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Wilson Pickett: In the Midnight Hour — The Voice That Carried Memphis to Muscle Shoals
Wilson Pickett was born on 18 March 1941 in Prattville, Alabama, the youngest of eleven children, and he sang first in Baptist church choirs. That sentence, plain as it sounds, contains almost everything that made his later records so urgent. Pickett did not learn to sing as a polite exercise. He learned it in a…
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How Elton John Made ‘Your Song’: The Breakfast-Table Ballad a Rival Band Gave Back
Almost every great love song pretends to experience. Your Song is the opposite: it is a love song written by a seventeen-year-old who had never been in love, set to music in about twenty minutes by a twenty-two-year-old who was still living in his mother’s flat, and first recorded by somebody else entirely. It should…
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Jackie Wilson: Lonely Teardrops — The Detroit Showman Who Sang Like an Opera Star and Moved Like a Boxer
Jackie Wilson was known as Mr. Excitement, and the nickname, for once, was not hype. It was a job description. On stage, Wilson did things other singers did not even attempt: knee-drops, splits, slides, spins, and sudden bursts of footwork borrowed from his years as an amateur boxer, all delivered while singing in a high,…
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How Van Halen Made ‘Panama’: The Car Song David Lee Roth Wrote to Prove a Critic Wrong
A reporter once accused David Lee Roth of singing about only three things: women, partying, and fast cars. Roth, who rarely let an insult pass without an answer, did something nobody expected — he checked the charge against his own catalogue. Women? Certainly. Partying? Guilty, happily. But fast cars, he realized, he had never actually…
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How Ella Fitzgerald Made ‘A-Tisket, A-Tasket’: The Nursery Rhyme She Nagged Into a Number One
In the spring of 1938, Ella Fitzgerald was twenty-one years old, the girl singer with Chick Webb’s orchestra, and in possession of an idea that most professionals would have laughed out of the band bus. She wanted to take a children’s nursery rhyme — a playground chant about a dropped basket that went back to…
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The Four Tops: Reach Out I’ll Be There — The Song Nobody Wanted to Release, Sung by the Line-Up That Never Changed
There is a particular kind of pop miracle that can only happen when the same four voices have been singing together for a very long time. The blend is no longer something the singers have to think about. It is in their breathing, in the way one man leans into a harmony while another pulls…
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How Earth, Wind & Fire Made ‘After the Love Has Gone’: The Ballad Born From a Forgotten Lyric
Earth, Wind & Fire built their empire on uplift — horns blazing, voices soaring, songs about dancing through September nights and shining like stars. So it is one of the lovely ironies of their career that the most heartbroken record they ever made, the slow and aching After the Love Has Gone, was not written…
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How Waylon Jennings Made ‘Luckenbach, Texas’: The Biggest Hit He Ever Hated
It spent six weeks at number one, was named the biggest country song of 1977, and carried its album to a piece of history. It is also a song Waylon Jennings flat-out disliked — about a town he had never visited, written by two men who had never visited it either, celebrating an escape to…
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Martha and the Vandellas: Dancing in the Street (1964) and the Detroit Years
Some songs are written to describe a feeling. “Dancing in the Street,” recorded by Martha and the Vandellas in 1964, was written to create one. It names city after city, invites listeners everywhere to join in, and builds its energy not from a complicated story but from a simple idea repeated until it feels true:…
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How Eagles Made ‘One of These Nights’: The Disco-Tinged Gamble That Took Them to Number One
Every great band has a hinge record — the one where the door swings from who they were to who they would become. For the Eagles, that record is One of These Nights. In the spring of 1975 the band were country-rock royalty: beloved, harmonious, and in serious danger of being typecast as the mellow…