. I heard Carly Simon on the radio a few years ago playing both versions back to back: She understood the possibilities of a great song - that sometimes it can exist independently in two different spheres. Before that "farewell" concert in 1971, Al Viola swung by Frank's dressing room to rehearse their duet. Cary Grant was present, and sat quietly as Sinatra, legs crossed, with vodka and cigarette in hand, ran down the number, made sure he had it right - his way, no melismas, just guitar and tenderness:
She may be weary
Women do get weary
Wearing the same shabby dress
But when she's weary
Try A Little Tenderness...
Don Rickles burst through the door, trailing Sammy Davis in a mock bear hug. "We warmed 'em up for you, Frank," he said. "You're gonna be great." I don't suppose anyone would have missed it if it hadn't been on the set list for that farewell concert in 1971 - if it had been dropped in favor of "The Best Is Yet To Come" or "One For My Baby" - but it was there because the song was important to Frank. And, as it turned out, Frank was important to the song. As far as I know, the last time he sang it was in concert in 1991- forty-six years after his first recording, twenty years after his "retirement" concert.
The composer, Harry Woods, never heard Sinatra's "farewell" performance. He died the previous year, 1970, just as "Paddlin' Madeleine Home" had all but faded away while "Try a Little Tenderness" was beginning its new incarnation as a much covered soulful power ballad.
As for Harry Woods, the only thing tender about him was his thin skin. He liked to drink and he was a violent drunk, quick to anger. During one barroom brawl, a female patron entered the establishment to find Woods kneeling on the floor straddling his opponent with his right hand round the guy's throat and the stump of his left pounding his head to a pulp.
"Good heavens!" said the lady. "Who is that horrible man?"
"Oh, that's Harry Woods," replied some barfly. "He wrote 'Try a Little Tenderness'."
~The above mentioned special with Mark and Don Black, on his journey from Denmark Street to Hollywood and Broadway, can be heard here.
If you enjoy our Sunday Song of the Week, we have a mini-companion, a Song of the Week Extra, on our audio edition of The Mark Steyn Show - and sometimes with special guests from Mark's archive, including Eurovision's Dana, Ted Nugent, Peter Noone & Herman's Hermits, Patsy Gallant, Paul Simon, Geoff Love, Lulu, Tim Rice and Randy Bachman.
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Our Netflix-style tile-format archives for Tales for Our Time and Steyn's Sunday Poems have proved so popular with listeners and viewers that we've done the same for our musical features merely to provide some mellifluous diversions in the Land of Lockdown. Just click here, and you'll find easy-to-access live performances by everyone from Herman's Hermits to Liza Minnelli; Mark's interviews with Chuck Berry, Leonard Bernstein and Bananarama (just to riffle through the Bs); and audio documentaries on P G Wodehouse's lyrics, John Barry's Bond themes, sunshine songs from the Sunshine State, and much more. We'll be adding to the archive in the months ahead, but, even as it is, we hope you'll find the new SteynOnline music home page a welcome respite from looting, lockdown and 'lections.
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