May 14, 2016 would have been the 80th birthday of Bobby Darin. In celebration, here is a look at ten key (although not always obvious) recordings from the five hundred or so that Bobby made between 1956 and 1973.
Silly Willy (1956)
Some singers find their voice the very first time they set foot inside a recording studio, and record some of their greatest work during their early years. Elvis Presley is probably the best example of this, recording the classic That’s All Right at his very first professional recording session. This was not the case for Bobby Darin, however. In fact, it was over two years after he entered a studio before he recorded his breakthrough single, Splish Splash. Prior to that, Bobby seemed to be constantly in search of his own sound, with many of his early records adopting the styles and mannerisms of other singers of the period. He needed something to make him stand out from the rest of the would-be pop stars trying to carve themselves a career in the mid-1950s, and that something was his own identity. Nowhere is this more noticeable than during the eight sides he recorded during his short tenure with Decca.
Recorded at his first session was a song that saw Bobby turning his attention to the novelty rock ‘n’ roll material with which he would eventually find stardom. Silly Willy is no Splish Splash, however. Much of the problem with the song is the awkward transitions between the two different tempi and rhythms that the song employs. It is a shame, for there is much to enjoy in Darin’s performance, but the various elements simply do not gel together in the way that they should.
Silly Willy is interesting, however, in that it provides us with our first audible clue that Bobby wanted to be more than just a pop singer. The number has its roots in a 1920s risqué jazz number about a drug-addicted chimney sweeper called Willie the Weeper which, in turn, provided the inspiration for Minnie the Moocher, which Darin would record a few years later. The lyrics of the first verse of Silly Willy and Willie the Weeper are so similar that it’s clear that Bobby knew the more obscure song and was drawing from that rather than the better known Minnie the Moocher. The first verse of Willie the Weeper reads:
Have you heard the story, folks, of Willie the Weeper?/Willie’s occupation was a chimney sweeper/He had a dreamin’ habit, he had it kind of bad/Listen, let me tell you ’bout the dream he had.
Silly Willy barely changes the lyrics at all:
Listen to the story about Willy the Weeper/Willy the Weeper was a long time sleeper/He went to sleep one night and dreamed so bad/Now let me tell you about the dream that little Willy had.
What is remarkable here is not the fact that Bobby Darin “borrowed” lyrics from an older song (this was not a rare occurrence in pop music at the time), but that he knew the lyrics to Willie the Weeper at all. Most of the well-known recordings, such as those by Louis Armstrong and George Lewis, were instrumentals – possibly with good reason due to the song’s repeated references to “dope” and taking “pills” – and so one has to wonder where Bobby heard the lyrics in the first place. If nothing else, it shows just how wide his knowledge of popular music was even at the tender age of nineteen.
Softly as in a Morning Sunrise (1958)
Bobby struggled to find a breakthrough hit following his move to ATCO in 1957, but eventually made the big time with Splish Splash. However, never one to rest on his laurels, he wanted to try new things and avoid being pigeon-holed as just another rock ‘n’ roll singer. In late 1958 he recorded his That’s All album, which would feature the track which would become his signature song, Mack the Knife.
On the same album was Softly as in a Morning Sunrise, taken from a 1920s operetta called The New Moon. The treatment it receives here is raucous and brash, both in the arrangement and the singing, and it’s clear that the whole point is that it is going against how the song was originally conceived and normally performed (particularly within a vocal arrangement).
There is a possibility that Bobby got this idea from the 1954 Hollywood biopic of the song’s composer, Sigmund Romberg. In Deep in my Heart (Stanley Donen), Romberg, played by José Ferrer, attends a show in which the song is being performed and is mortified at the up-tempo, crass arrangement of his beloved composition. There is more than just this casual link between the two performances. For example, towards the end of the song, Bobby changes the lyrics in exactly the same way as they are in the film sequence by repeating words: “Softly, softly, as in an evening sunset, sunset.” But he goes yet further, breaking the “fourth wall” and talking to arranger/conductor Richard Wess, telling him “the title of this tune is Softly, so can we do it that way please?” He then proceeds to sing it louder than ever. It’s a brash and cocky move, totally breaking with convention, and the kind of thing which separates him from Sinatra, who treated his material somewhat more reverently.
Sinatra did come close, however, on the rarely heard attempt-at-a-hit Ya Better Stop, recorded in 1954, in which he shouts as the song starts to fade: “Oh here now, this ain’t gonna be another of those fade-away records. Get your grimy hand off that dial, man!” The chief difference here is that Sinatra waits until the song is over before his interjection, whereas Darin is making out that he has almost no regard for the song itself in the way it was originally intended. That, no doubt, was not the case, but Romberg was probably turning in his grave despite the fact that Bobby had just exposed his relatively obscure song to a new generation. Ya Better Stop remained unreleased until 1978, nearly twenty years after Bobby’s recording of Softly as in a Morning Sunrise.
