December 10, 2009

Holidays? Humbug! It’s Christmas!

Nothing like clustering around the warm glow of your monitor to enjoy this clip a few dozen times over the Silly Season…

Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters




While Clyde McPhatter’s groundbreaking contributions as a soul and R&B vocalist have gone generally undernoticed outside of music circles, his fervent voice and passionate delivery influenced such artists as Smokey Robinson, Ben E. King (one of his heirs in the Drifters), Aaron Neville and Jackie Wilson (his successor in the Dominoes).

“He was one of the first guys I ever listened to,” Robinson said shortly after McPhatter’s death in 1972. “When he first came on the scene with Billy Ward and the Dominoes, he was The Man.”

“Anything Clyde sings is a prayer,” Aaron Neville told Goldmine’s Bruce Sylvester. “When I was growing up, I don’t care what else was going on in the world - Jim Crow, all the other stuff - you could put on Clyde McPhatter and it would all disappear.”
(© The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum Inc)

6 comments:

  1. I see this song in my head in Home and Away, with the kid doing a mime act and having a bath.

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  2. Home Alone, he mimes it in the bathroom and ends by putting on aftershave and screaming the house down.

    I love that film, great slapstick comedy.

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  3. Of course. Home and Away. What a lapse.

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  4. Hah! That's because it's there, night after night...

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  5. Elvis Presley lifted McPhatter's phrasing on White Christmas almost intact for his own version.

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  6. Hey Mick - probably made a nice change from ripping off/borrowing from Little Richard, Ike Turner etc

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