Milord (1960)
Bobby wasn’t just recording in different genres, he was now recording in different languages! Only one song appears to have been recorded at the session on June 20, 1960, in New York, but it’s a Darin classic, albeit one that is not particularly well-known. A year earlier, Bobby had appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show on the same bill as Edith Piaf, and here he takes one of her signature songs and turns it into a tour-de-force.
Milord is one of Bobby’s most infectious recordings, and there are few recordings within the Darin legacy where his enjoyment of singing a particular song jumps out of every groove as much as it does here. He sings the entire number in the original French, although he changes a few words to account for the song being sung by a man instead of a woman. There is a Gallic element to the orchestration thanks to the use of the accordion, but the arrangement gains momentum with each verse, until Darin lets loose completely during the instrumental, singing along and clearly having a ball. The only fault, perhaps, is that it’s all over in two minutes – but what a great two minutes!
Despite the wonderful singing and arrangement, ATCO clearly didn’t quite know what to do with a song sung completely in French, and it languished in their vaults for four years before they released it as a single, reaching #45 in the U.S. charts during a period where Darin was having something of a lull when it came to chart success. The Daily Mirror in the U.K. called the release “interesting, but I can’t see it tearing the charts apart.” Likewise, the Australian press weren’t too excited either, saying “as great an entertainer as Darin is, he doesn’t inject into the number the mood and feeling that Piaf did.”
It’s hard to tell what the critics were listening to, but it certainly didn’t seem to be Bobby’s version of Milord.
I Got a Woman (1961)
Darin had already recorded I Got a Woman at the jazz combo sessions nearly two years earlier that had produced the Winners album (that version remains unreleased), and also for the Darin at the Copa album. However, he tackled it again for his Bobby Darin sings Ray Charles LP – for a whole six and a half minutes. The song starts off in normal fashion, but then Bobby keeps the “alright” ending of the song going for over three minutes despite it being basically the same line repeated over and over again. This is Darin at his most self-indulgent, and yet there is still a point to it, for he finds almost every possible variation of singing that line during this extended coda which listeners are going to love or tire of quickly and simply hit the “next” button on the remote control. There is also a rawness here, particularly with this song. During the main section, he reaches for notes and misses them, but it doesn’t matter – Darin is showing us that this music is all about “feel” and not about technical perfection, and he hits that message home time and again during the course of the album.
I’m on My Way, Great God (1962)
In July 1962, Bobby started work on his first album of folk songs. Earthy wouldn’t simply tap into the then-current vogue for folk music, though, but would instead pull together both traditional songs from around the globe as well as newer compositions written by the likes of Tom Paxton.
I’m on My Way Great God is the first of the spiritual/gospel songs on the album, and it is quite an epic. It starts off with minimal instrumentation, with the arrangement growing subtly with each subsequent verse. The song also utilises a choir, but here they are not at all intrusive in the way that they are on the big band album recorded during the same series of sessions. It’s interesting to note just how controlled Darin’s vocal is, starting off at barely a whisper, and then slowly but surely getting more and more powerful over the four-and-a-half minute running time. Bobby, no doubt, was aware he had a showstopper on his hands, and included the number in the folk section of his live concerts through 1963 as well as when he appeared on The Judy Garland Show filmed just days after the assassination of President Kennedy.
Gyp the Cat (1964/5)
In 1964, Bobby couldn’t get a hit record for love nor money. In September 1964, he made his first attempt at recording his own composition Gyp the Cat, a clever pastiche of Mack the Knife, this time about a thief, and using a similar melody to the Kurt Weill song. As with Mack the Knife, the song tells a story, and the arrangement works in the same way, with it gaining in intensity with each successive verse. It’s a lighter affair lyrically, with a nice twist in the final verse, and would have been a better choice of single than Hello Dolly which was released instead. Despite the British Invasion, there was clearly still a place in the singles charts for this type of material, as Armstrong’s Hello Dolly and the Darin-produced Wayne Newton hit Danke Schoen had shown. The 1964 version of Gyp the Cat remained unissued until thirty-odd years later, with a 1965 recording of the same song issued as a B-side. It was something of a waste of a fun Darin original, in his signature style, and showing that he could poke fun at himself through a pastiche of his earlier hit.
We Didn’t Ask to Be Brought Here (1965)
We Didn’t Ask to be Brought Here (recorded just after he returned to Atlantic in 1965) was a fine, adult, contemporary pop song with a clear message and, as such, was Darin’s first overtly political single. While there were no specifics mentioned within the song, it would have been clear to listeners at the time that the song was referring to events such as the Vietnam War and the Cold War when he sings “the world’s gone mad.” Billboard called the single “his greatest chance for the charts since Mack the Knife. In the current commercial protest vein, he excels with his own composition backed by a hard driving dance beat.” Sadly, very few got to hear it, and the single sank almost with trace. One has to wonder if both Darin and the advertisements for the song had something to do with it. An original advert is shown in Jeff Bleiel’s book, That’s All, and tells the reader that the song has a “great message” but then has a picture of Darin in a suit and tie – hardly the image associated with someone singing a protest song in 1965. The image and the content were simply an anachronism.
If I Were a Carpenter (1966)
Bobby Darin told many times in concert a humorous story of how a couple of agents came to see him in 1965 or 1966 and offered him songs by the likes of John Sebastian and Tim Hardin that he rejected and that went on to become hits. Quite how much of the story is true is debatable, although it was no doubt at least partly based in fact, even if it had been somewhat embellished. “When they came to me the next time, I was lying in wait for them,” he told an audience in 1973, and the song he ended up recording was If I Were a Carpenter, a number which would introduce yet another phase in the career of Bobby Darin.
Despite the fact that Darin spent time trying to ease the rumours that Tim Hardin was annoyed at him “stealing his song,” the original stories still make for good copy. Fred Dellar, in the liner notes for the CD release of the If I Were a Carpenter album, repeats the story that Hardin was “incensed” that Darin had “copied Hardin’s own vocal approach.” He even quotes Hardin as saying “he played my version through his headphones, so that he could copy my phrasing.” While Darin was clearly inspired and influenced by the original Tim Hardin demo, he certainly wasn’t listening to it through headphones when he recorded the song as he makes a number of small, but not unimportant, changes to both the melody and the timing. The bridge section, for example, is sung faster in Hardin’s version, but in tempo in Bobby’s. Meanwhile, certain notes are exchanged for others in Darin’s rendition, particularly in the second verse where this happens on multiple lines. Finally, Bobby’s vocal is far more intimate, more delicate, than Hardin’s. Somehow, from somewhere, he had found yet another new voice that had only ever been hinted at over the previous decade.
Me and Mr. Hohner (1969)
In 1968, Bobby moved away from traditional record labels and set up his own: Direction, where he would spend the next two years recording songs of protest and social commentary. Darin’s second album for the label opens with Me and Mr. Hohner, and finds Darin talking, almost rapping, the lyrics, producing a sound that was considerably ahead of its time. At face value, this is a song about police harassment in general, but the references to “South Philly” at the end of each verse makes it clear that this is Darin’s view of Frank Rizzo, who was Police Commissioner in Philadelphia at the time. His obituary in the New York Times states that Rizzo was often viewed as a “barely educated former police officer who used a hard line and tactics bordering on dictatorial to suppress opposition and keep blacks out of middle-class neighborhoods.” The 1991 article goes on to say that “Mr. Rizzo personally led Saturday-night round-ups of homosexuals and staged a series of raids on coffee houses and cafes – saying they were drug dens.” This, together with the multiple charges against Rizzo (all of which were dropped) regarding the beating of suspects, fits in with the picture the song paints of a young man and his harmonica “not doing nothing to no-one/When a squad car stops and out jumps cops/‘You’re one of them if I ever saw one’” and the fear at the end of each verse of getting a beating.
The track is brilliantly executed, with a fine production and Darin’s vocal sounding completely natural despite the nature of it. Billboard called it “another strong message lyric set to an infectious beat [with a] top arrangement and vocal workout.” Later in the year, Variety stated that Bobby was told he couldn’t sing the song during his appearance on This is Tom Jones (he sang Distractions instead).
Happy (1972)
Finally, we come to Bobby’s last single, which was released in December 1972. The effect of television appearances could be seen when Happy was sang twice on Darin’s TV series in early 1973, and the song went on to reach #67 in the US charts. That may not sound much, but it was his highest charting single since The Lady Came from Baltimore in 1966, and his first to chart at all since 1969. Happy is subtitled Love Theme from Lady Sings the Blues, but this is a little confusing. The song itself never appeared in the film sung by anyone. Indeed, it hadn’t even been written at the time of the film’s release. Instead, the song simply borrows a melody from the incidental music in the film and adds lyrics to it – much like Somewhere My Love (Doctor Zhivago) or Stella By Starlight (The Uninvited).
Darin turns the song into an epic. There is a huge orchestral arrangement but, even when the full force of the band is heard during the bridge section, Bobby shows that he can compete and he belts out this section before turning on a dime to a much softer voice for the end of the vocal. The single clocks in at just under four minutes, but the version released on LP is two minutes longer, although Darin doesn’t sing a single note extra. Instead, the extra two minutes are an extended orchestral outro, with backing vocals at the very end adding a gospel feel to the proceedings. The number and production were atypical Darin, but show that Bobby could still deliver even this late in the game. Billboard called the single “one of Darin’s finest performances on record.”
(Bobby Darin: A Listener’s Guide is available in Kindle and paperback format from Amazon)
This is Bobby Darin 